A word of prayer to the victims of the mass shooting that occured Sunday night during a country music festival is displyed on the front signage of Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, Tues. Oct. 3, 2017.
Saturday, Oct. 14, 2017 | 2 a.m.
Metro Police again revised the timeline of the Oct. 1 shooting at the Mandalay Bay, saying on Friday that Stephen Paddock shot and wounded a security guard on his hotel floor about the same time he began to spray bullets on a country music concert below.
The gunman shot the guard, Jesus Campos, around 10:05 p.m., Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said at a brief news conference Friday, not at 9:59 p.m., as he had told reporters on Monday, and not after Paddock stopped firing on the crowd at 10:15, as the sheriff said on Oct. 4.
The latest account came a day after MGM Resorts, which owns Mandalay Bay, disputed the police department’s timeline, saying in a statement that the time of 9:59 had come from a hotel report “manually created after the fact” and was not accurate.
The sheriff did not say on Friday whether Paddock had already begun shooting at the crowd from the window of his 32nd-floor suite when he wounded Campos, or turned to the concert immediately after. MGM said in its statement that the gunman was firing at the concert grounds “at the same time as, or within 40 seconds after” the time Campos first reported shots over his radio.
Several other key facts remain unknown, including Paddock’s motive and why he stopped shooting at the crowd. The new timeline still leaves about 12 minutes — including 10 minutes of effectively automatic gunfire — between when Campos reported the shots and when the police arrived on the 32nd floor, at 10:17 p.m. The timelines released by the police since the shooting have raised questions about their response and whether officers had enough time to address Campos’ call and potentially stopped the massacre sooner.
Emergency radio traffic from that evening, however, details a chaotic scene in which the police were fielding reports of multiple shooters and mass casualties in the minutes after Paddock began firing on the crowd. While officers almost immediately identified a high floor of the Mandalay Bay as a source of gunfire, they believed that there were suspects on more than one floor. Hotel dispatchers also received multiple calls with conflicting information, according to a person familiar with the security response inside the hotel.
The sheriff said Friday that he was “absolutely offended” by allegations of incompetence within the department, and said that the shifting timeline was a result of the vast scope of the investigation and not an attempt to mislead anyone about the circumstances of the attack.
“This is a very dynamic event,” he said. “A very big event. Thousands of people involved — humans involved — in documentation.”
The announcement caps almost two weeks of confusion about the chronology of the shooting, in which Paddock, a high-stakes gambler, hauled powerful weapons into the gold-paneled resort, pointed them out the window of his suite and shot at thousands of people below.
Paddock killed 58 people before killing himself.
Lombardo also announced Friday a revised number of injured people, to 546 from fewer than 500. He added that 45 people were still in hospitals, some in critical condition, and that the number of dead could rise. “By the grace of God it doesn’t,” he said.
The back-and-forth is a sign of the complexity of the case and the amount of information investigators are sifting through as they try to unravel what happened. Lombardo said that his team was examining thousands of pieces of evidence, patching together information from hotel cameras, private cameras, police body cameras, police dispatch and witness interviews. He said repeatedly at the news conference that information about the case would change as the investigation continued.
Officials said the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division was handling the investigation because of its experience dealing with mass shootings and terrorism attacks. More than 200 FBI agents and support staff have worked the case. So far, the FBI has conducted hundreds of interviews and investigated 2,000 tips or leads.
The police have said that investigators found several bullets in aviation fuel tanks near the concert grounds, and on Friday Lombardo said that his team believed Paddock had fired at them “with intent.” He noted that there was “very low probability” that gunfire could have ignited the fuel.
On the day of the shooting, Campos had been dispatched to the 32nd floor to investigate an alarm indicating that a room door was ajar, according to police officials.
Lombardo said Friday that while an initial written report of the night showed that Campos had been shot at 9:59 p.m., further examination revealed something different: Campos had tried to access the 32nd floor, but found a door barricaded. He ascended to another level in order to get to the 32nd floor.
He went to the door that was ajar, Lombardo said, “mitigated the situation and subsequently received fire from the suspect.” That happened around 10:05 p.m., which is also when Paddock began to shoot at the concert.
Lombardo said Friday that Campos notified the hotel both by radio and cellphone shortly after he had been shot. But he did not say when Mandalay Bay notified the police department.
The sheriff, alluding to allegations of a conspiracy among his department, the FBI and MGM — supposedly in an effort to establish a legal case — said, “there is no conspiracy.”
