PROBERS STRUGGLE TO UNCOVER MOTIVE
President Donald Trump plans to travel to Las Vegas on Wednesday to speak with law enforcement officers and the survivors of a concert shooting outside the Mandalay Bay hotel casino that killed 59 people.
The visit comes as investigators continue pursuing leads to learn a motive for the attack Sunday by Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old high-stakes gambler and retired accountant who had no known history of mental illness. Paddock died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head after strafing the crowd of about 22,000.
Paddock’s girlfriend Marilou Danley, 62, will be at the center of the investigation as authorities try to determine why a man with no known record of violence or crime would open fire on a concert crowd from a high-rise hotel.
Danley was in the Philippines at the time of the shooting. A law enforcement official says FBI agents met Danley at the airport in Los Angeles late Tuesday night.
Authorities revealed Tuesday that Paddock stuck a camera inside the peephole of his hotel room to see down the hallway as he opened fire on the crowd.
Undersheriff Kevin McMahill said Paddock set up two cameras in the hallway outside his room so he could watch law enforcement or security approach.
Federal officials also said Paddock had devices attached to 12 weapons that allow semiautomatic rifles to mimic fully automatic gunfire. In all, he had nearly 50 guns in three locations, authorities said.
So far, neither law enforcement nor Paddock’s relatives have been able to explain what motivated a multimillionaire with no apparent criminal history to commit mass murder before killing himself.
Retired FBI profiler Jim Clemente speculated that there was “some sort of major trigger in his life — a great loss, a breakup, or maybe he just found out he has a terminal disease.”
He also noted a possible genet- ic component to the slaying: Paddock’s father was a bank robber who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list in the 1960s and was diagnosed as a psychopath.
Paddock transferred $100,000 to the Philippines in the days before the attack, a U.S. official briefed by law enforcement told The Associated Press.
Investigators are trying to track that money and are also looking into at least a dozen financial reports over the past several weeks that said Paddock had gambled more than $10,000 per day, the official said.
More than 500 people were injured in the attack. Forty-eight of them, including a 16-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl, remained in critical condition Tuesday night, hospital officials said.
A vigil was held in Orlando on Tuesday evening for the victims of the Las Vegas attacks, which surpassed the Pulse nightclub shooting as the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
A nearby church rang its bell 59 times, once for each of the people killed in Sunday’s shooting.
Pulse nightclub owner Barbara Poma said the Vegas shooting takes Orlando back to June 12, 2016, when a gunman killed 49 people and wounded 58 in her gay nightclub.