Vegas officer who froze during massacre fired
A Las Vegas police officer has been fired for remaining one floor below the gunman who fired into a crowd of concertgoers from a high-rise hotel room and killed 58 people in 2017, the police union president said Wednesday.
Officer Cordell Hendrex was terminated by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in March for his inaction at the Mandalay Bay hotel during the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, said Steve Grammas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association.
Body-camera footage released by the department shows Hendrex, accompanied by another officer and armed security guards, walking and standing in the hallway of the 31st floor as the gunman, Stephen Paddock, fired on people at a concert venue below.
On the recording, the officers and guards can be heard reporting that the gunman is one level above them, but for several minutes they stay on the floor below.
Hendrex later wrote in a report that he had frozen, The Las Vegas Reviewjournal reported last year.
“I know I hesitated and I remember being terrified with fear and I think that I froze right there in the middle of the hall for how long I can’t say,” Hendrex wrote.
Grammas said the union was seeking to contest the officer’s termination through arbitration, and that he expected a final decision in August or September. Officials with the police department were not immediately available for comment.
“There was a lot of heroism on Oct. 1,” Grammas said, referring to the shooting on Oct. 1, 2017. “There were several people who were in the same situation of fear and inaction.”
Grammas said Hendrex had shown more courage than some others who responded to the shooting.
“Let’s not forget, he was still on that 31st floor,” Grammas said.
Meanwhile, the parents of a young woman killed in the Las Vegas massacre said Wednesday that the family is blaming gun manufacturers for their daughter’s death.
“Someone murdered our daughter,” said James Parsons, whose 31-year-old daughter, Carrie Parsons, was one of the 58 people killed. “Someone should be held accountable for that.”
A wrongful death lawsuit filed Tuesday targets Colt and seven other gun manufacturers, along with gun shops in Nevada and Utah, arguing their weapons are designed to be easily modified to fire like automatic weapons.
“It was a horrifying, agonizing experience, and we don’t want this to happen to other families,” Parsons told The Associated Press.
The lawsuit is the latest case to challenge a federal law shielding gun manufacturers from liability. It charges that gunmakers marketed the ability of the Ar-15-style weapons to be easily modified to mimic machine guns and fire continuously, violating both a state and federal ban on automatic weapons.
Parsons and his wife, Ann-marie, argue in the lawsuit that the firearms are “thinly disguised” machine guns that the manufacturers knew could be easily modified, even without the use of a “bump stock,” an attachment used by the Las Vegas gunman that allowed him to fire in rapid succession.
The Trump administration banned bump stocks this year, making it illegal to possess them under the same federal laws that prohibit machine guns.
“We understand this is an uphill battle,” Ann-marie Parsons said Wednesday from their home in suburban Seattle. “But somebody has got to do something because the carnage continues.”
“Losing our daughter is the worst thing that ever happened to us. It is hurtful to us every time we see these things happen,” she said.