Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Newly released bodycam videos show Vegas shooting aftermath

Mandalay

John Locher / AP

In this Oct. 1, 2017, file photo, police run toward the scene of a shooting near Mandalay Bay.

Police body camera videos made public Wednesday show SWAT teams searching stairways and offices of a Las Vegas hotel and officers directing panicked people to flee a concert venue during a shooting that killed 58 people and injured hundreds.

Radio communications recorded in some of the 16 video files offer a sense of timing during the deadliest mass shooting in the nation's modern history, with officers responding to false-alarm reports of shootings at other casinos learning that the gunman had been found dead in his 32nd-floor floor suite of the Mandalay Bay resort.

"Reports of shots fired at the Aria appear unfounded at this time," a man's voice says on the radio close to one officer's body camera. "There was a large crowd running, but no one who can say that they actually heard shots."

"Yeah," says the unnamed officer wearing the camera and carrying an assault-style rifle with a team off officers moving up the Las Vegas Strip and into a casino. "We're going to be getting a lot of those tonight."

Another radio report says, "We're with security now. They're saying they don't have any shots fired inside New York-New York."

Police and the FBI later attributed false reports of shootings at other casinos on and near the Strip to a rapid spread of panic late Oct. 1.

Videos show tense officers on a pedestrian walkway directing people out of a casino at gunpoint while shouting commands for them to keep hands up.

A SWAT team dispatches a dog around corners of a stairwell inside the Mandalay Bay resort and searches an employee found working in one hotel office.

The videos represented the 13th batch of documents, 911 audio, police reports, witness statements and video released since May 2 after the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department lost a public records lawsuit by media including The Associated Press.

Records seen to date have not provided a motive for Stephen Paddock, a retired accountant and high-stakes gambler, to amass an arsenal of assault-style weapons and unleash a deadly barrage into a crowd of 22,000 people attending a Route 91 Harvest Festival country music concert.

Sheriff Joe Lombardo, elected head of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, has said he doesn't expect a motive will be found.

But police and the FBI have said they are confident that Paddock was the only shooter and that the attack did not involve a broader conspiracy. Authorities say Paddock fired out the windows for about 10 minutes and wounded a casino security guard in a hallway outside his door and then killed himself before police arrived.

Lombardo has promised a final police report of the shooting this summer.

The top FBI official in Nevada, Aaron Rouse, said this week that his agency's final report should be made public by the end of the year.