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:
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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