THE police officers who first stormed the hotel room where Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock carried out America’s biggest massacre in history have broken their silence.The three police officers who were in the Mandalay Bay hotel room will reveal new details about what they discovered.they found a note in the hotel room that included handwritten calculations about where he needed to aim to maximise his accuracy and kill as many people as possible.The officers were the first to see Paddock’s body and his massive arsenal of weapons and ammunition he had stockpiled for days before his mass shooting.
He requested an upper-floor room overlooking the festival, stockpiled 23 guns, a dozen of them modified to fire continuously like an automatic weapon, with a bump stock device.He had also set up cameras inside and outside his room to watch for approaching officers.Officer Dave Newton from the Las Vegas Police Department’s K-9 unit said he noticed a note on the shooter’s nightstand.
He said the note was located near one of the windows that Paddock had smashed with a hammer to fire onto the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival.“I could see on it he had written the distance, the elevation he was on, the drop of what his bullet was gonna be for the crowd,” Newton said.“So he had that written down and figured out so he would know where to shoot to hit his targets from there.”Paddock’s hotel suite was on the 32nd floor of the hotel.
Newton recalled how they entered the room amid the flashing lights of a fire alarm set off by an explosive used to blow through the door.“Very eerie. Yeah, the dust from the explosive breach. And then you have the flashing lights,” Newton said. “And that looked straight, like, out of a movie, you know?”Paddock’s hotel suite gave him an ideal perch from which to carry out his attack on a crowd of more than 20,000 people attending the festival concert across the street, some 365 metres away.The note has not shed any light on the gunman’s motives, which authorities are yet to uncover nearly a week after the deadliest mass shooting in recent US history.
Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 500 injured when Paddock pumped thousands of bullets into a musical festival crowd from the nearby Mandalay Bay Hotel.He fired into the crowd using his arsenal of more than 20 assault rifles and killed himself shortly before police burst into his room.Publicly, investigators have said they are struggling to establish a motive for the massacre.
Nearly a week after the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, federal agents on Saturday started hauling away the piles of backpacks, purses, baby strollers and lawn chairs left behind when frantic concert-goers scrambled to escape raining bullets from a gunman who was shooting from his high-rise hotel suite.FBI agents fanned out across the crime scene near the Las Vegas Strip throughout the week stacking the belongings left from last Sunday’s shooting into more than a dozen large piles.
Clark County Undersheriff Kevin McMahill expressed the frustration of police and FBI officers who have “run down well more than 1000 leads in this investigation”.“Some of it has helped create a better profile into the madness of this suspect but we do not still have a clear motive or reason why,” said Sheriff McMahill.“In the past, terror attacks or mass murder cases, the motive was made very clear by a note that was left by a social media post, by a telephone call that was made.“Today, in our investigation, we don’t have any of that uncovered. I wish we did.”He issued an appeal for anyone with any clues to come forward.“We do not clearly have a motive or a reason why” he said.“I can assure we are aware of all aspects of this case to include the rumour, innuendo and suppositions by many in the public.“And I get it. We all want answers.”
As Las Vegas police are appealing to the public for help in uncovering a wealthy retiree’s motive for massacring 58 people at an outdoor concert this week, US Vice President Mike Pence has visited Las Vegas offering solace. “We are united in our grief, in our support for those who have suffered and united in our resolve to end such evil in our time,” Pence said, joining Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman and other local leaders at a City Hall commemoration for victims of the shooting that followed a prayer walk through the city.