NOWHERE TO RUN NOWHERE TO HIDE
America counts the cost of its deadliest shooting ever after a pensioner let rip on concertgoers from 32 storeys up
IT’S happened again. Every time there’s a mass shooting on US soil it’s a cue for lots of hand-wringing and heated debates about gun laws, but nothing ever changes. Now the country is reeling from another attack – its worst ever. Investigators are still trying to make sense of it. Stephen Paddock doesn’t fit the profile of your average terror mastermind. He was a pensioner and at age 64 spent his days at a retirement village in the state of Nevada. He didn’t seem to nurse any grudges, didn’t appear to hold extreme political views and his only brush with the law had been a parking ticket – in short, he didn’t look as if he could hurt a fly.
And yet at the time of going to print America was reeling – from a room on the 32nd floor at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on the famed Las Vegas strip, this seemingly harmless old guy had fired round after round of bullets into a crowd as he carried out the US’ deadliest shooting attack.
His target was a 22 000-strong gathering of country music lovers who’d assembled near the hotel for the Route 91 Harvest outdoor music festival. Witnesses say it was “like shooting fish in a barrel”. There was nowhere for people to run and from his vantage point Paddock was able to pick off his victims easily.
The massacre went on for about five minutes, triggering a deadly stampede, and at the end of it more than 55 lay dead while over 500 others needed to be stretchered off to hospital.
Police stormed the gunman’s room but it was too late. He’d already shot himself, determined to take his secrets to the grave. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Joseph Lombardo revealed that inside the suite was a cache of weapons which included 10 rifles.
Hours after the shooting radical group Isis claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that Paddock had converted to Islam recently, but America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dismissed this unsubstantiated claim.
“We’ve determined to this point no connection with the international terrorist group,” said an FBI special agent involved with the investigation.
Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley (62) – an Australian who works at a casino in Vegas – was also initially regarded as a person of interest but it turned out she was out of the country at the time of the shooting and police don’t think she was involved.
Investigators raided Paddock’s two-bedroom home in a retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada, keen to find more about the lone-wolf gunman.
Quinn Averett of the Mesquite police department says it was a “nice, clean home, nothing out of the ordinary”. Preliminary investigations showed
that Paddock, a former accountant, had a private pilot’s licence and owned two light aircraft. He also had a hunting licence, and in his retirement would often visit the Las Vegas strip to gamble.
For his shell-shocked family the shooting makes no sense at all. “We know absolutely nothing. We’re dumbfounded,” says his brother Eric, who lives in Orlando, Florida. “He was just a guy. He gambled. He was nice to my kids when they went to Vegas. He sends his mom cookies.”
Eric says his brother didn’t have a history of mental illness and as far as he knew didn’t harbour any grudges or radical political beliefs. He hadn’t served in the military and had never shown the slightest interest in guns. “His life is an open book. It’s all in the public record.”
He says something strange must have happened to make his brother do what he did. “Something happened. He snapped or something.”
Meanwhile US President Donald Trump caused waves when he took to Twitter following the attack. “My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you!” he wrote in a perfunctory 115-character tweet.
It was a far cry from the heartfelt addresses made by his predecessor, Barack Obama. But the day following the shooting Trump made a formal statement, branding the shooting “an act of pure evil”.
Looking subdued as he spoke from a teleprompter, he said the nation was united “in sadness, shock and grief ”.