A Burst of Gunfire, a Pause, Then Carnage in Las Vegas That Would Not Stop
LAS
VEGAS — At first, it sounded like fireworks — a loud, crackling noise.
Then the awful realization began to spread, unevenly, through the huge
crowd.
It
dawned on people when they heard screams, when they saw bloodied
victims collapse around them, or when others stampeded for the exits,
trampling some of the people in their way.
Many
of the terrified concertgoers followed their instincts and crouched or
lay flat, not realizing that they remained exposed to a gunman lodged
high above them. Others surged into surrounding streets and buildings,
leaving behind debris lost in the panic — drink cups, shoes, and
cellphones that kept ringing for hours, as relatives and friends tried
to reach their loved ones and find out if they were safe.
By
sunrise on Monday, the staggering toll at an outdoor country music
festival on a cool desert night was becoming clear: at least 59 people
killed, the police said, and 527 injured, either by gunfire or in the
flight to safety.
A
lone gunman perched on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and
Casino had smashed the windows of his hotel suite with a hammer, taken
aim at a crowd of 22,000 people, and committed one of the deadliest mass
shootings in American history. Late on Monday, law enforcement
officials said they still had no idea what the motive was.
The
gunman had 17 firearms, including a handgun, in his suite, according to
Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police
Department. And when the police searched the shooter’s house on Monday,
“we retrieved in excess of 18 additional firearms, some explosives, and
several thousand rounds of ammo,” Sheriff Lombardo said. He added that
they also found ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer sometimes used in making
bombs, in the gunman’s car.
The
sheriff said some rifles found in the hotel room may have been modified
to make them fully automatic. Automatic rifles, which fire multiple
rounds with a squeeze of a trigger, are highly regulated, and on videos
posted online by witnesses, the rapid-fire sound indicated that at least
one weapon was fully automatic.
Among
the revelers below at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, Melissa Ayala, 41,
said she first realized what was happening when a man near her fell to
the ground with a bullet wound to his neck. “There was blood pouring
everywhere,” she said.
Ms.
Ayala said she and four friends, who had come to the festival from
California, were drinking and laughing when they heard the gunfire,
which at first they thought was fireworks.
And
then: “It was just total chaos,” she said. “People falling down and
laying everywhere. We were trying to take cover and we had no idea where
to go.”
The police identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock,
64, a retiree with no significant criminal history, who liked to gamble
and seemed to live a quiet life with his girlfriend in Mesquite, Nev.,
about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. He shot himself to death before
the police reached his room.
The
Islamic State terrorist group, through its news agency, Amaq, claimed
responsibility for the attack, saying that Mr. Paddock had converted to
Islam months earlier, and had “responded to calls for targeting
coalition countries” that are fighting the group in Syria and Iraq. That
phrasing usually indicates that the attacker was inspired by the group,
rather than directed by it. Such claims have not always proved accurate
in the past.
Aaron
Rouse, special agent in charge of the FBI office in Las Vegas, said,
“We have determined to this point no connection with an international
terrorist group.”
Speaking
at the White House, President Trump called the shooting “an act of pure
evil,” ordered flags flown at half-staff, and said he would travel to
Las Vegas on Wednesday.
On
Capitol Hill, Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader,
sent a letter to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan calling for him to create a
select committee on gun violence to “study and report back common sense
legislation to help end this crisis.”
Previous
mass shootings have not generally resulted in changes to federal gun
laws. Asked at a news conference about whether the president, who has
said that some mass shootings could be mitigated if victims had more
liberty to buy guns, would now ask for changes to gun laws, his press
secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said that “there will be, certainly,
time for that policy discussion to take place, but that’s not the place
that we’re in at this moment.”
“I
think one of the things that we don’t want to do is try to create laws
that won’t stop these types of things from happening,” she added.
Last
Thursday, officials said, Mr. Paddock checked into the gold-tinted,
43-story Mandalay Bay, near the Four Seasons Hotel and the Luxor Hotel
& Casino at the southern end of the string of big hotels that line
South Las Vegas Boulevard, the renowned Las Vegas Strip. He took Suite
32135, at the end of a hallway, giving him sweeping views to the east
and north. He brought in more than 10 suitcases.
Over
the following three days, the Las Vegas Village and Festival Grounds,
northeast of the Mandalay Bay, played host to the Route 91 Harvest
Festival, featuring dozens of country music acts.
It
was after 10 p.m. Sunday, while Jason Aldean was on the festival stage
singing “When She Says Baby,” that the first burst of gunfire hit the
crowd. At 10:08, someone broadcast on a police radio channel, “we got
shots fired — sounds like an automatic firearm,” and less than a minute
later, “It’s coming from upstairs in the Mandalay Bay.”
Video
of the shooting captured nine seconds of continuous, rapid bursts of
fire, followed by 37 seconds of silence from the weapon, as some in the
crowd screamed in panic and others just looked around in confusion. Mr.
Aldean kept singing for a few seconds before realizing what was
happening and taking cover.
Gunfire then erupted again and again, in rapid-fire bursts.
Jamey
Eller, 66, said she and her friends hit the ground with the first
fusillade, and then “the second round came and we started to
belly-crawl.” As the shooting continued, they decided they had to get up
and run.
“We had no idea where we were going,” she said. “We just kept hearing shooting. It felt like they were following us.”
Her
sister, Cindy McAfee, 56, called her husband, Steve McAfee, who had
stayed back in their hotel room — on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay,
where the gunman was. “He was looking down and seeing what was going on
and said, ‘Just get out of there — he’s not in the venue, he’s here,’ ”
Ms. McAfee said. “It was absolutely the most scared I’ve been in my
entire life.”
Almost
nine minutes after the shooting began, an officer radioed, “We’re still
taking gunfire, we’re pinned down.” Seconds later, an officer
broadcast: “We need to snuff the shooter before there are more victims.
Anybody have eyes on him?”
Some
survivors tried to climb the chain-link fence topped with barbed wire
around the nearby McCarran International Airport, until firefighters
ripped the fence up from the ground, allowing them to crawl under it.
Krystal
Legette, who was visiting from New York, and several other people were
at the Sundance Helicopters office at the airport, waiting for a
sightseeing flight around the city, when she said three women burst into
the building, screaming, “They’re shooting, they’re shooting.” Then
another woman came in, bleeding from a bullet wound in her right arm,
and Ms. Legette, a nurse, and three others applied a tourniquet.
More
and more people ran into the office, until about 100 had taken shelter
there, she said. A company worker turned out the lights, locked the
doors and told everyone to go inside closets and other areas away from
the windows.
Ambulances
arrived at the festival grounds quickly, but were overwhelmed by the
number of casualties. Their radio frequencies were so clogged that some
paramedics used their cellphones instead to call ahead to hospital
emergency rooms. Victims arrived at hospitals in cars and the backs of
pickup trucks.
“It
was a wide range of injuries, from gunshots to shrapnel wounds, to
trample injuries, to people trying to jump fences,” said Greg Cassell,
chief of the Clark County Fire Department.
As
survivors poured into streets and buildings surrounding the concert
site, the police swarmed the Mandalay Bay, conducting a floor-by-floor,
room-by-room search starting on the 29th floor and working their way up,
Sheriff Lombardo said. At one point, he said, Mr. Paddock fired at them
through the door of his suite, wounding a hotel security guard in the
leg. The officers backed off, he said, and then SWAT teams went in.
The
police also searched for Mr. Paddock’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley,
thinking that she might have been with him, in part because he had been
gambling using a Players Club Card, a kind of casino debit card, that
was issued in her name. Later, the sheriff said, it was determined that
Ms. Danley, who has worked in casinos in the past, had been out of the
country at the time of the shooting. The police later searched the
couple’s home in Mesquite and another house Mr. Paddock owned in
northern Nevada.
Hours
after the shooting, as guests returned to the Mandalay Bay to retrieve
their luggage, those who had been at the concert were still in shock.
Ms.
Ayala and her friends from California described how they had run for
several minutes, reaching the top of the MGM Grand parking lot, where
they continued to see the chaos on the Strip below. They called their
children, worried that it would be the last time they spoke.
They flagged down a driver who agreed to take them to a friend’s timeshare, far off the Strip.
“It
wasn’t until we got there and locked the door behind us that we felt
safe,” Ms. Ayala said. “That was the first time I really breathed.”
Ken Belson and Jennifer
Medina reported from Las Vegas, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.
Reporting was contributed by John Eligon from Las Vegas; Julie Turkewitz
from Mesquite, Nev.; Rukmini Callimachi, Jonah Engel Bromwich and Sheri
Fink from New York; and Eric Schmitt and Adam Goldman from Washington.Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel sings 'Try to remember' especially for Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund at Vita Magica September
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