Sheriff: Las Vegas shooter had lost money for 2 years
LAS VEGAS — The man who shot hundreds and killed 58 at the Route 91 Harvest music festival a month ago was a narcissist who may have seen his image as a high-rolling gambler declining, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said as the investigation into the Oct. 1 rampage entered its second month.
“He was going through some bouts of depression. But he was status-driven,” Lombardo said in a wideranging interview with 8 NewsNowin LasVegas that offered the first hints of what might have driven 64-year-old Stephen Paddock to open fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.
“Since September 2015, he’s lost a significantamount of wealth, and I think that might have been a determining factor on what he was determined to do,” Lombardo said.
“This individual was status-driven based on how he liked to be recognized in the casino environment and how he liked to be recognized by his friends and family. So obviously that was starting to decline in the short period of time and that may have had a determining effect on why decided to do what he did,” the sheriff said.
“He was going wrong direction.”
Lombardo said investigators still don’t understand precisely what set Paddock off a little more than a year ago when he began stockpiling weapons and scouting locations around the country.
Lombardo used the interview to try and set straight the initially confusing timelines offered by authorities in the days after the shooting.
The chief questions have centered around the fact thatPaddockwas able to fire at the crowd opposite the in the hotel for a full 10 minutes, though a hotel security guard had been shot before the main shooting rampage began, and had reported it.
What happened was this, the sheriff said: The security guard, Jesus Campos, had been alerted that a room on the 32nd floor had a door that had been held open for a long period of time. He found that the door to that floor from the stairwell had been barricaded, and he radioed in to report that at 9:59 p.m.
Campos, Lombardo said, then took the stairs to the 33rd floor, exited, walked to the elevators and took one back downto the 32nd floor. He was shot in the leg outside Paddock’s door.
“So subsequently you have a couple minutes of him going up, going down the elevators and back down the hallway and then he encounters the suspect,” Lombardo said. “He receives awound, he attempts to go through his radio and then he also confirms his communication with dispatch via cellphone.”
“We didn’t know shots were fired until 10:05 pm — 10:04:55 or something like that,” Lombardo said. “That’s when we actually determined — through calls for service, computer-aided dispatch, body-worn cameras, other people’s observations through videos in Uber, taxis things like that— we feel pretty comfortable in that the large amounts of firing by the suspect occurred at 10:05 p.m.”
Two Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers already were at the Mandalay Bay on another call and began working their way up the stairs as the shooting began.
“So thatwas right around 10 minutes theywere able to do that. So that’s pretty amazing in public safety time you call dispatch, you get a revise, you formulate a plan, you ascend the stairwell, you have no idea what floor it is, you’re receiving information from disparate directions, and then you encounter this blocked doorway — and that was right around 10 minutes,” Lombardo said.
Paddock made money on real estate and described himself as a professional gambler, though he had worked also as a defense industry auditor. But Lombardo said Paddock had “gone up and down” in wealth and had recently been losing money.