TRUMP: SHOOTING ‘ACT OF PURE EVIL’
More than 500 also hurt in deadliest U.S. shooting. FBI: Lone gunman had no links to terrorist groups.
The rapid-fire popping sounded like firecrackers at first, and many in the crowd of 22,000 country music fans didn’t understand what was happening when the band stopped playing and singer Jason Aldean bolted off the stage.
“That’s gunshots,” a man could be heard saying emphatically on a cellphone video in the nearly half-minute of silence and confusion that followed. A woman pleaded with others: “Get down! Get down! Stay down!”
Then the bam-bam-bam sounds resumed. And pure terror set in.
“People start screaming and yelling and we start running,” said Andrew Akiyoshi. “You could feel the panic. You could feel like the bullets were flying above us. Everybody’s ducking down, running low to the ground.”
While some concertgo
ers hit the ground, others pushed for the crowded exits, shoving through narrow gates and climbing over fences as 40- to 50-round bursts of what was believed to be automatic weapons fire rained down on them from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino hotel.
By Monday afternoon, 59 victims were dead and 527 wounded in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“You just didn’t know what to do,” Akiyoshi said. “Your heart is racing and you’re thinking, ‘I’m going to die.’”
The gunman, identified as Stephen Craig Paddock, a 64-year-old retired accountant from Mesquite, Nevada, killed himself before officers stormed Room 135 in the gold-colored glass skyscraper. He had been stay
ing there since Thursday and had busted out windows to create his sniper’s perch, roughly 500 yards from the concert grounds.
The motive for the attack remained a mystery, with Sheriff Joseph Lombardo saying: “I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath at this point.”
Paddock had 16 guns in his hotel room, including rifles with scopes, Lombardo said. Two were modified to make them fully automatic, according to two U.S. officials briefed by law enforcement who spoke on condition of anonymity because the inves
tigation is still unfolding. At Paddock’s home, authorities found 18 more guns, explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Also, several pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that has been used to make explosives, were in his car, the sheriff said.
The FBI said it found noth- ing so far to suggest the attack was connected to interna- tional terrorism, despite a claim of responsibility from the Islamic State group, which said Paddock was a “soldier” who had recently converted to Islam.
In an address to the coun- try, President Donald Trump called the bloodbath “an act of pure evil” and added: “In moments of tragedy and hor- ror, America comes together as one. And it always has.” He ordered flags flown at half-staff.
With hospitals jammed with victims, authorities put out a call for blood donations and set up a hotline to report missing people and speed the identification of the dead and wounded. They
also opened a “family reuni- fication center” for people to find loved ones.
More than 12 hours after the massacre, bodies covered in white sheets were still being removed from the festival grounds.
The shooting began at 10:08 p.m., and the gun- man appeared to fire unhin- dered for more than 10 min- utes, according to radio traf- fic. Police frantically tried to locate him and determine whether the gunfire was com- ing from Mandalay Bay or the neighboring Luxor hotel.
At 10:14 p.m., an officer said on his radio that he was pinned down against a wall on Las Vegas Boulevard with 40 to 50 people. “We can’t worry about
the victims,” an officer said at 10:15 p.m. “We need to stop the shooter before we have more victims. Anybody have eyes on him ... stop the shooter.”
Near the stage, Dylan Schneider, a country singer
who performed earlier in the day, huddled with others under the VIP bleachers, where he turned to his manager and asked, “Dude, what do we do?” He said he repeated the question again and again over the next five minutes.
Bodies were laid out on the artificial turf installed in front of the stage, and people were screaming and crying. The sound of people running on the bleachers added to the confusion, and Schneider thought the concert was being invaded with multiple shooters.
“No one knew what to do,” Schneider said. “It’s liter- ally running for life and you don’t know what decision is the right one. But like I said, I knew we had to get out of there.” He eventually pushed his way out of the crowd and found refuge in the nearby Tropic ana hotel-casino, where he kicked in a door to an engineering room and spent hours there with others who followed him.
The crowd, funn e led tightly into a wide-open space, had little cover and no easy way to escape. Victims fell to the ground, while others fled in panic. Some hid
behind concession stands or crawled under parked cars.
Faces were etched with shock and confusion, and people wept and screamed.
Tales of heroism and com- passion emerged quickly: Couples held hands as they ran through the dirt lot. Some of the bleeding were carried out by fellow concertgoers. While dozens of ambulances took away the wounded, some people loaded victims into their cars and drove them to the hospital. People fleeing the con- cert grounds hitched rides with strangers, piling into cars and trucks.
Some of the injured were hit by shrapnel. Others were trampled or were injured jumping fences.
The dead included at least three off-duty police officers from various departments who were attending the concert, authorities said.