Could police have reached gunman sooner?
LAS VEGAS — The revised timeline given by investigators for the Las Vegas massacre raises questions about whether better communication might have allowed police to respond more quickly and take out the gunman before he could kill and wound so many people.
On Monday, Sheriff Joe Lombardo said Stephen Paddock shot and wounded a Mandalay Bay hotel security guard outside his door and sprayed 200 bullets down the hall six minutes before he opened fire Oct. 1 from his high-rise suite on a crowd at a country music festival below.
That was a different account from the one police gave last week: that Paddock shot the unarmed guard, Jesus Campos, after unleashing his barrage of fire on the crowd, where 58 people were killed and hundreds injured.
The sheriff had previously hailed Campos as a hero whose arrival in the hallway may have led Paddock to stop firing. But on Monday, Lombardo said he didn’t know what prompted Paddock to end the gunfire and take his own life.
How crucial were the minutes that elapsed before the massacre began?
“This changes everything,” said Joseph Giacalone, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York City police sergeant. “There absolutely was an opportunity in that timeframe that some of this could have been mitigated.”
Giacalone added: “By engaging the shooter ahead of time during this event, it could’ve saved a lot of heartache.”
Campos reported to hotel security dispatchers that he was shot before Paddock opened fire on the crowd, Assistant Sheriff Tom Roberts told The Los Angeles Times. Campos ran down the hall, away from Paddock’s room, after he was shot and may have used both his radio and a hallway phone to call for help, he said.
“Our officers got there as fast as they possibly could and they did what they were trained to do,” another Las Vegas assistant sheriff, Todd Fasulo, said Tuesday.
MGM Resorts International, which owns the Mandalay Bay, has referred all inquiries to an outside crisis management team which again declined to comment for the record Tuesday, A representative for Campos’ union didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
But the sheriff has said that Las Vegas police officers searching the hotel for the gunman during the attack did not learn the guard had been shot until they got off the elevator on the 32nd floor and met him in the hallway.
Fasulo explained the change in the timeline by saying that dozens of investigators have been using different sources of information — including surveillance video, computers, police body cameras, cellphones and interviews — and that not all clocks were in sync.
McMahill defended the hotel and said the encounter that night between Paddock and the security guard and maintenance man disrupted the gunman’s plans. Paddock fired more than 1,000 shots and had more than 1,000 rounds left in his room, the undersheriff said.
Meanwhile, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, one of the nation’s leading gun-control groups, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of all victims of the shooting against the makers and sellers of “bump stocks,” the devices used by the gunman.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in Las Vegas, claims that the leading manufacturer of the devices misled federal authorities about their purpose and marketed them to thrillseeking gun enthusiasts who wanted the experience of firing a fully automatic weapon that is otherwise greatly restricted under federal law.
The gun industry has broad protections from lawsuits. But in this case, Gardiner said, that liability wouldn’t apply because “bump stocks” are neither firearms nor ammunition.