Apparent ‘lone wolf ’ had arsenal of powerful guns in room
LAS VEGAS — Perched in his suite at a high-rise hotel overlooking the Vegas Strip, a 64-year-old retiree with no real criminal history and no known affiliations with terror groups rained bullets down into a crowd at a country music festival, killing at least 59 people and injuring hundreds more in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
The attack, at least initially, was as inexplicable as it was horrifying. Law enforcement officials said they could not immediately tell what drove Stephen Paddock to fire at thousands of unsuspecting concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino before killing himself late Sunday.
Authorities said a sweep of law enforcement databases showed Paddock had no known run-ins with police, and — despite the Islamic State’s repeated claims otherwise — investigators also could not find
any connections to international terrorist groups. He was the son of a notorious bank robber, and his own crime demonstrated some amount of sophisticated planning.
Police said he stayed in a large hotel suite for several days and aroused no suspicion, bringing with him an arsenal of 23 guns — their calibers ranging from .223 to .308, some with scopes — authorities said. One of the weapons he apparently used in the attack was an AK-47-type rifle, with a stand used to steady it for firing, people familiar with the case said. He fired, without warning, from an elevated position on an openair venue, leaving his victims few options to avoid harm.
“I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath,” said Joseph Lombardo, the sheriff of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which is leading the investigation.
Investigators on Monday searched Paddock’s home and another property he owned, and they hoped to review surveillance footage and other electronic equipment to determine how and why Paddock perpetrated an unprecedented massacre.
Among the questions: How a former accountant with a penchant for high-stakes gambling obtained a weapon that sounded to those on the ground like it could fire as an automatic, and how he was able to bring it and many other weapons into a hotel suite undetected.
Lombardo said hotel staff had been in and out of the suite, which Paddock had stayed in since Sept. 28, and spotted nothing “nefarious,” though he had more than 10 suitcases.
Investigators believe at least one of the guns functioned as if it were fully automatic, and they are now trying to determine if he modified it or other weapons to be capable of spitting out a high volume of fire just by holding down the trigger, people familiar with the case said.
Two officials who were briefed by law enforcement and spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still unfolding told the Associated Press on Monday that Paddock had two “bump stocks,” a device that could have converted semiautomatic firearms into fully automatic ones.
Purchase records indicate Paddock legally bought more than two dozen firearms over a number of years, according to a person close to the investigation. Guns & Guitars, a store in Mesquite, Nev., said in a statement that Paddock purchased some of his weapons there but that employees followed all procedures required by law and he “never gave any indication or reason to believe he was unstable or unfit at any time.”
Investigators found at least 19 additional firearms, thousands of rounds of ammunition and the chemical tannerite, an explosive, at Paddock’s home. They also found ammonium nitrate, a chemical that can be used in bomb-making, in Paddock’s vehicle, Lombardo said.
More than 22,000 people had been at the Route 91 Harvest festival, a three-day country music concert with grounds across the street from the Mandalay Bay resort, when the shooting began about 10 p.m. Sunday, according to police. As country star Jason Aldean played what was expected to be one of the last sets of the night, Paddock opened fire — his bullets flying from a window on the casino’s golden facade, which Paddock had smashed with some type of hammer.
Aldean fled the stage, a target about 500 yards away from Paddock’s suite. Thousands began racing for safety under the neon glow and glitz of the Vegas Strip.
“People were getting shot at while we were running, and people were on the ground bleeding, crying and screaming. We just had to keep going,” said Dinora Merino, 28, a dealer at the Ellis Island casino who was at the concert with a friend. “There are tents out there and there’s no place to hide. It’s just an open field.”
The death toll in Las Vegas was massive, surpassing the 49 people slain by a gunman in Orlando in June 2016, when a shooter, later found to have been inspired by the Islamic State, opened fire inside a gay nightclub. Lombardo said the number of dead from Sunday’s concert shooting could rise, as an additional 527 were thought to have been injured.
The dead included a behavioral therapist who was soon to be married, a nursing assistant from Southern California, a commercial fisherman and an off-duty Las Vegas city police officer. Two other officers who were on duty were injured, police said. An off-duty officer with the Bakersfield Police Department sustained non-life threatening injuries.
Some of the wounded were injured not by gunfire but in the ensuing chaos. One 55-year-old California woman who declined to give her last name said she was “trampled” trying to flee what she initially thought were fireworks. Clark County Fire Chief Greg Cassell said responders saw a “wide range” of injuries, including gunshot victims, those wounded by shrapnel, people who were trampled and people who were hurt jumping fences.
Taylor Benge, 21, said that when the lights came on he realized “about 5 feet to the left of me there was a man with a bullet wound to his chin.”
“He was just lifeless on the ground,” he said. He said he and his sister threw themselves on the ground as the gunfire continued, then ran for the exit. “My jeans are covered in someone’s blood, my T-shirt is covered in someone’s blood, my sister’s whole leg was covered in blood,” Benge said.
Police and hotel security ultimately scoured several floors of the hotel looking for the shooter and came upon Paddock’s suite, Lombardo said. At some point, Paddock fired through the door and hit a security guard in the leg, he said, adding that the guard is expected to survive. SWAT officers stormed the room and some fired shots, though Paddock is believed to have killed himself, Lombardo said. He was not counted in the death toll of 59 that authorities reported.
Police said they believe Paddock was a “lone wolf ” attacker, though they were still interested in speaking more with a woman named Marilou Danley who lived with him in Mesquite, a little more than an hour outside of Las Vegas on the Arizona border. Police later said Danley, Paddock’s girlfriend, was outside the country — as of Monday afternoon, in Tokyo — and not involved in the shooting.