Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo discusses an after-action report Wednesday, July 10, 2019, about the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Monday, Sept. 30, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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After most every mass shooting, the public is introduced to a police chief or county sheriff on whose watch the tragedy occurred.
Before the Las Vegas massacre, it was an occurrence after killings on campuses, a movie theater, a church and a club that catered to the LGBT community. And after, following killings at more schools, additional houses of worship, another bar or a packed Walmart.
The law enforcement official stands behind a lectern facing a plethora of news cameras broadcasting the grim details on the latest American tragedy on televisions and computer monitors around the nation. In the fall of 2017, the country got to meet Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo.
Approaching the two-year mark since the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival — in which 58 people were slain, rattling Southern Nevada and California, where most victims were from — Lombardo reflected on the investigation’s conclusions, changes to Metro Police policy and its personnel’s level of preparedness in case someone else decides to inflect terror on this community again.
“The world has changed,” he lamented during an editorial meeting with the Las Vegas Sun when asked about mass shootings in recent years. For him, each mass casualty is another reminder of what happened here. “Obviously, it happened under my watch as your sheriff, so I personally dwell on that probably a lot more than most people — other than the victims.”
There always are references to the Route 91 massacre after whatever happens to be the latest mass shooting, with media organizations ranking the deadliest incidents, and Las Vegas still occupying the top position.
Action from someone intent on causing harm is unpredictable, and though Metro doesn’t have a “crystal ball” to prevent all plots, police can prepare to quickly eliminate the threat and minimize harm, Lombardo said.
An end to a vast investigation
Asked if he was satisfied with the conclusion in local and federal reports as to why a high-stakes gambler perched himself in a 32nd-floor hotel suite with an arsenal of rifles and indiscriminately fired below, leaving a trail of dead, Lombardo said he’s confident federal and local investigators were thorough and “dotted all the I’s and crossed the T’s.”
“Did we miss some particular point of evidence that would have given us a little more insight about the suspect’s actions? … I don’t know,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that we didn’t determine a motive, and I think the entire world would be interested to the reasons why — as you could imagine how interested I would be into the reasons why — but unfortunately we never came to a conclusion.”
Lombardo maintained that 64-year-old Stephen Paddock’s “diminishing” mental capabilities, his “mood maladies,” including depression, and the significant wealth he lost in the year leading up to the shooting — during which time he amassed most of the two dozen or so rifles he used — contributed. “He wanted to go out with a bang and there’s no other explanation to be given on that, based on the evidence.”
The shooter’s brain was sent to Stanford University for forensic analysis. But the probes did not find anything 100% conclusive as to why he did what he did, Lombardo said. “I was hoping they’d find some massive tumor or something.”
Additionally, Paddock’s brain had been inflicted with some damage when the shooter put a bullet into his own head.
158-page report, and other changes to policing
After local and federal probes into the shooting that also injured more than 800 concert attendees, Metro in July released the 1 October After-Action Review that outlined the agency’s response, and its “strengths, weaknesses and the lessons learned,” essentially closing the book on the incident.
Out of 93 policy-change suggestions listed, 86% of them had been instituted, Lombardo said during the editorial meeting Tuesday.
Since the shooting two years ago, it’s not unusual to see Metro snipers watching from above at open-air events. Metro has also fortified its communication with public partners and their security teams. Problems with radio communications, such as the ones encountered in parking structures and inside Strip resorts during the shooting’s chaos, have been identified and were set to be fully addressed by July. Enforcement would come from the Clark County Fire Department, which now has crews at large-scale events.
Officers are also now more involved in medical care, carrying supplies, such as tourniquets, and are trained to learn compression and bandaging, Lombardo said. More officers working the events also now carry long guns, or have them available nearby.
Metro received pushback on the way investigators were dispatched after the shooting, with its homicide unit probing the festival grounds while the shooter’s room was investigated by the Critical Incident Review Team. Now there’s a “major case protocol” so decisions about how an investigation proceeds are in place, as opposed to being determined after the fact.
Training with regional agencies has also been boosted to include more collaboration and practicing for more specific and diverse “what if” scenarios, Lombardo said.
How Metro communicates with the public also has been tweaked to better inform media that preliminary information could change, Lombardo said.
Traditionally, Lombardo said, law enforcement was concerned with prevention and response, but now there’s also an element on a recovery phase, to include long-term mental health services for the community and officers affected by a tragedy.
When Lombardo receives intelligence from the Southern Nevada Counter Terrorism Center inside Metro headquarters, his administration moves to beef up patrols in areas similar to those targeted elsewhere in case of a copy-cat criminal.
Disciplinary actions
After the investigation, Metro moved to separate two officers from the force. An unidentified officer was fired but later reinstated through arbitration. The agency also recommended the firing of Officer Cordell Hendrex, who it determined had hesitated to act when he and a rookie trainee were a floor below the shooter as gunfire erupted. The firing hasn’t gone through arbitration, Lombardo said.
Several officers were also disciplined, but Lombardo did not expound on how many or what the sanctions involved.
Domestic terrorism
In a changing landscape in which most mass shooters have been homegrown as opposed to foreign terrorists, law enforcement has had to adapt, Lombardo said.
An alleged white supremacist shooter in El Paso, Texas, in August allegedly targeted Hispanic victims when he opened fire at a busy Walmart in the binational border city. An American-born suspect in a synagogue shooting last year in Pittsburgh espoused anti-Semitic ideology.
A Las Vegan arrested this year is accused of plotting to attack local synagogues and a downtown Las Vegas bar he thought catered to LGBT clientele.
For the most part, Lombardo said, Metro handles investigations with domestic extremists, while the FBI handles foreign terrorism investigations.
Lombardo is not one to open up about how the Route 91 massacre personally affected him. That’s because he sees that and other mass shootings through a law enforcement lens.
But he finds solace when he interacts with his peers from other jurisdictions, some of which have been bloodstained by senseless mass shootings. “We learn from each other and hopefully we’re not letting our ego get in the way,” Lombardo said.
Being reminded by Las Vegans when he’s out in public, by those who want to talk about what happened, can be exhausting, Lombardo said. “It’s hard to forget because it’s quite often presented to you,” he said. “It would be terrible to say I keep my fingers crossed, because that’s not what should be expected (of) me, but what I hope is that I’m doing everything I can to prevent it in the future.”
