MOMENT TO MOMENT, MADMAN FORCED FEAR UPON FESTIVAL
Stunned concertgoers were frozen in confusion as bodies started to drop, then realization struck that death was near
Just after 10 p.m. Sunday, Michelle Compton was enjoying herself, listening to the act she’d come to see: Jason Aldean, the night’s headliner at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival.
Clad in a cowboy hat and jeans, Aldean was breezing through his set when the sounds of what seemed like pyrotechnics filled the air. The singer must have known that the set did not feature fireworks because he ran from the stage, his guitar still strapped onto him.
“Then two rows in front of me, a woman goes down, and a man yells that she’s bleeding, and people duck down,” Compton said. “And I’m just standing there.”
Compton’s friend yelled at her: Get down! She didn’t immediately understand what was happening. “Even three or four minutes into it, I was still thinking, ‘This can’t be happening. Not here,’ ” she said.
It was happening: a mass shooting — the worst in U.S. history. And she was standing in the middle of it.
The volley of gunshots lasted just 11 minutes. In that span, Stephen Paddock, 64, a chronic gambler, real estate investor and former mail carrier from Mesquite, Nev., operating from a
32nd-floor perch in a glass-clad high-rise hotel, used a small arsenal to kill scores of people and wound hundreds.
Paddock checked in to the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on Thursday, a day before the festival began on Las Vegas Boulevard, more popularly known as the Strip. He rented out a tworoom suite in the hotel’s north tower, about two-thirds of the way up, one whose nearly floorto-ceiling windows afforded an unobstructed view of the openair venue 400 yards away.
Paddock brought with him “in excess of 10 suitcases,” according to police reports. The cases held at least 23 weapons, many of them rifles ranging in size from
.308 to .223 caliber, along with two tripods.
Paddock brought a trove of amateur video equipment, designed to keep tabs on anyone approaching his end-of-corridor room — including a camera he positioned in the peephole of the door.
“I anticipate he was looking for anybody coming to take him into custody,” Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said.
As Paddock shot out two windows in his suite and began his rampage, scores of Mandalay Bay guests called the front desk, wondering about the popping sounds. Outside, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers tried to figure out the source of the shots in the tangle of high-rise hotels.
A few doors down from Paddock, Sonny Morgan, an Atlantaarea businessman in town for a conference, dozed in front of Sunday Night Football when he woke
to the sounds of gunshots.
“I heard a major explosion, and I honestly thought that it was like a terrorist attack at that point, somebody was trying to blow up the hotel,” he said. “So I immediately just called my wife because I didn’t know what was going on. I just kind of said, ‘I love you.’ ”
The shooting stopped momentarily, then when it picked up again, around 10:21 p.m., one officer reported that he saw a “strobe light” coming from the hotel’s north tower.
Police closed in on the Mandalay Bay.
A PACKED FESTIVAL
Along with Compton, about 22,000 attendees were having the time of their lives as the massive Route 91 event built to a climax Sunday. Tickets were not cheap — ranging from $210-$750 for VIP packages — but it was sold out.
Compton made the nearly
four-hour trip to Vegas from Yucca Valley, Calif., with a friend. It was their second time at Route 91.
As they ran for the exits during pauses in the shooting, they passed bodies on the ground. A young girl lay with her eyes still open.
Desperate to escape, Compton jumped into a police van headed for a nearby hospital. The van was so packed the door wouldn’t close. Compton hung out the door, her friend holding on to her.
When they got to the hospital, Compton discovered the van wasn’t driven by police. A woman found it unoccupied and used it to drive a man who’d been shot to the hospital. Others jumped in to get away.
Linda Proctor, in town with family from Vero Beach, Fla., to celebrate her daughter’s 50th birthday, watched the concert from an elevated VIP platform
near the stage. She and her family were guests of singer Jake Owen, a family friend, who had gotten them backstage passes.
When the shooting began, Proctor said, everyone thought the sounds were fireworks — until someone on the platform was hit. “Then everybody just starts screaming, ‘Get down! Get down!’ So we all just fell down on the ground.”
At a memorial service Tuesday in Florida, she recalled, tears in her eyes and her voice breaking, “I laid there, and I swear to God, I wondered what it’s going to feel like to get shot. I just knew I was going to get shot.”
Paddock, she said, targeted the stage for a while, and when she saw someone beckoning to her from a fence on the ground, her instincts told her to jump the 12-foot drop to the ground. She landed safely and thought her family would follow, but they got pushed in a different direction.
Proctor crawled under a food truck — she remembered the smell of gas — as the seemingly never-ending sound of gunshots popped across the field. A woman asked the truck’s owner, “Can I put my baby in your cooler?” to shield him.
Proctor shimmied under a fence and hid behind a tour bus in the parking lot. She spotted Owen’s tour bus and banged on the door. It was locked, but people opened it and pulled her in. Safely inside, she and a dozen others lay on the floor.
“Nobody knew anything for a long time,” she said. “I was trying to be so brave, but I have to admit, I thought my husband or daughter could be laying out there on that field.”
Her family members had made their own escape, running a mile to the MGM Grand, where they hopped in an Uber and reached streets blocked by police.
SUSPECT DOWN
On the Mandalay Bay’s 31st floor, a police officer radioed that he could hear automatic fire “coming from one floor ahead ... one floor above us.”
At 10:24 p.m., hotel security guard Jesus Campos, evacuating guests, approached Paddock’s room. The shooter, possibly watching a video feed, fired through the room door. A ricochet from the shots wounded Campos in the leg, but police now had a room number: 32135.
About 30 minutes later, just before 11 p.m., a SWAT team appeared on the 32nd floor. Morgan, the Atlanta businessman, hunkered down in his room and heard police making their way to the end of the corridor.
“Six or seven SWAT guys came in and just made sure that I wasn’t a bad person, that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing,” he said. “They ushered us out and told us to run as far and as fast as we could to get away.”
Around 11:25 p.m., once the 32nd floor was cleared, police readied explosives to blast through the door of Room 32135.
By the time they burst in moments later, Paddock was dead from a single, self-inflicted round. At two minutes to midnight, police radioed to report the suspect was down.
In common with so many mass shooting victims, the people attacked in Las Vegas came from everywhere and from all walks of life: They were college students and construction workers, a hairdresser, a union pipefitter, a special education teacher, a school office manager, a family law attorney, a Navy veteran who served in Afghanistan and two Disneyland cast members. One was an off-duty Las Vegas cop. Many were parents to young children.
For the survivors, living through the trauma and seeing family members again became the sweetest of gifts.
In Owen’s tour bus, Proctor and the others waited for about four hours, listening to police scanner traffic until they felt safe enough to venture out. Proctor got a ride from police to another hotel, where she heard from one of Owen’s crew members that her family was safe.
About half an hour later, they reunited at the hotel. “I looked up, and they were walking down the hall,” Proctor said. “And we just ran to each other.”
“I laid there, and I swear to God, I wondered what it’s going to feel like to get shot. I just knew I was going to get shot.” Linda Proctor of Vero Beach, Fla.
“I heard a major explosion, and I honestly thought that it was like a terrorist attack at that point, somebody was trying to blow up the hotel.” Sonny Morgan, Mandalay Bay guest