Officials returning items to those who fled in Vegas
LAS VEGAS — The abandoned shoes, phones, backpacks and purses strewn for days across the huge crime scene of the Las Vegas massacre were slowly being returned to their owners Sunday to become sad souvenirs of a horrific night.
One week earlier, the same scene was home to a happy day of country music for 22,000 people at the Route 91 Harvest festival. A few hours later, when Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd from the Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 58 people, those thousands were left fleeing for their lives, with no care for the possessions they are now recollecting.
“Whatever was dropped when people started running, those items we’re collecting and we’re going to provide back,” Paul Flood, unit chief in the FBI’s victim services division said at a news conference.
Also Sunday, federal investigators returned to Paddock’s southern Nevada house for what the local police chief called “re-documenting and rechecking.” Police Chief Troy Tanner said he accompanied the FBI in the service of a federal search warrant at the three-bedroom house on a cul-de-sac in a retirement community in Mesquite, Nev.
Las Vegas hotel and gambling magnate Steve Wynn, who owns casinos that Paddock gambled in but not the Mandalay Bay, said Sunday that his hotels have undertaken special security measures in recent years to identify potentially dangerous guests.
Those measures include using magnetometers to detect significant amounts of metal and training housekeeping staff to report suspicious actions like a do-notdisturb sign remaining on a door for extended periods.
Paddock spent the days before the shooting bringing bags of guns into the hotel and setting up his sniper’s perch for the shooting. He also rigged his own surveillance cameras to watch for police and hotel staff.
“If a room goes on ‘do not disturb’ for more than 12 hours, we investigate,” Wynn, whose hotels include Wynn Las Vegas and Encore, told “Fox News Sunday” in an interview. “We don’t allow guns in this building unless they’re being carried by our employees, and there’s a lot of them. But if anybody’s got a gun and we find them continually, we eject them from the hotel.”
Wynn said a scenario like Paddock’s “would have triggered a whole bunch of alarms here.”
In another tribute to the 58 killed and nearly 500 injured, the casino marquees on the Las Vegas Strip were to go dark at 10:05 p.m. Sunday to mark exactly a week passing since the shooting.
Meanwhile in Washington, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said only broader legislation would be effective in outlawing “bump stocks” like Paddock used. But the National Rifle Association is reiterating support for more limited regulations that stop short of a ban.
It was a sign of a rocky road ahead for action by Congress, even with growing bipartisan support for regulating or banning the devices that convert semiautomatic weapons into rapid-fire guns.
The NRA ventured into unfamiliar territory last week when it endorsed new restrictions on the device. But leaders of the gun lobby signaled Sunday they may draw a line at writing those restrictions into law.
“If we could legislate morality, we would have done it long ago,” Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president and chief executive, said in an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Instead, LaPierre said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives should review the matter.
“I think you want to tell ATF to do its job. It’s an interpretive issue, and they need to get the job done,” he said.