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A DAY AFTER authorities revised the timeline of events on the night of the Las Vegas mass shooting, the hotel where the gunman was staying is casting doubt on the changes.
Police said earlier this week that they believe Stephen Paddock shot a hotel security guard through the door of his high-rise hotel suite six minutes before he unleashed a barrage of bullets into a crowd at a musical performance below. The injured guard ran down a hall using his radio and possibly a hallway phone to call for help, reporting he had been shot in the leg.
That account differs dramatically from the one police gave last week: that Paddock ended his hail of fire on the crowd, where 58 people were killed and hundreds injured, in order to shoot through his door and wound the unarmed guard, Jesus Campos.
But late yesterday, the company that owns the Mandalay Bay hotel casino questioned the new timeline.
“We cannot be certain about the most recent timeline,” said Debra DeShong, a spokeswoman for MGM Resorts International. “We believe what is currently being expressed may not be accurate.”
Las Vegas police did not respond last night to questions about the hotel’s statement or whether investigators stand behind the revised timeline released earlier in the week.
The revised timeline raises questions about whether better communication could have allowed officers to respond more quickly and take out the gunman before the attack. It remains unclear if police ever received a call for help from the injured guard.
“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.”
Nicole Rapp, whose mother was knocked to the ground at the Route 91 Harvest Festival and trampled by panicked concertgoers as bullets rained from above, said she’s “having a hard time wrapping my head around” why police changed the timeline of the shooting.
“It’s very confusing to me that they are just discovering this a week later,” she said.
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“How did we not know this before? It’s traumatic for the victims and their families not to be sure of what happened.”
Undersheriff Kevin McMahill said yesterday that the guard had been responding to a door alarm on the hotel’s 32nd floor when he heard an odd drilling sound.
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, Clark County Sheriff Joe 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.
As the guard notified maintenance and security of the stairwell issue, several single shots were fired into the hallway before he shot again, unloading more than 200 rounds at the guard and a maintenance man, McMahill said. Campos, the security guard, was struck in the leg and injured, police said.
Campos reported to hotel security dispatchers that he was shot before Paddock opened fire on the crowd, Assistant Sheriff Tom Roberts told The Los Angeles Times yesterday.
It wasn’t clear exactly what time Campos called for help or if the hotel had relayed the information about the shooting to police. Las Vegas police did not respond to questions from The Associated Press about whether hotel security or anyone else in 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,” another Las Vegas assistant sheriff, Todd Fasulo, said yesterday.
Greg Zanis stands in front of crosses he placed near the city's famous sign in honour of the victims. Gregory Bull
Gregory Bull
The six minutes that transpired between the hallway shooting and the start of the gunman’s fusillade wouldn’t have been enough time for officers to stop the attack, said Ron Hosko, a former FBI assistant director who has worked on SWAT teams. Rather than rush in without a game plan, police would have been formulating the best response to the barricaded gunman, he said.
“Maybe that’s enough time to get the first patrolman onto the floor but the first patrolman is not going to go knock on that customer’s door and say ‘What’s going on with 200 holes in the door?’” Hosko said.
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 bullets 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.”
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What really matters is how someone could buy 11 semi automatic weapons in the space of a year. Weapons designed for warfare and to kill mass amounts of people not for self defence.
I presume you are joking. Metal detectors everywhere that people congregate is what you are talking about. As Daire says, military weapons killed the people, not a failure of hotel security.
@Fionan MacKenna: like I said these are not guns used for self defence and I don’t know of many inocent and responsible law abiding citizens who buy 11 semi automatic weapons in the space of a year. I think you’re the one being simplictic.
@Daire O’Reilly: The whole things stinks but I think you are confusing semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons. A semi automatic will not fire a burst like an AK-47 etc. Think of a pistol with a clip, just like a Glok…that’s a semi-automatic and a lot of Americans will justify their use. Fully automatic should be banned
@Simon O’Connor: what you are saying is wrong so many levels. The semi automatic used was legally converted to essentially a fully automatic weapon. There is no comparison to a handgun which usually fires a 9mm. The assault rifles generally use a 45mm bullet which has higher velocity and is bigger. The chances of being by a 45mm is substantially higher. There is no good reason to have an assault rifle or machine gun
@Michael Geraghty: All I’m saying is he didn’t stroll into a gun shop and say “hey give me 11 military grade guns please”. He bought semi-automatics and converted them himself.
@Michael Geraghty: They are not firing 45 mm rounds, that’s nearly anti aircraft caliber, they fire mort likely 5.56 mm rounds, but you’re right in saying these are much faster than a 9 mm handgun round. It still begs the question, why anyone should be allowed to buy military grade weaponry
@Michael Geraghty: I know nothing of guns nut I think you mean a .45 which equates to 11.43mm. You have pretty much the same chance of being hit but it’s the damage that will be greater due to the larger area & mass.
Why don’t they release the video footage of this man checking in with his bags and what day he checked in? There is plenty of conflicting evidence out there wrt to his real check in date. Also release the video footage from the cameras in his hotel room and corridor. This would dispell peoples belief that the FBI is involved in a coverup. Many people at the event are claiming that there are multiple shooters in Vegas at the same time.
@Patrick Keane:
CCTV footage is normally only released into the public domain before an investigation / trial is complete if the public’s assistance is required to identify a suspect, which is not the case here.
@Avina Laaf: this reminds me of when the FBI confiscated all video cameras around the Pentagon when a plane supposedly flew into it. It’s 16 years later and they still haven’t shown us a video of a large plane flying into the Pentagon. Many cameras would have picked this up if the official story is true.
@Patrick Keane:
What would ‘they’ have to gain from faking a plane flying into the Pentagon? Don’t you think two planes flying into the WTC would have been enough?
@Avina Laaf: look up Donald Rumsfeld announced on September 10 2001 $2.3 TRILLION dollars is gone missing from the Pentagon. You will find many videos showing this to be true. The explosion in the Pentagon and the Twin Towers falling the very next day made everyone forget about the missing money.
@Cormac Flanagan: No I never said that. There was months or years of planning involved. I said there was a big announcement that was reported on all of the American news stations saying that the Pentagon lost 2.3 TRILLION dollars. Look up you tube, etc and you will see this announcement. The media forgot about this massive amount of money missing with the tragic loss of lives the following morning.
@Avina Laaf:
If your theory is true what would ‘they’ have to gain by hitting the twin towers too?
At least you don’t think they were rigged with thermite I suppose…
@Avina Laaf: yeah the US Government has never lied to it’s people before or wanted to carry out attacks on their own people to push more surveillance. The CIA declassified Operation Northwoods where they wanted to carry out false flags against the American people. Also the Feds sold arms to Mexican drug cartels and radical Muslims under Operation Fast and Furious. These are some possibilities wrt to the travesty of Vegas. People need to be open and do their own research and don’t blindly believe everything that known liars tell you.
Must be a conspiracy loon convention in town. The tinfoil hat wearers are out in force today. @Patrick Keane, it is all available with a “simple Google search, all the conspiracy. It’s there for you, if you are SIMPLE!
What anti science conspiracy buffoonery would you recommend we waste our time with? A bit of 9/11 lunacy? chemtrails perhaps, moon landing denial, pseudo scientific anti vaxxer hoaxing, flat earth theory maybe? Illuminanti? Freemasons? Climate change denial? New earth creationism? UFOs? Maybe we will get really sinister and indulge in the lies and racism of Holocaust denial. That’s just the silly stuff off the top of my head. It’s great all that useless misinformation out there available with just a simple search on Google. Unfortunately the web for some, is like a sewer most of what you think is solid is useless waste.
@Patrick Keane:
Of course it has, and you’re right to ask questions, but it doesn’t mean that everything everywhere is part of some giant conspiracy.
Look at my link – Rumsfeld wasn’t saying that $2.3 trillion had been stolen, he was saying that their accounting procedures were outdated and that transactions, whilst recorded on older systems, couldn’t be tracked by modern computerised systems.
@Patrick Keane: agree , I’m not much of a conspiracy nut but the pentagon attack was definitely something very fishy , more the hallmarks of a missile than 757 , dunno for what reason but they acted very strange and confiscated local cctv too , very odd
@DC: he shot a 1000 rounds at a large number of people pinned in together through a scope from a height position with a military grade gun designed to be used at distance. Course he’s going to find his targets better than if he shoots blindly through a wall.
@Steve McMahon: and for those who believe there was more than more gunman look at some of the interviews military experts have done. They were surprised that with the guns used, ammo used, advantage point into the crowd and the time he was shooting for that the shooter didn’t kill more people.
@Simon O’Connor: yes which allowed it to fire 600 rounds per minute compared to 800. It is essentially a fully automatic. How you can defend these weapons is beyond me
@Cormac Flanagan: I know it sounded a bit insensitive last week when I commented but I genuinely thought only killing 50 was terrible shooting , I mean he had lit up open targets and was firing constantly for 10 minutes with machine guns , but having reviewed some of the youtube clips from experts they pointed out that he was using but stocks and firing machine like as an amateur rather than professional shooter who would have inflicted far more causalities in that time frame by taking aim and hitting targets , in a way people were lucky he was so bad at shooting as it saved many more certain deaths
Certainly a lot of mmmm going on with one…. Last few days the story changed after a week on when security guard was shot… Why sudden change? Then the admittance in press conference that he actually checked in 3 days earlier than police admitted.. hopefully truth comes out and people get whole story for those that lost lives and were injured.
@Bryan Whaley: it’s actually fairly rare that key elements to an event like this would change so much, and that so much confusion and conflicting reports would surround it.
Don’t see many genuine conspiracy theories here but the whole thing just seems very off do you not think?
It is quite a failure of the police/swat to enter his room over an hour after the first shots were fired.
Somehow I think there will be rumours and misleading information for quite a while.
What I would like to see done about this is to find out why the flood lights were switched on on the main stage, allowing the gunman to pick more targets,
Better response both in action and time for the police department,
And most of all, a health care system that isn’t putting victims in debt cause they were shot by some (unt
@Mr D:
You don’t think he was picking out individual targets do you?
He was raining bullets down on a densely-packed and well contained crowd – I don’t think he needed the aid of floodlights!
PSYOPS or Psychological Operations: Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives.
Just asyin’
@Global-Dominance:
The Trump government would benefit most from portraying it as an islamist attack, but they’ve gone out of their way to say it isn’t. What does that tell you?
@John Tierney: You are handy with the copy and paste of a definition, which is saying nothing. I will put you on the Loonwatch list with the rest of tinfoil mad hatters that believe the X files is a documentary and David Icke is a sane well balanced knowledgeable individual.
For anyone buying into this conspiracy 2 shooter bullshit. Go to Reddit and check r/conspiracy, Take a random users and check their history. Now you see how mental you sound.
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