Las Vegas police change story on shooting timeline
Hotel security guard shot prior to Stephen Paddock shooting into the crowd, raising questions as to why Paddock stopped shooting.
This is not good.
The internet is rife with conspiracy theories about Stephen Paddock and the mass murder by rifle fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Accurate and timely information from investigators is needed, and I hoped it would be forthcoming.
I had several questions about the shooting, one of which was:
2. Was his fatal gun shot to the head consistent with suicide? It seems strange to me that Paddock would commit suicide so quickly if his intent was maximize death and he was monitoring people approaching in the hallway. And if he didn’t commit suicide quickly, why did he stop firing? We don’t know what the time lapse was between the shooting from the window and the shooting of the approaching security guard in the hallway.
That question seemingly was answered in a press conference on October 5, in which police indicated the shooting at the crowd was interrupted by the approach of a hotel security guard to the room. I noted this announcement in a prior post, Stephen Paddock looking more and more like Jared Loughner:
Additionally, the reason Paddock stopped firing appears to have been caused by the hotel security guard approaching the room, which turned Paddocks attention away from firing out the window to preparing for a siege:
https://youtu.be/oLXXkzRbpeo?t=48
That explanation made sense. But now police are walking it back, saying the shooting of the security guard came 6 minutes BEFORE the shooting into the crowd started. The L.A. Times reports:
Police have dramatically changed their account of how the Las Vegas massacre began on Oct. 1, revealing Monday that the gunman shot a hotel security guard six minutes before opening fire on a country music concert — raising new questions about why police weren’t able to pinpoint the gunman’s location sooner.
Officials had previously said that gunman Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nev., shot Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos after Paddock had unleashed his deadly volley at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, an assault that began at 10:05 p.m. and left 58 people dead, with hundreds more injured.
hey had credited Campos, who was shot in the leg, with stopping the 10-minute assault on the concert crowd by turning the gunman’s attention to the hotel hallway, where Campos was checking an alert for an open door in another guest’s room.
But Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said Monday that Paddock shot Campos before his mass shooting — at 9:59 p.m. — and they now didn’t know why Paddock stopped his attack on the crowd.
How is it that Paddock shot 200 bullets into the hallway directed at the security guard, but no one called the police? The sound must have been such that you would expect a flood of calls to hotel security and the police. Yet nothing has been released on that.
Police are still insisting that there is no evidence of a second shooter or any link to a known terror group, or any specific motivation for the shooting:
Police need to be much more careful in releasing information. Every time the police have to alter something as critical as a timeline and explanation as to why the shooting stopped, it creates suspicions.
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Comments
Not only is the security guard’s involvement curious, so is the question if the police waited an hour after the gunman was dead before entering the room?
Surely, the police must have heard that fatal shot even if they didn’t recognize it as such. So what was the timeline of the last and presumably fatal, shot?
What on earth makes you think they could identify the ‘fatal shot’?
This isn’t Hollywood the ‘fatal shot’ isn’t suddenly dramatically louder and echo in the building. All the police would have known was he stopped shooting.
That gave them time to set up and get ready to storm the room, and since he was no longer actively shooting there was no desperate need to assault the room before everything was in place.
They didn’t ‘wait an hour’. It took them a certain period of time to actually identify the correct room, get their assets at the location and in place, and then set up for a takedown. That all takes a good amount of time.
Another reason to conceal carry. Police take a long time.
The entire complex was a “gun-free zone.”
And “When seconds count…”
Security Guard Campos had a radio, presumably he communicated his having been shot to his command post. Did Mandalay Bay Security repot this shooting and its location to Metro? When exactly?
With a guard on the ground, in radio contact, how could Metro NOT have identified 32nd floor immediately? Why was Metro not in that hallway within 56 minutes of the first shots, in time to stop the attack on the concert BEFORE it began?
Now, I am not as concerned with the hour it took for them to breach the room. I am concerned about the failure to breach before the massacre, or during it.
This is shocking. We need more details or else we are going to BLAME Metro.
All reasonable questions but the blame there lies on Metro, not necessarily on the police.
The time period is still in question, but if it took the guard’s superiors just a couple minutes to actually call the police, then their call would have gotten lost in a SEA of panic 911 calls from 20,000 people all reporting shootings, at that point its not a shock at all they couldn’t get through to police.
This presumes that the only method the casinos in Vegas have to communicate crime to the LVPD is 911. In a day and age when podunk banks that handle far less cash are equipped with silent alarms that can be activated by various means such as desk or floor-mounted “panic buttons,” that are activated should a robber force employees to disable regular alarms before opening the safe, or even something as simple as bill traps in teller drawers. A few bills are placed between the jaws of the trap. Merely by complying with the robbers demand and emptying the till the jaws that had been held apart now complete a circuit that sets off the silent alarm.
Yet these casinos have nothing except 911 available to communicate with police just like the rest of us Joe Sixpacks? Please.
There’s an accomplise in here somewhere, and possibly Paddock did not kill himself, but was killed by the accomplise.
The grassy knoll tinfoil hatters are having a field day with this, and it raises questions about what is being reported and released into the public sphere – simple errors, or deliberate dis- and misinformation?
Sheriff Lombardo is either a fool or a liar, or both. He looks more and more like someone who is not in the loop. Who is really calling the shots in this investigation? This PR fiasco reminds me of what happened with the Dallas PD after the JFK assassination.
I’m guessing the FBI is calling the shots. But don’t worry, they’ll get to the bottom of this just like they did with the TW800 shootdown.
Like I said before Trump should convene a commission to investigate it. In fact, maybe Guilliani should head the commission ( unless you could think of someone better ).
This new timeline still fits with my simple idea that this was a illegal gun save gone wrong.
Ok, I am gonna put my conspiracy nut theory here just for my 2 cents.
I wonder if ISIS had tricked Paddock into thinking they wanted to buy guns and ammo from him and were going to pay top dollar. They arrange a meeting in the hotel.
Paddock being a fairly intelligent person gets there early and sets the place up in a way that he feels will keep him safe while dealing with the purchasers and during the purchase. Think about it, the camera’s, the planned escape route, the homemade explosives components in the car it looks like a arms deal.
However, when his “customers” arrive they have different plans, they kill incapacitate or kill Paddock and then use the guns to pull off a terror attack and then leave Paddock as the patsy. I mean they would have had more than enough time to escape before the police locked down the floor. Hell they didn’t even have to “escape” the hotel, all they really had to do was have rooms at the hotel so when they are done shooting they just return to their rooms and act as surprised as everyone else.
That is just my brainstorming to try to make things match up.
Hey, as nutcase conspiracy theories go, this one is pretty good.
If nothing else I can keep it for an idea if I ever get to write that novel, ROFLMAO!
Well, certainly. “Dead guy in room bullets were fired from” does not equal “dead guy was shooter” even if people who watch too much TV assume it does. He could even have been a perfectly innocent hotel guest who happened to have the room someone picked out as the ideal spot to fire from. The guns in the room might be his … or they might not. They might be the ones fired at the crowd … or they might not. There are undoubtedly piles of evidence and clues … videos, eyewitness accounts, standard forensic work on gun and bullet identification, etc … but we’re not seeing much of it.
Far more questions than answers so far. And the few answers aren’t very convincing. In such a vacuum, anything goes. The only limit is lack of imagination.
I don’t see how anybody with two brain cells to rub together could possibly believe Paddock was a gun runner and this was an illegal gun sale gone bad.
Anybody stupid enough to register under his own name in a hotel/casino where the “eye in the sky” covers every inch of public areas, each time the room key is swiped or the registered guest’s vehicle enters or leaves the garage is logged, then haul the merchandise up to the room, unpack it so to put on essentially a private gun show for criminals/terrorists ALL BY HIS LONESOME EXCEPT FOR THE OCCASIONAL HIGH PRICED HOOKER, wouldn’t make it through his first sale. Let alone survive long enough to amass the kind of wealth Paddock is reputed to have.
The only way to do this “gun running” nonsense more stupidly would have been to arrange the meet-up, “gun show,” and then complete the cash transaction in the parking lot of the Clark County Jail.
Wow! Mighty proud words from someone who likewise can’t explain why Paddock would take all the guns up to the room by himself to have a shoot out of random individuals.
You wave your hand away from the question of where did Paddock get his money to high roll? Having a couple of rental properties doesn’t provide that kind of cash. He had planes and inventory.so why is that so hard to believe he was into the black market? The simple fact is that a bustling Vegas hotel room attracts far less attention than an individual’s home or a quiet country road.
You also mindlessly wave away the Jihad connections. I’ve provided links. Please take the time to read the before you tut-tut. ISIS is claiming him and by all accounts they don’t do that lightly. Given the information about NYC Jihadists wanting guns to shoot up concerts and Paddock’s ability to service them, how is that not worthy of interest?
We don’t know what happened. I know that some people, not saying you, seem to want this to ponder and psychoanalyze the mindset of a Columbine type shooter to find a “solution” as to how we can prevent something so senseless in the future. But that just seems to me to be living in the problems of the past century, rather than the present one.
So until you can explain the mystery, maybe you should not be so critical of those of us who are proposing theories that make more sense than a middle aged man buying tons of guns and explosives, carrying it all up there by himself (despite evidence to the contrary) and shooting up the place for ten minutes and then stopping.
He had more than just a couple of rental properties. He had more than enough legal assets to acquire his low seven figure net worth. That included a string of apartment buildings and a real estate business. That particular business alone, which he started with his brother in 1992, netted the shooter $2M when he sold it 2004. If you don’t think you can make a few million over several decades buying apartment buildings on the cheap, staying in an apartment on site, fixing them up yourself and then selling them can make you a millionaire then you have to, I suppose, resort to magical thinking. Black Market! Gun running! But I know people who have made millions by first starting out with trailer parks, fixing those up including the general store and laundromat, buying cheap trailers outright to use as rentals for the working poor, moving on to more desirable sites, then apartment buildings, always moving up. To bigger, better, and more desirable properties.
The nice thing about owning trailer parks here in Tornado Alley is that if a tornado blasts through, you as the owner haven’t lost much. Most of what’s above ground belongs to other people.
Also, you apparently don’t read my comments for comprehension. Since when do I “wave away” the possible terrorist connections? See my comment below @October 10, 2017 @ 9:28 pm where I review some of the factors that point toward possible IS involvement or at least inspiration.
“…The simple fact is that a bustling Vegas hotel room attracts far less attention than an individual’s home or a quiet country road.”
And, you’re kidding, right? In addition to all the video/active surveillance covering all the public areas and every electronic “transaction” being logged, I forgot to mention the security guards conducting roving patrols throughout the casino and hotel as they look for illegal activity.
Again, you’re kidding, right?
Dude you need an attitude adjustment. You are acting so smug, like you have it all figured out and everyone else is just so stupid when none of us can point fingers at other theories saying, oh, well it doesn’t make any sense that he would do XYZ because from the time Paddock checked into the hotel nothing makes sense. And it doesn’t help that we are being fed misinformation.
I don’t have time to read all the comments today. Maybe tomorrow. As for magical thinking about gun running. What? I’m’ not getting why you think it is so beyond the pale for an educated guy to cross the border for easy money. And the money that you are talking about, it is not really all that much for someone gambling like he did. From one of the articles, the other video poker players did not think he was THAT hot.
At least we can agree on the Jihad connection. I think the answer lies in here. http://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/Terror-Plot-New-York-Concert-Landmark-ISIS-Las-Vegas-Arrest-Times-Square-449749293.html#ixzz4v7sgnZPD But with so much misinformation being floated, it is impossible to know the truth, so get off your high horse.
Actually unless this casino hotel is a huge exception to the rule then 95% of all that security is in the casino itself, not the hotel proper. Simple fact is that hotels don’t thrive by being nosy, not even casino hotels, so your fantasy of every public area being recorded in these hotels is just that a fantasy.
Uhhh, because he was crazy and by definition crazy people don’t make rational decisions.
Because of course Stephen Paddock would feel “safe” from the criminals/terrorists with all that law enforcement around, arriving or departing from their shifts, constantly driving in and out as they process suspects or transfer convicted criminals to state prison to serve their sentences.
(SARC)Whenever I’m going to do a drug deal with someone I don’t know yet, I always drive over to the municipal complex where city hall, the municipal courts, and the police are headquartered. In the middle of the afternoon. These new, unproven “associates” would never try anything there (SARC off).
You have been watching way to much TV. The casino is very security intensive, the hotel not so much, its just a fact, also how many casino’s have you been to in real life? You rarely see security.
One more troubling unknown about this attack. I’m also curious about the girlfriend’s inconsistent story, although that could just be the result of fuzzy reporting.
Frankly I am of the opinion that she is just a gold digger that happened to chose the wrong sugar daddy, lol. It seems like maybe she was just the (excuse my french) piece of ass he kept at that house. I bet as time goes on more “girlfriends” come forward.
I think “gold digger” might be too strong a term, but I won’t object too strongly if that’s how you or anyone else want to look at it.
From my perspective the GF comes across as too pathetic for that. Talk about the biological clock going off. She’s 62 years old, twice divorced, and she’s not getting any better looking or younger with each passing year.
Paddock obviously enjoyed berating and humiliating her in public. This is, no doubt, of a piece with the way he lived out his rape fantasies with prostitutes. The GF may well have known about the prostitutes. How could she not? She met Paddock when she was working in some sort of hospitality capacity at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa. What goes on in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but she had worked in Vegas long enough to know what does go on in Vegas. She couldn’t have been so naive to be clueless about what Paddock was doing when he went off on his gambling binges without her.
If she knew about his violent rape fantasies she might even have been relieved.
This Danle woman seems to be like other women I’ve known who were abused, whether emotionally or physically. The answer is, “Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t know.” The devil they don’t know is being alone and finding out they can’t actually do any better with a new guy if they can find a new guy at all. Danle may have been a gold-digger when she first met Paddock but her gold-digging days are long past and she knows it. No casino is going to hire a geriatric like her to work in some sort of hospitality capacity with high-rollers. Maybe they’ll hire her as a waitress in a coffee shop. Maybe.
So she put up with the public humiliation and (I can’t prove this, but again she worked in Vegas long enough to know) his womanizing with prostitutes because the devil she doesn’t know and didn’t want to know is dying old and alone.
That’s my theory, and it’s based upon witness testimony.
What “witness testimony”? You are so full of crap your eye’s are probably brown. First, not a word she said can be trusted. Second you are making the radical assumption that she didn’t like participating in the violent rape fantasies. Maybe that is why they were together.
Witness testimony my ass, your assumptions are no more credible than anyone else’s here, mine included. So unless you had a camera in their bedroom what you “know” is jack diddly crap.
Could the Security guy been involved in this somehow?
We haven’t heard a word from him
To the authorities:
“Do you want conspiracy theories? Because this is how you get conspiracy theories.”
Two things.
First, this is a HUGE discrepancy. The security guard was initially used as the reason why Paddock ceased his onslaught some 40 minutes before police breached his rooms. He was initially reported to be investigating a door alarm and encountered Paddock at the end of his fusillade, thereby causing Paddock to cease his attack. However, now the security guard is reported to have encountered Paddock five minutes before he opened fire on the crowd. Now, the report is that Paddock’s door was ajar, something which does not happen in hotels, which have self closing doors per fire code, unless the door is blocked open, and Paddock was drilling a hole in an interior door or wall. So, the guard, reportedly, entered the suite and was attacked by Paddock, who then shot him. Paddock then took five minutes to continue preparing, before he opened fire. And, it appears that no alarm was sent to the LVMPD until after Paddock had engaged the crowd.
Second, what caused the guard’s reported wound? It was obviously NOT a 5.56x45mm round fired from a rifle. Being hit with a round of this type, at close range, causes an immense amount of tissue damage. One does not walk around for 5-10 minutes after being struck with said bullet, let alone the nearly an hour alluded to in initial reports, where he assisted the police until ordered to leave to seek medical attention. So, what hit him? A splinter from the door? A handgun round? What?
This is what drives conspiracy theories. The initial reports left us with the question of why did Paddock stop firing, after ~10 minutes, when he had a large amount of ammunition remaining? The first trial explanation was that his rifles had jammed. Then some three to four days after the incident, the police introduced the heroic security guard, who stumbled into Paddock actively firing on the crowd and either knocked on the door [quite possibly the stupidest thing one could do while gunshots are coming from the other side of that door] or opened the door to see what was going on [again, not a positive survival trait]. And, this so flummoxed Paddock, that he made no attempt to escape but simply killed himself. It changed a couple of days later where official reports now suggested that Paddock had fired on the responding LEOs. The problem with these scenarios was the lack of witness collaboration. The person in the room below Paddock reportedly did not hear any shots before paddock opened up on the crowd and certainly not a five minute gap in the firing, as the newest scenario suggests had to happen. Nor, did anyone report hearing any shots after the firing on the crowd. So, we are left with the most likely options, which are that either the security guard lied, for an undisclosed reason, the investigators are completely incompetent, or someone is trying to spin this incident to arrive at a lone, crazed gunman scenario.
Whatever the explanation for this anomaly, it serves to discredit the investigation and gives full rein to the conspiracy theorists.
Great points. Also if I read it correctly Paddock fired 200 rounds at the security guard. How the hell does that go unnoticed?
As far as the security guard being shot in the leg, I am betting on a graze or as you point out a shrapnel injury.
Let me understand… 200 rounds shot at the security guard and he ends up grazed on the leg. Not blown into one thousand little pieces of mincemeat. So the shooter can’t hit a barn door with a bazooka his aim is so bad. But then shoots out the window some 350 yards and is able to kill 58 in ten minutes. My my, his aim improved significantly in a few seconds. What did he do to achieve this remarkable improvement? Did he read the operations manual? Recalibrate his sights? Adjust his glasses? Put some eyedrops in? Please explain.
Hey, that is what the article says, information is changing so fast who knows, it might actually be 2 or 20 bullets, which sounds much more reasonable to me. I mean sure he could have emptied 2 beta mags, but I find it highly doubtful.
As far as how the guard could only be hit once, well that takes an understanding of how inaccurate full automatic fire really is, especially if you are firing an unmounted gun. You can go “rock and roll” and easily miss a man sized target just 20 feet away, especially if you have no training.
If it was 200 rounds then a much more likely scenario is that the guard was hit in the first burst of fire and immediately pulled GTFO maneuver as any sane person would and the rest of the rounds were just random spray.
Actually, at 20 feet, or 50 feet, you are not going to miss a man-sized target firing full auto. If you aim, or point shoot as practiced, you are going to hit the man with the first 2-3 rounds, at least. And, with an AR-15, fired from the shoulder, you are probably going to put most of a twenty round magazine into him. The weapon design reduces muzzle climb.
In the case of the security guard shooting, we do not have any accurate report of where he was, in relation to Paddock, during that shooting. If the guard was running down the hallway and turned a corner as Paddock fired, he might have escaped injury. If Paddock fired through the closed door, then all bets are off, as far as accuracy goes. We also have no idea what weapon Paddock used [no information has been released]. The only thing that is pretty clear is that he probably did not take a hit to the leg from a 5.56x45mm round. At hallway distances, such a hit would cause extensive damage. It could have been a graze, but even a glancing blow creates quite a bit of damage.
@Mac45
Sorry your just incorrect, I’ve shot these rifles for years and taught people how to shoot and care for them and I promise you an untrained person with a fully automatic rifle can fire off 30 rounds and not hit a damn thing at 20 feet.
You also have to consider that so far none of these weapons have been confirmed as fully automatic rifle, frankly from the firing pattern that I heard on the videos there was no fully automatic rifle, all we really have is a couple of pictures with bumpfire stocks.
At hallway distances, such a hit would cause extensive damage.
If the bullet goes through a door first, maybe not.
One report described the door as being as full of holes as Swiss Cheese. So it was not 2 rounds only. 200? I don’t know where the police came up with this number from.
No one has asked where those 200 bullets ended up. Are the corridors of the 32nd floor full of bullet holes? How could Paddock have fired 200 rounds down the corridor and not busted a lot of drywall — which does not even slightly slow a bullet down — and a lot of windows, hotel guests in their rooms, furniture, … I have not seen any reports of such destruction. Not that such destruction is significant in comparison tot he people killed and wounded, but how could Paddock have fired 200 rounds without a lot of damage?
@Geologist
Couldn’t have been 200. 200 rounds through a hotel door would have basically just blown it off the hinges. I am betting it was a single Magazine, so 20 to 30 bullets which I can tell you from experience feels like 200 or so.
If a person can not land the first round on a human sized torso target from 30 feet, when firing an AR-15 from the shoulder, then they are blind. The first round will go pretty much where you point it, given a slight upward or downward trajectory depending upon what distance it is sighted in at. It will certainly strike an adult torso. And, muzzle climb will still allow the next 1-3 rounds to strike the target, as well. The AR-15 is designed to reduce recoil induced muzzle climb.
A sniper rifle is a point weapon, designed to hit single point very consistently. A machine gun is an area weapon, designed to fully cover an area rather than a single point. An AR-15 pattern weapon with a bump stock is neither a point weapon nor an area weapon. It is a kludge that can be effective only in extraordinary circumstances and then only for a limited amount of time.
It is doubtful that Paddock was able to see an individual target at 300+ yards at night let alone hit what he was aiming at. Instead, his ‘target’ was a blob of humanity standing elbow to elbow with little separation. Every infantryman knows to keep his interval when on patrol, etc.; crowds at concerts do the opposite. Paddock’s bullets were land sporadically throughout the crowd, not concentrated as they would be with a machine gun designed for automatic fire.
All of the barrels on Paddock’s weapons that were used with bump stocks were rendered permanently inaccurate within a minute. They simply are not designed to shed the heat of such rapid fire. Most machine guns have very heavy barrels, but even those would not stand up to those rates of fire for more than a few seconds.
Yes. using the weapons that he reportedly used, in the manner that he used them [simulated full automatic fire], he was simply spraying and praying. To his advantage, there was a huge number of people [20,000+] in a small area. This increased his chances of scoring a hit. But, there was no precision to this. He was using the rifle as an area weapon.
And, at the rate of fire at which he was operating and with only the few seconds needed to reload, his weapon would have overheated quickly. The AR-15/M16 has a tendency to lock up under extended rapid fire discharge conditions, which would have necessitated changing weapons during the shooting. It would be interesting to learn just how many weapons he actually fired during this incident.
I suspected the paper found near his window was calculation drop for range of fire.
For a spray weapon, this is very unusual.
I usually fire 308 at 300 yds, and rarely would I use such a calculation. There were multiple 308 mags and weapons in the photo, and I suspect that is what he used to target the airport Jet A tanks. He was far enough away from McCarran Airport to have to calculate bullet drop from a larger sniper caliber.
The crowd damage was cover fire.
I definitely wouldn’t need any calculation for 223 at his elevation.
I want to know the full inventory of weapons and calibers in the room. From that, you can see intent.
His guide dog was shooting out the window?
Then you would think there would be ~200 interior holes in the walls, going from inside the room to the outside.
The idea that an UNARMED guard was on floor 32 investigating a door left open asPaddock was on a shooting spree never made sense and no media journo bothered to question that.
I haven’t heard the press conference yet., but reports had it that he was drilling holes to put a plate on the fire escape door. Some take this to mean that he never meant to escape. I don’t know. What if he had a couple of accomplices. One to blow the tannerite in the car ( or was it meant to be planted elsewhere ), one to blow the oil tank. Then when police respond to that he slinks off quietly in the confusion.
Some speculate that he slipped n a spent shell casing and accidentally shot himself. Or the second person shooting him is still open.
Was it unintentional deception or deliberate lies that the police handed out before? At this point we have many rumors and few facts, and the fact that we have are unreliable.
This is not good for the credibility of the FBI, which has not been in good standing anyways.
They should just be clear to the public about what’s actually going on, and IF there are details they do not want to make public to protect the integrity of the investigation, just say so.
Tinfoil conspiracy theories thrive when people are not properly informed.
Hehe, you used FBI and Credibility in the same sentence…now that’s funny. If the FBI had any credibility then Hillary would be on trial right now.
Yeah. I know. I was just trying to be politically correct, something that doesn’t come naturally.
A lot of people have noticed the local police doing the press conferences have a fed behind them whispering in their ear. Or at least watching.
I possible mitigation, detective stories going back to Sherlock Holmes have police putting out false information, or withholding information, to mislead perps not yet caught.
We could hope this is the reason.
How is it that Paddock shot 200 bullets into the hallway directed at the security guard, but no one called the police?
Maybe it’s just that kind of hotel. Business as usual.
Hey, it’s a better theory than any that officialdom has offered so far.
I am betting that’s either a misprint or a mis-spoken number. now 20 bullets I can see.
Even a mere 20 should have raised a few eyebrows down at the desk. For that matter, so should 2. One, maybe they’d ignore. That’s a “Did you hear that? Weird, sounded kinda like a gunshot …” type of thing. Easily ignored as one of those freakish things not worth investigating if it doesn’t happen again. But more than one, somebody’s obviously shooting at something.
Oh, I agree it is beyond belief that no one heard anything and now there is this maintence guy who says he was on the floor as well. Honestly, at this point I don’t think the police even have a clue what the real timeline is supposed to look like.
Hear anything? How did no one present on that floor get shot? The geometry is that this guy was in a suite at one end of the hallway. If he’s shooting at the security guard, he’s firing down the long axis of the hallway. Those 200 rounds would have gotten to the other end no problem, and hotel walls aren’t exactly armor plated. They might not have gotten through the rooms along the corridor, even if they hit the corridor walls at a shallow angle, but what about ricochets off of any hallway fixtures (sprinkler heads, lights, etc.).
Something’s wrong with this picture.
Campos isn’t a hero and stopped nothing. He got shot and 6 minutes elapsed without intervention by the hotel staff or LVPD? I find that preposterous. As Steve Wynn said, his staff is well armed, I believe Mandalay’s were too and knew well within 6 minutes one of their guys got shot on the 32ed floor.
We have been told 72 minutes elapsed before the cops entered Paddock’s room. Now its 78. Really makes me wonder what the heck the cops were waiting on? How long did they stand outside Paddock’s room doing nothing while he murdered and maimed hundreds of innocents?
I am thinking they are covering up some kind of miscommunication that caused the breach to be delayed. Maybe, they waited thinking that the FBI team would do the breach and then ended up having to just go ahead and use SWAT. Maybe, due to the festivities the SWAT members were so spread out it took time to get the team assembled. (Most SWAT officers don’t sit in the SWAT office and wait for a call like in the movies, they are out being police just like regular detectives and officers, they just happen to be on the SHTF squad.)
I am betting it’s about optics but it is hard to cover up such a huge time gap.
What is wrong with conspiracy theories? A theory is not a fact, just an guess as to what may have happened based on the information available. Some theories will be absolutely wrong while others may fall very close to the truth. At least we all know an actual crime was committed and the theories wrap around the how and why.
We currently have 17 people looking into a conspiracy theory trying to validate the theory with no known crime…
Well, sometimes they spur the lunatic fringe on to real-life acts which can turn out to be disastrously stupid.
C.f. “pizzagate.”
And sometimes the lunatics are correct, and the actual lunatics are in the hall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z39KZAryzk
C.f. Hurricane Harvey Weinstein.
Conspiracy theories are fine as long as they don’t become a call to action.
I wonder if Paddock sprinkled tannerite around the base of those fuel tanks so as to ignite the jet fuel after puncturing the tanks. His weapons of choice lacked the energy necessary to puncture those tanks and its doubtful he had the accuracy necessary to hit the tannerite with a shot even had he successfully punctured the tanks.
The tanks themselves were repaired on the day after the shooting, but there was no mention of tannerite. But Paddock had broken the second window in order to target those tanks. He also probably knew that jet fuel can be difficult to ignite.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the authorities were reluctant to mention fuel tanks and tannertite in the same breath. A poker playing, tax collecting mailman with a NASA background probably presents quite a conundrum to the investigators.
Actually the 2nd window was to have a better shooting angle on people as they fled. Most people aren’t going to run towards the stage they are going to run away from it. The 2nd windows angle gives him better shots at people fleeing.
Paddock had little chance of hitting anyone fleeing the scene. In fact, his effectiveness was enhanced by those in the crowd who hunkered down in place.
No, once Paddock had to aim, he was finished other than the much fewer accidental hits. That’s not to say he was fully aware of that though.
Oh, I am not saying it would work I mean he was about 1000 to 1100 yards away and even with the largest caliber that has been listed so far (.308 or 7.62×51) he was lobbing rounds into the crowd. What I am saying that seems a more likely reason for the angle change than trying to blow up tanks hollywood style.
sheesh. Were you lying then or are you lying now?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-shooting-timeline-stephen-paddock-mandalay-bay/
Who are you asking?
At that link, Lombardo gave a press conference where he broke down the timeline in great detail. Now it has changed…..significantly. I wasn’t really asking anyone in particular, just asking that age old question..
Yea, I bet there are other “Major Breaks” as they days and weeks go on.
We non-police are missing some important data points that the police may or may not have.
1) Video of the hallway/elevator showing the shooter and any other people, along with 911 call recordings from the hotel guests.
2) Entry logs for the electronic key on the door.
3) The photographs of the room post-shooting excluding the shooter, of course (ick).
1) I’m not sure what’s going on with the video, but either a) there was a screw-up of some sort that made it unavailable, such as the shooter spray-painting the cameras or just storage failure of the archives, or b) there *is* something interesting in the footage, and the FBI/LVPD are tracking it down as fast as they can, so they’re sitting on the release of the footage to avoid spooking the secondary subject.
2) Entry key logs would show the pattern of who went in and out of the suite, maid service, etc, and when matched up with the missing video, would help put context to the situation.
3) One would *HOPE* the LVPD officers are smart enough not to contaminate a crime scene. Then again, one would have hoped that the Simpson detectives would not have been stupid enough to get blood drawn from the suspect, then make a detour to visit the crime site before taking said blood samples to the lab. Sometimes police have stupid fits, particularly when major crimes have just taken place. Many examples exist, such as the Waco biker meeting that turned into a bloodbath, or others that you may fill in the blanks here. Hopefully once the SWAT team realized the shooter was dead, some nameless sergeant bellowed, “Nobody touch anything, back out of the room, and let’s get the crime scene photographers in here.”
One last comment: 200 rounds shot into the hallway? That’s 5-40round magazines of 5.56mm shot through the door, which is one *heck* of a lot of holes in that door and the hotel corridor. It’s a minor miracle nobody got killed inside the hotel from that, *IF* the police reports on that are correct, too.
Until someone provides evidence to the contrary, I believe that Vegas is related to the FBI investigation into the plans to shoot up concerts/subway in NY.
Here’s a source:
“While the alleged [New York City] plot was apparently uncovered and interrupted months ago, investigators were not prepared to announce its existence until Friday [after the Vegas shoooting], in part because the search continued for other possible terror connections.”
Source: ISIS Sympathizers Planned to ‘Create the Next 9/11’ With Attacks on Concerts, Subways & Times Square: Feds – NBC New York http://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/Terror-Plot-New-York-Concert-Landmark-ISIS-Las-Vegas-Arrest-Times-Square-449749293.html#ixzz4v7sgnZPD
“While the alleged [New York City] plot was apparently uncovered and interrupted months ago, investigators were not prepared to announce its existence until Friday [after the Vegas shoooting], in part because the search continued for other possible terror connections.”
From the article: Prosecutors added that Al Bahnasawy also communicated with an undercover agent posing as an ISIS sympathizer about wanting to “shoot up concerts cuz they kill lots of people.” He also researched upcoming concerts in the city and talked about picking a show in “a concert hall thats far away from cops.”
1,000 Leads Later, Authorities Still Stumped by Vegas Gunman
“We just need guns in our hands,” El Bahnasawy said. “That’s how the Paris guys did it.”
My belief is that if the FBI was involved in watching this deal to “search for other possible terror connections”, as noted in the article above, then they are NEVER, EVER, EVER, going to admit it because it all went so horribly wrong.
I may have missed it in all the misinformation but I have a couple of questions that I haven’t seen answered as of yet.
1: Have they released a number of shots he fired? I have heard “thousands” but I wonder if they have given an actual number, for both inside the hotel and at the crowd.
2: Have they released the breakdown of how many of the 500+ injuries were from the gunfire vs trampling and other injuries. All of which are still the shooters fault but I doubt there were actually 500+ gunshot injuries.
I saw the injury breakdown somewhere.. I can’t find it now, but it was like 179 bullet injuries, ( don’t know if that’s including the dead or not ) and the remainder were injuries incurred in the unassing of the concert kill zone.
Now see that is a much more reasonable number. But leave it to the media to go with the “OMG he shot almost 600 people!”
The authorities are succeeding. They are giving us a bunch of useless information about timelines, guns, ammo, and numbers so we think we are getting info. But they are giving us nothing useful, e.g. what is the content of the emails on his computer, the websites he frequented, his bank account info, his employee evaluations, etc. Nothing that tells us anything about the person.
Stuff going on now in LV is a a new more reality based sequel to Oceans Eleven and
Steven Paddock is a disguised way better looking George Clooney.
The new timeline leaves me with way more questions than answers. First, how can a security guard get shot/shot at and a responding officer NOT be aware of it. Second, how could a response have taken more than 15 minutes? With that information there is a plausible explanation. The guard was involved in the shooting.
I can see the breach team taking as much as half an hour to stack up on the door since they would have to assemble, but 90 minutes is just hinky.
I wasn’t talking about the breach team. I was talking about the first officer on the scene about 20 minutes after the first shot. I can’t believe that there wasn’t an officer within 5 minutes of Mandalay bay and that it would take longer than 5 minutes to get to the 32nd floor. I understand that the breach team would take longer to assemble and that without active shooting the response wouldn’t need to be hurried but the initial response is way long unless the police where not notified right away.
If the police were not notified an easy scenario can be put together that would explain most of the discrepancies. The initial barrage down the hall was to take out the cameras in the hall. At this point the security guard and Paddock set up/break the windows. The begin firing on the crowd/airport making sure only one of them is shooting at a time. When the guard is notified that the police are in the building he kills Paddock and exits the room. Discovering he was injured he claims to have been hurt in the barrage he claims happened at the end of the shooting which has now been moved to before. Just a theory but it does tie up some loose ends.
None of this makes sense anymore. Now I have read that there were actual police officers in the security office before the first shot was ever fired.
The lunatic left is now more convinced than ever that Paddock was a deranged right-wing domestic terrorist. NRA! Trump!
The lunatic right is now more convinced than ever that Paddock was a deranged left-wing domestic terrorist. Antifa! ISIS!
Or it might have been teh gubbamint, much like 9/11. Alone, or in conjunction with either of the above. FBI! CIA!
Order your popcorn and tin foil via the good professor’s Amazon links, and stay tuned.
I suppose you’ll lump me in with the “lunatic right.” But the fact is that there are a number of “suspicious coincidences” that do point toward possible IS involvement or at least IS inspiration. They don’t establish the case by any stretch of the imagination. Just that they point in that direction.
The Manchester suicide bomber chose to blow himself up in the foyer outside the Ariane Grande concert because his prophet declared musical instruments and “singing girls” immoral (sex slaves are halal and rate a thumbs up from the old pervert, singing and dancing girls are haram and rate a thumbs down). Therefore by definition there would be no practicing Muslims there. Nominal Muslims, yes, but the fact of their presence proves that they would be heretics and hypocrites, indeed apostates (if Islam had a “national” sport it would be the practice of takfir, or “excommunicating” the wrong kind of Muslim so the “true” Muslims can kill them without suffering eternal damnation; see the millenia-old Sunni/Shia conflict for starter-list of further examples).
It didn’t seem to matter what kind of music festival he targeted. There is considerable evidence that the “Life is Beautiful” rap festival earlier in September attracted his attention. He rented multiple condos overlooking the event. I know that to a Muslim terrorist the kind of music wouldn’t have mattered. It’s all “satanic” western music featuring shameless women with no fear of Allah singing and dancing IN PUBLIC!
Does this prove Paddock was an Islamic State “soldier?” No, of course not. But it is consistent with how an Islamic terrorist would have chosen his target.
In fact, in May IS put out a call for “lone wolves” to attack the Vegas strip. They reiterated the call in September, and the week prior to Paddock’s mass murder rampage IS warned Muslims to stay away from exactly that kind of event.
The only thing I can conclude out of this that is proof positive of SOMETHING is the fact that Paddock set up cameras inside his room to video his murder spree. There is only one reason anyone would do this; because his murder spree was of great interest to someone who knew his plans and was not inside that room.
Was that someone IS? Dunno; as I said there are certain facts that point in that direction but without hard evidence it’s impossible to make the case. Does IS have that hard evidence? Dunno; they haven’t shown their cards. It could be that they have no cards to play, or they want the investigators to rule out any possible link to terrorism or attribute this to some other cause such as severe, undiagnosed mental illness (that seems to be the leading contender right now but it’s BS as any mental illness that went undiagnosed in life can not be diagnosed after death unless there is a physical cause like a brain tumor). Then release the hard evidence to inflict maximum embarrassment on US law enforcement and intel agencies.
Another thing that I do know with certainty. There can be no innocent explanation for the 180 degree turn from last week to this week. Last week Clark County Sheriff’s office officials were willing to go before the cameras and get fairly specific about all the ways Jesus Campos provided assistance to local law enforcement “[W]hich was absolutely critical to us.” Now they’re saying none of that happened.
They are obviously lying, but I don’t know which story was the lie. Last week’s or this week’s. Or maybe the next week’s.
Was there a School Book Depository nearby ?
This all smacks of the authorities trying to get their lies straight.
All their stories are offered with high levels of both detail and certainty. A week ago Campos notified the hotel security dispatcher of Paddock’s location and (I surmise) that he had been shot. According to the official version at the time Campos gave police his pass key and then proceeded to clear rooms until he was ordered to seek medical attention. He was praised as a hero for putting a stop to the shooting by both his union spokesman and by Clark County Sheriff Lombardo. In fact, the LA Slimes quoted Clark County Undersheriff Kevin McMahill saying during a press conference last week that Campos “had notified his dispatch, which was absolutely critical to us, knowing the location, as well as advising the responding officers as they arrived.”
Now the story has morphed into Paddock shot Campos before his mass murder spree and the responding LVPD officers didn’t know that a security guard had been shot or was even on the 32nd floor until they got off the elevator and bumped into him.
This isn’t just some simple mistake. No one “misspoke.” There is no “fog of war” here. The communications between Campos and the hotel dispatcher would have been recorded. The call from hotel dispatch to the LVPD would have been recorded. You don’t go from “Campos’ information was absolutely critical to us” to “Campos who? We never knew he was there” inside of a week unless you are deliberately doing some Bolshevik-grade airbrushing to your story to keep something out of the public eye.
Where are the surveillance camera videos from the Mandalay?
We aren’t going to see those until the feds, state, and local authorities get their lies straight, and then we’ll only see the surveillance video that supports or at least doesn’t conflict with the new “official truth.”
This whole thing has become a freak show.
No journO is asking what the security guard was doing up there in the first place. “Inspecting a door left open” my behind. Hotel staff don’t do that at night. I’ve been in too mnay hotels to know how “great” service is at night.
Now to back my story I will refer to a compilation of most of the videos that became available soon after the massacre happened. It included those video filmed from the concert area, the street level of the hotel, the cab driver, and the suite lkocated right under Paddock’s on floor31. This compilation is fully synchonized (audio and time) and shows the shooting from the very moment it started until it finished. I got to download before it disappeared from the web. It’s NOT Alex Jones conspiracy theory junk. It only combines all the videos into a single timelines. That’s all it does. This video is key to my reasoning. If you want to see it for yourself search for “Entire Vegas Shooting Continuous Synced from Different Angles rendered at 4k”. Enough said. I will refer to the video as 4K (it was encoded in 4k resolution).
1. Paddock disabled all the smoke detectors priot to start shooting. Proof: in the video filmed from the suite on floor 31 during the shooting, you can clearly hear the loud shooting but the annoying sound smoke detectors make.
2. By disabling the smoke detectors, Paddock triggered an alert in the sensors computer system somewhere in the building. This alert prompted a manager to send the guard to go take a look. This probably took a few minutes. I’d say at least 6 or 7 minutes. Smoke detectors aren’t exactly a priority in Vegas (remember the big fire of 1980?)
3. By the time the guard reached the 32nd floor, Paddock was already preparing his shooting by firing single shots to the crowd. These shots are heard at the very end of the slow song the band was playing. These are not successive shots like the ones heard during all the videos filmed shortly after. This explains the presence of the note used by Paddock to make calculations.
4. Paddock sees the guard approaching and shoots him through the door using single shots, not successive shots. If he had used one of his rifles with the bump stock attached to it, the guard would be dead now.
5. The guard is disabled, possibly dropping his walkie-talkie and crawls away from there (who’d want to stay for a $18/hour salary?) or simply gets the hell out of there, without notifying management that a shooter is on floor 32.
6. Paddock is not free to start the massacre.
There is no conspiracy theory here. It was nothing but pure incompetence by hotel staff. They simply took too long to react to the fact that all smoke detectors had been disabled by Paddock.
I submit to you hotel management lied to the police in order to hide their sheer incompetence, and portrayed the guard as a hero instead.
One of the big questions is “why did he stop shooting”? I have a personal theory about that. I wonder if he ran out of easy targets after 10 or 12 minutes. The 20K attendees didn’t just stand around. They headed for the exits and were hiding behind stuff.
He couldn’t hit crap with a bump stock at 400 yards. Once the fun was over, and he knew the cops were outside his door, he took himself out. Makes more sense to me than some of these complex conspiracy theories.
Taking it a step further, I also speculate that a random security guard walking down the hall, and showing up on his planted camera, panicked him and caused him to spray the door. Injuring the guard with unaimed by massive fire. Once the guard didn’t immediately charge the room he started on his grisly mission.
I just hope there wasn’t an armed contingent of security just sitting at the end of the hall while the crowd was being sprayed.
More information from Eric Raymond’s inside source:
By whom?
Apparently by some mysterious anonymous “source” which means it is most likely complete BS.
“So until you can explain the mystery, maybe you should not be so critical of those of us who are proposing theories that make more sense than a middle aged man buying tons of guns and explosives, carrying it all up there by himself (despite evidence to the contrary) and shooting up the place for ten minutes and then stopping.”
1. Your theory about gun running makes zero sense and you would know that if you had any exposure to how smuggling operations actually worked. I’ve had such exposure when I was in the Navy. Search on JIATF West. But this was no smuggling operation as he wasn’t dealing with actual military-grade weaponry. More on this later.
2. There is contrary evidence to what? There is certainly no contrary evidence to the proposition that once Paddock checked into the Mandalay Bay he could have made several trips directly form his car to his hotel room using a luggage cart over the next couple of days. He would have attracted zero attention whatsoever considering all the other guests doing exactly the same thing.
3. Your demand that I tell you why he had more weapons than he could possibly use presumes I can get inside his head and tell you what made sense to him. I can tell you that it couldn’t have possibly been for the purpose of conducting illegal arms sales. You can’t conduct a gun running operation on a shoestring budget, just you and the GF. He’d have been dead a long time ago. I don’t need to get inside this guy’s head to know that, I just need to know how the business works.
4. Black markets exist to provide willing buyers with illegal goods or services. There were no illegal weapons in this guy’s room. Everything he had he bought at retail prices, including the $99 bump stocks. Who the hell is going to pay some sort of mark-up for that when they can do the exact some thing? There is no way to make money operating that way.
True story. A friend of mine married a Korean girl he met during a tour of duty there. Then they moved back to the states for a new duty assignment. She was and is a lovely girl, but the government of Korea puts heavy protectionist tariffs on foreign goods. This creates “business opportunities” for anyone with a military ID because, of course, there is no tariff on goods that you can buy on base for personal consumption. And it’s rationed so to make sure it’s only for personal consumption.
So one day he gets a call at work from a friend who says, “Uh, you need to head straight out the main gate and go get your wife. She’s sitting outside the Safeway.”
She had gone in and bought a couple of 12 packs of Bud and six big cans of coffee. Then she set up a table on the sidewalk and was trying to sell it at a 50% mark-up. That’s what most of the Korean wives did in Korea. There are ways around the rationing. You may only be able to buy a case of Bud at a pop, but if you go to all the places that sell Bud on base (the PX, the package store, the convenience store at the gas station) you can amass enough merchandise to make a tidy profit by selling to some shopkeeper off base.
This poor girl didn’t realize that what were big sellers on the black market in Korea were available to everyone. She didn’t realize that anyone could walk into that Safeway and buy everything she had on that table for the same price she had paid.
Please feel free to disparage her sense of honesty and integrity but in most of the world if you have the kind of advantage she had as a spouse of a military member, you use that to help out your family. In fact, people would think you are a wicked person if you didn’t use that advantage to help out your family.
But I digress. Anybody who thinks Paddock was illegally selling legal firearms he bought at retail prices out of his hotel room, be aware that you are engaging in the exact same flawed thinking as that Korean girl who couldn’t understand why people weren’t snapping up that beer and coffee at only 50% over what she had paid for it. It’s a business model that’s doomed to failure wherever it’s tried, whoever tries it.
You’ve knocked a pretty big hole in the “gun-running” scenario, but perhaps he wasn’t selling guns so much as he was selling a “delivery service.”
I know lots of high school kids who would have happily bought the beer for the 50% markup.
Yes, you might be right. But you also are attributing rational thinking to a person who was obviously deeply deeply disturbed, which is the biggest flaw in all of your arguments. I mean this guy could have been “A Beautiful Mind” crazy and just thought someone was coming to buy guns, we just don’t know. Just because something doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t really matter.