(AP) — The revised timeline given by investigators for the Las Vegas massacre raises questions about whether better communication might have allowed police to respond more quickly and take out the gunman before he could kill and wound so many people.
On Monday, Sheriff Joe Lombardo said Stephen Paddock shot and wounded a Mandalay Bay hotel security guard outside his door and sprayed 200 bullets down the hall six minutes before he opened fire Oct. 1 from his high-rise suite on a crowd at a country music festival below.
That was a different account from the one police gave last week: that Paddock shot the guard, Jesus Campos, after unleashing his barrage of fire on the crowd, where 58 people were killed and hundreds injured.
The sheriff had previously hailed Campos as a “hero” whose arrival in the hallway may have led Paddock to stop firing. But on Monday, Lombardo said he didn’t know what prompted Paddock to end the gunfire and take his own life.
How crucial were the minutes that elapsed before the massacre began?
“This changes everything,” said Joseph Giacalone, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York City police sergeant. “There absolutely was an opportunity in that timeframe that some of this could’ve been mitigated.”
Giacalone added: “By engaging the shooter ahead of time during this event, it could’ve saved a lot of heartache.”
Police released few details about the new timeline and did not respond to questions from The Associated Press, including whether anyone from the hotel called 911 to report the hallway shooting.
“Our officers got there as fast as they possibly could and they did what they were trained to do,” Assistant Sheriff Todd Fasulo said.
A spokesman for MGM, which owns the Mandalay Bay, declined to comment Tuesday, and a representative for Campos’ union didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Fasulo explained the change in the timeline by saying that dozens of investigators have been using different sources of information — including surveillance video, computers, police body cameras, cellphones and interviews — and that not all clocks were in sync.
Last week, police said Paddock had shot at concertgoers for 10 minutes and stopped firing around 10:15 p.m. The first officers arrived on the 32nd floor at 10:17 p.m. and encountered the wounded guard at the elevator bank about a minute later, police said.
The security guard had been responding to a door alarm on the floor when he heard an odd drilling sound, Undersheriff Kevin McMahill told KNPR on Tuesday. That was when Paddock fired hundreds of rounds at the guard and a maintenance man, McMahill said.
Paddock had power tools and was trying to drill a hole in a wall, perhaps to mount another of the security cameras he set up around him, or to point a rifle through, but he never completed the work, Lombardo said. He also drilled holes and bolted a metal bar to try to prevent the opening of an emergency exit door near his room.
McMahill defended the hotel and said the encounter that night between Paddock and the security guard and maintenance man disrupted the gunman’s plans. Paddock fired more than 1,000 shots and had more than 1,000 rounds left in his room, the undersheriff said.
“I can tell you I’m confident that he was not able to fully execute his heinous plan and it certainly had everything to do with being disrupted,” McMahill said. He added: “I don’t think the hotel dropped the ball.”
During the attack, Las Vegas police officers searched the hotel for the gunman and did not learn the guard had been shot until they met him in the hallway after getting off the elevator, the sheriff has said.
Hard to believe the former time-line after reading this. If he was shot FIRST, HE evidently didn’t report it at all, although he had plenty of time to even call in to 911. Who was this (previously unmentioned) maintenance man.
Who are the police trying to protect? The reputation of the hotel? The security guard? Themselves, because this whole thing was a nefarious set-up to implicate someone with a sketchy but clean past?
The story about different clocks doesn’t do it for me.
Um, that was last week Monday, not yesterday, right?
Actually the different clock settings is the most believable part of the story. But it sounds like we were lucky that more people weren’t killed and injured.
But we are talking about a 20 minute difference; not 5.
That’s pretty silly, they had no reason to set anyone up. On occasion, people do shit like this.
Also, in these type of chaotic situations, there is always conflicting info at first, and it takes time to sort it out. I recall conspiracy nuts saying fighter jets could have easily shot down the second plane that hit the Tower and also 77 that hit the Pentagon. They based this on taking selected items from preliminary reports, etc. Then when you do the research, you find out the conspiracy nuts are full of it. What’s funny is that if everything was immediately reported and the story never changed, conspiracy nuts would claim that it must have been staged because they would claim there is always conflicting info initially.
I don’t find it hard to believe that the police initially thought the guard had interrupted the shooting, etc. Plus there are hundreds of agents and investigators on this. The notion that they are all following a script of some kind as some big plot is not even remotely possible. People always leak.