Footage released of Vegas police response to shooting
Courts decline to delay video clips
The officers sweep the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on their way up to the gunman’s suite on the 32nd floor, telling patrons to leave and head south away from the shooting.
They arrive at the room and blow open double doors into it from the hall, only to find the suspect dead in a pool of blood in the darkened room — the blinds are all closed tightly — from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Guns are strewn around the room. They take note of the wires that web throughout the room, but relax when they see that they’re linked to an elaborate camera system: they see one perched on a service cart outside the room, and another attached over the peephole.
“He has an intricate camera system set up,” one of the first officers to arrive in the suite observes, “so he knew when officers were coming down the hallway.”
The footage, seen publicly for the first time on Wednesday, was recorded on two body cameras worn by police officers who stormed the hotel suite of gunman Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 people and injured hundreds in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
Its release is part of a cache of evidence to be made public after a judge sided with media organizations in a legal debate with the police.
Police had sought to delay releasing the video footage and records, saying they were part of an ongoing investigation.
Media organizations argued in court that the department should have to make public recordings, 911 calls, affidavits and interview reports, among other things.
Paddock opened fire on a country music festival from his suite at the resort hotel in October, pumping bullets into a massive crowd that had gathered on the Las Vegas Strip. And when it was over, police say, Paddock turned one of his guns on himself.
The cameras capture the human moments of officers responding to what in a previous era might have been unthinkable: the massacre of concertgoers in a major American city inflicted by a lone man with no clear agenda, political or otherwise.
“How many did he put down, downstairs?” one officer, in a helmet and tactical gear, says to another during a lull after wiping his eye.
“A lot,” the officer wearing the body camera responds.
Though police have released a preliminary report on the massacre, Paddock’s motivation for the attack he planned meticulously remains an unsettling unknown.
The Las Vegas police’s preliminary report said that they still did not know why the gunman carried out the attack, although they ruled out any political or ideological radicalization.
He acted alone, investigators said, and left behind no suicide note, manifesto or other explanation.