More than 50 dead, 500 wounded in Las Vegas concert shooting - UPDATES

Sally Ho and Regina Garcia Cano
The Boston Globe
Mon, 02 Oct 2017 12:16 UTC

© David Becker/Getty Images

People ran for cover during the shooting.

A gunman perched high on the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas Strip casino unleashed a shower of bullets down on an outdoor country music festival below, killing at least 50 people and wounding more than 200 as tens of thousands of frantic concert-goers screamed and ran for their lives, officials said Monday. It was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Country music star Jason Aldean was performing Sunday night at the end of the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival when the gunman opened fire across the street from inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino. SWAT teams quickly descended on the concert and the casino, and officers used explosives to get into the hotel room where the suspect was inside, authorities said. The gunman died at the scene and was identified by Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo as Stephen Paddock. A motive as not immediately known.

Aldean was in the middle of a song when the shots came rapidly: Pop-pop-pop-pop. Video of the shooting then showed Aldean stopping and the crowd getting quiet as if they were unsure of what had just happened. The gunman paused and then fired another volley of muzzle flashes from the gold glass casino as more victims fell to the ground while others fled in panic. Some said they hid behind concession stands and other crawled under parked cars.

Kodiak Yazzie, 36, said the music stopped temporarily when the first shots began and the tune even started up again before the second round of pops sent the performers ducking for cover and fleeing the stage.

''It was the craziest stuff I've ever seen in my entire life,'' Yazzie said. ''You could hear that the noise was coming from west of us, from Mandalay Bay. You could see a flash- flash- flash- flash.''

Thousands in the crowd fled as the bullets ran rampant. Monique Dumas from British Columbia, Canada, said she was at the concert, six rows from the front of the stage when she thought she heard a bottle breaking, and then a burst of popping sounds that may have been fireworks. She said as she made her way out, it was ''organized chaos'' as everyone fled. ''It took four to five minutes and all that time there was gunfire.''

In addition to Paddock, police said they located a woman who may have been his roommate - Marilou Danley, 62. Lombardo said they believe this was a ''lone wolf'' attack.

''It's a devastating time,'' Lombardo said.

President Donald Trump extended his condolences to the victims of the shooting in a tweet Monday, offering ''My warmest condolences and sympathies to the victims and families of the terrible Las Vegas shooting. God bless you!''

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was ''briefed on the horrific tragedy in Las Vegas' and "we are monitoring the situation closely and offer our full support to state and local officials. All of those affected are in our thoughts and prayers.''

Police shut down the usually busy Las Vegas Boulevard and authorities across the state and federal ranks converged onto the scene as dozens of ambulances ferried those struck by gunfire. Nearby Interstate 15 and flights at McCarran International Airport were also halted. Hospital emergency rooms were jammed with victims delivered by ambulance. Others loaded the wounded into their cars and drove them to hospitals.

Jose Baggett, 31, of Las Vegas, said he and a friend were in the lobby of the Luxor hotel-casino - directly north of the festival - when people began to run, almost like in a stampede. He said people were crying and as he and his friend started walking away minutes later, they encountered police checkpoints where officers were carrying shotguns and assault rifles.

''There were armored personnel vehicles, SWAT vehicles, ambulances, and at least a half-mile of police cars,'' Baggett said.

Among those killed were two off-duty police officers who were attending the concert and two other on-duty officers were wounded, including one in critical condition, police said.

Hours after the shooting, Aldean posted on Instagram that he and his crew were safe and said the shooting was ''beyond horrific.''

''It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night,'' Aldean said.

The shooting at the sold-out Route 91 Harvest festival was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Forty-nine people were killed when a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in June 2016.

Sunday's shooting came more than four months after a suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22 people. Almost 90 people were killed by gunmen inspired by Islamic State at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris during a performance by Eagles of Death Metal in November 2015.

Comment: More footage from the scene:

The Boston Globe article above says the shooter "died at the scene". Other reports say he "was fatally shot" in the Mandalay (note the passive tense - they didn't state he was shot by police). The Las Vegas sheriff clarified, saying the shooter had killed himself before police stormed his hotel room. He was in possession of more than 10 guns. Over 400 people have been taken to the hospital.

The shooter's brother told the Daily Mail that Stephen Paddock was a "normal guy" and must have "snapped" (but note that he later says he only talked occasionally to his brother and they were not close):

Eric said that there was 'absolutely no indication he could do something like this' and said that Stephen had no political or religious affiliation.

He said: 'He was just a guy. Something happened, he snapped or something'.

Speaking from his home in Orlando, Florida, Eric said: 'We know absolutely nothing, this is just, we are dumbfounded. We have absolutely no idea. Our condolences go to the victims and all their families'.

Eric said that he and Stephen, 64, lived on different coasts - Stephen's last address was in Mesquite, Nevada - and that they did not speak that often.
...
'He's my brother, we don't have a very close relationship but we talk occasionally. There's no rhyme or reason here, it makes no sense'.

Eric said that they were hoping that the police do not shoot dead his brother's girlfriend Marilou Danley, 62, who is wanted by the FBI and was living with Stephen in Mesquite. He said: 'She has nothing to do with this, at least from my perspective.'

Strangely, ISIS has claimed that Paddock converted to Islam a "few months ago" and conducted the attack on behalf of ISIS. Either "ISIS" is getting desperate in their propaganda, they're just trolling, or truth is stranger than fiction. So far there is no evidence to back up the statement from ISIS. However, as the Free Thought Project points out, an ISIS propaganda video from earlier this year calls lone wolf attacks and features footage of the Las Vegas Strip. The video caused Las Vegas to go on high alert, and the alert was still ongoing as of the shooting.

One witness told media the following:

So there was a lady who pushed her way forward into the first row and she started messing with another lady. She told us we were all going to die tonight - it was about forty five minutes before the shots were fired.

The witness also said:

"They escorted her out to make her stop messing around with all the other people, but none of us knew it was going to be serious."

She described the lady as Hispanic. The lady was escorted from the venue along with a man.

The unnamed witness, who was attending the event on her 21st birthday, described the pair as short, both around 5 ft 5ins to 5ft 6ins tall, and looked like "everyday people".

Coincidence? (It was almost certainly not Paddock's girlfriend, who is apparently currently in the Philippines.)

Paddock was known to local law enforcement, but not to federal authorities. No word yet on what his history with the police was.

Meanwhile, gun stocks are soaring, as they usually do in the aftermath of a mass shooting.

Updates: Jake Owen, who was onstage at the time of the shooting, shared his account:

"It got faster and faster, almost like it sounded like it was an automatic rifle. You could hear it ringing off the tops of the rafters of the stage," he told TODAY on Monday, just hours after the shooting. "That's when you saw people fleeing. At that point, everyone on stage just started running everywhere possible. It was pretty chaotic for sure."
...
"I just kind of ran like everyone else. At one point, I was crouched down behind a cop car with about 20 other people, that were people who had just come to the show," Owen said. "Everyone's asking if everyone's okay. There was blood on people. You can see a couple of folks in the street that looked like they had been shot, lying there."

Owen said the gunfire went on for about 10 minutes. "It wasn't something that just was quick," he said. "It was chaos for a pure 7-10 minutes."

Owen eventually made his way back to his touring bus, parked in a crew lot, and hid inside "because you could still hear gunfire," he said. "It literally was like a movie you've seen before that's not real life," he said.
...
Owen credited first responders for responding quickly to the shooting. "They did everything they could to get out here quickly as possible and take care of these people," he said.

Owen said he was in Las Vegas for the festival but also with friends, including one celebrating a milestone birthday. "We live this life of not being scared, which I think is great, but this is reality these days. This stuff is really happening," he said. "We were all scared."

Paddock's girlfriend has been cleared of any suspicion (police said: "We have had a conversation with her and we believe her at this time not to have been involved"). More details on how Paddock was found in the hotel:

Police found a cache of 10 rifles in his room, Lombardo said, adding that it was unclear how he managed to keep the weapons from being discovered by housekeeping staff.

Cops were able to locate the room due to its smoke detector, which was blaring as a result of the heavy smoke created from the automatic weapon, a former Las Vegas police officer told CBS News.

"The way the shooter was identified was not from the muzzle flashes, but the smoke detector in the room went off from the amount of smoke that came from firing that fully automatic weapon," said the officer, Randy Sutton.

Police have yet to establish a motive.

Update: Local police have clarified that Paddock did not have a criminal record. And according to his brother, he was "not an avid gun guy". However, he was a hunter. (According to WaPo, he was also a licensed pilot and owned two planes.)

Not only did Paddock enjoy listening to concerts, but he specifically enjoyed country music and attending live music events at Las Vegas hotels - the exact scene where he would eventually open fire on 22,000 concert-goers.

Since 2013, he had lived a quiet life in the small town of Mesquite, Nevada. He bought a three-bedroom home in a desert retirement community on the outskirts of town for $370,000 in 2015, according to public records.

"It's a nice, clean home and nothing out of the ordinary," Mesquite police department spokesman Quinn Averett told reporters, as quoted by Reuters. Some guns and ammunition were found inside - not necessarily a remarkable finding, in an area where gun ownership is high.

He had no criminal background, with Las Vegas Police confirming that he had no more than a routine traffic violation on his file.

His own family has expressed "horror" at what Paddock was capable of, killing 58 people and injuring at least 515 others as they listened to country music singer Jason Aldean at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on Sunday night.

"We are in complete shock, bewilderment, and horror. We have absolutely no idea how in the world Steve did this. Absolutely no concept," an unnamed relative told the Post. "There was nothing secret or strange about him."

The shooter's brother, Eric Paddock, expressed the same level of shock, telling CBS News that the gunman was "not an avid gun guy at all."

"The fact that he had those kinds of weapons is just - where the hell did he get automatic weapons?" he said.

He told CNN he was aware his brother had "a couple of handguns" which he kept in a safe, and "maybe one long rifle," but no machine guns or automatic weapons that he knew of.

"It's like an asteroid fell out of the sky," he said, describing his reaction to the shocking news.

A total of 10 guns, including some rifles, were found in the 32nd floor hotel room which Paddock had occupied since last Thursday. A deceased Paddock was also found at that time, after police officers and a SWAT team breached the room.

Update: Number of deaths and injured rises

Sheriff Joe Lombardo says the number injured by the Las Vegas shooting on Sunday night continues to increase: it stands at 515 and there are 58 dead. Lombardo called the attacker a 'lone wolf' saying the attack could not have been prevented because they did not 'have any prior knowledge to this individual'.

Update: The Duran has pointed out the parallels to the attack in Manila, Philippines, 4 months ago: lone gunman, hotel/casino, claimed by ISIS, later revealed to have had nothing to do with ISIS (Javier Carlos didn't have links to terrorism, but did have large gambling debts - Paddock too was a gambler). Speaking of coincidences, here's Boris Johnson being Boris Johnson this weekend. Note the name of the poem he recites:

A top legal expert for CBS is in hot water for her comment on the massacre:

"If they wouldn't do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing. I'm actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters."

She's been fired.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, just tried to score some political points - and was roundly trolled on Twitter.

Most odd so far has been the revelation that Paddock's father was himself once on the FBI's most wanted list. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock II who, as Michael Hoffman puts it, "enjoyed a partial and episodic immunity from the Federal and local governments for his crimes." Paddock was a bank robber and diagnosed psychopath, described by law enforcement as "a glib, smooth-talking man who is egotistical and arrogant." His crime spree started in the 40s: convicted in 1946 on ten counts of auto theft, 5 counts of running cons. He committed armed robbery against a bank in 1969, just 6 months after escaping from federal prison (after which he was placed on the top-10 most wanted) for a 1960 bank robbery. He was arrested in Las Vegas in 1971 after changing his appearance to evade law enforcement. Of course, "Neighbors said they couldn't believe that the colorful businessman, then 34 years old, was involved in crime."

He spent a year in prison in the late 70s, but was paroled in 1979 after just 1 year (he was in prison for multiple robberies, prison escape and attempting to run over a Federal officer). He was arrested agin in 1987 for racketeering. He got off with a $100,000 fine, no jail time. He died in 1998.

Stephen Paddock's brother, Eric, says he and his brother didn't know their father - understandable, given his career choice.

Update (Oct. 3): Vegas police officials have provided more information.

Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo says 59 people have been killed and 527 injured in a mass shooting Sunday night at an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas. Speaking at a news conference, Lombardo also said investigators found 18 firearms, explosives and several thousand rounds of ammunition in the home of shooter Stephen Craig Paddock in Mesquite, Nevada. He said a SWAT team is standing by 'getting ready to hit' a second house owned by Paddock in Reno, Nevada.

In addition to the multiple weapons found in Paddock's home, police say they found a total of 23 firearms in the hotel room, including high-powered rifles capable of penetrating police armor, as well as a modified bump stock rifle allowing it to simulate automatic fire. Two stores have confirmed they sold firearms to Paddock: New Frontier Armory in North Las Vegas, and Guns and Guitars in Mesquite, Nevada (where Paddock owned property). Police say they also found ammonium nitrate in Paddock's car. An image of two of the weapons found in the hotel has made it online:

Police are still trying to determine a motive and have requested witnesses to send pictures and recordings to the FBI. Eric Paddock provided more detail on his brother: he was wealthy, liked video poker and going on cruises. A neighbor described Paddock to Michael Savage as "a friendly man with ordinary hobbies", adding that the narrative doesn't add up. Paddock didn't have any obvious political or religious views. He speculate that Paddock was not the real shooter.

ISIS is doubling down on their claim, going so far as to call Paddock "Abu Abd Abdulbar al-Ameriki". Still no evidence Paddock was linked in any way to ISIS, though. Trump has called the attack an "act of pure evil". Trey Gowdy appeared on Fox with his initial thoughts:

Appearing on Fox News on Monday, Gowdy told Martha MacCallum that "its really impossible to fathom a massacre on this scale."

He also asserted that it is difficult to believe that a single person could carry out such an attack alone and undetected.

"It was an incredible level of premeditation that you don't normally see, and it is difficult to believe that a single person could have done this without detection," Gowdy said. He added that "a lot of crime is prevented because a non-law enforcement officer says something" and that he believes that it is likely we will find out that someone along the way thought that something was suspicious.

"I think we're going to find someone along the way was suspicious they should have turned that suspicion into a phone call to law enforcement. It's an incredible amount of premeditation to not go detected," Gowdy added.

Questions are now being raised as to what actually happened. Multiple witnesses stated they thought there was more than one shooter. While some of the evidence cited so far is ambiguous or misleading (e.g., the strobe light visible in many videos on a lower floor of the hotel, misidentified by many online as muzzle flashes), other videos appear to capture the sound of more than one source of gunfire.

Surveillance footage of Paddock has yet to be released. He had reportedly been staying at the Mandalay Bay for four days before the shooting, where he used his girlfriend's slot machine card, including on the night of the shooting.

Update: More details from Mesquite, Nevada, where Paddock lived:

...[Paddoc] kept a low profile, conversing little and maintaining no Facebook or Twitter accounts. ...

"He was always normal," said Donald Judy, a former next-door neighbor who said he was struggling to reconcile the friendly conversations about real estate and family with carnage carried out from a hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

Almost every week, Paddock and his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, would go to Peggy Sue's bar and diner in Mesquite, where they would have a few drinks and she would sing karaoke ...

Everyone seated at the U-shaped bar Monday evening remembered Danley in particular. Bartender Monique Ortega said that when she learned Paddock was the shooter, she called her boss immediately.

"Now [that] I know that it was him, he seemed kind of creepy," she said.
...
Paddock gambled frequently, and two law enforcement sources said he had made chip purchases in Nevada casinos in the last year that were in excess of $10,000 a day, the amount required to be reported to the government.

But relatives and acquaintances said he was a successful real estate investor who showed no sign of financial problems.
...
U.S. Rep. Ruben Kihuen (D-Nev.), who received a briefing from the multiagency anti-terrorism center, said no new clues have emerged so far.

"Law enforcement were looking through his computer. They couldn't find a motive. As of a couple of hours ago, there was no motive. That's all we know," he said late Monday afternoon.
...
Paddock's former brother-in-law, Scott Brunoehler, recalled the gunman in the 1970s and 1980s as a smart, fun-loving person who enjoyed entertaining on his boat at Castaic Lake and Buena Vista Lake in Kern County.
...
Paddock listed his occupation as postal carrier at the time of their marriage. He worked for a predecessor to Lockheed Martin for three years in the late 1980s, according to a company statement. His brother-in-law said he was an accountant; public records describe him as an internal auditor.

He also owned rental properties across the country. In Los Angeles, Paddock co-owned two run-down apartment buildings in a working-class neighborhood of Hawthorne.
...
Donald Judy's wife, Sharon, who lived next door to Paddock in Florida, said he described himself as a world traveler and "professional gambler by trade" and said he once showed her a picture of himself winning a $20,000 slot-machine jackpot.

"He was friendly all the time," she said.

NBC is reporting that Paddock wired $100,000 to the Philippines in the week before the shooting. He seems to have started dating Marilou Danley (who was in the Philippines over the weekend) earlier this year.

A man named Jeff Bridges made a video tour last year of the same room used by Paddock (you can view it here). In it, you can see that the suite is large. Both broken windows visible in photographs of the hotel appear to belong to the room in question (the one on the left being the TV area, the one on the right the area before the bedroom).

An Iraq war vet, Chris Bethel, apparently had a room just 2 floors below Paddock's:

Now, police are crediting the Haltom High School graduate with helping lead them to the room where Stephen Paddock, 64, from Mesquite, Nevada was shooting into a crowd of more than 22,000 people.

Bethel called police immediately and told them what he saw and heard, convinced the shooter was nearby.
...
"About 10 minutes later the Las Vegas Police Department called me to let me know that the shooter was on the 32nd floor. Room 135, and that they had gotten him," said Bethel.
...
"I feel like I didn't do enough. I feel like I couldn't get a hold of somebody quick enough to let them know. And it felt like it took them too long to get over there... to take him out. To get him. And it's actually eating me up inside," said Bethel. "I just need to go home. That's my thing. I need to go home to my family. And just process all of this."

Live updates from @LVMPD:

Comment:

Update (Oct. 4): Hillary Clinton has doubled down on her politicization of the shooting, blaming Republicans and the NRA.

Paddock's girlfriend is back in the U.S. for questioning. FBI met her at the airport upon her return. She has been named a person of interest, though she isn't currently considered an accomplice:

Immigration documents in the Philippines say that Danley first arrived there on Sept. 15, departed on Sept. 22 then returned three days later on a flight from Hong Kong.

The Australian Associated Press reported that Danley was born in the Philippines and moved to Queensland in eastern Australia in the early 1980s. She left Australia for the U.S. in 1989, where she worked in casinos, it said.
...
Jill Snyder, special agent in charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, told CBS This Morning that in the last year alone Paddock bought 33 guns, most of the rifles.

Paddock also used surveillance cameras to monitor police approaches to his room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino - including a camera he positioned in the peephole of the door.

"I anticipate he was looking for anybody coming to take him into custody," Lombardo said.

At a late-night press conference Tuesday, authorities said Paddock, a high-stakes gambler and retired accountant, made his attack even more deadly by adding more lethal components to his weapons. He had devices attached to 12 semiautomatic rifles that allowed them to mimic fully automatic gunfire.

Danley's sisters say Paddock sent her to the Philippines prior to the shooting. They believe he did this so that she wouldn't interfere with his plans. They say they don't think she knows anything about the shooting and that she is a good person who would've stopped Paddock had she been there. According to Newsweek, Danley was married to two men simultaneously, had multiple addresses, and filed for bankruptcy in the last few years. She has two social security numbers, registered under different names (Marilou Natividad-Bustos, from her second marriage, and Marilou Danley, from her first marriage).

Paddock reportedly streamed live feeds of his rampage offshore, but haven't released details of which countries:

Paddock used excessive Mandalay-Bay internet bandwidth during his multiple-day stay in the resort's suite, FBI sources confirmed.

FBI sources said they also confiscated Paddock's captured video feeds as part of evidence after the shooter apparently committed suicide.

Vegas Gunman Was Prescribed Psychotropic Drugs that Can Cause Violent Behavior

Like almost all mass shooters, it turns out Paddock was on psychotropic drugs. The Las Vegas Review-Journal discovered that he was prescribed diazepam in June of this year (he was previously prescribed the drug in 2016). From the Duran:

This means that the Duran accurately predicted two crucial realities in respect of the suspect's profile, first of all that there was a connection to Philippines where an almost identical shooting took place 4 months prior to the Vegas massacre and secondly, that suspect Stephen Paddock was likely taking powerful psychotropic drugs. Both of these claims have now been confirmed.

From the original report:

"Records from the Nevada Prescription Monitoring Program obtained Tuesday show Paddock was prescribed 50 10-milligram diazepam tablets by Henderson physician Dr. Steven Winkler on June 21. A woman who answered the phone at Winkler's office would not make him available to answer questions and would neither confirm nor deny that Paddock was ever a patient.

Paddock purchased the drug - its brand name is Valium - without insurance at a Walgreens store in Reno on the same day it was prescribed. He was supposed to take one pill a day.

Diazepam is a sedative-hypnotic drug in the class of drugs known as benzodizepines, which studies have shown can trigger aggressive behaviour. Chronic use or abuse of sedatives such as diazepam can also trigger psychotic experiences, according to drugabuse.com".

The Free Thought Project adds:

As the Journal reports, a 2015 study published in World Psychiatry of 960 Finnish adults and teens convicted of homicide showed that their odds of killing were 45 percent higher during time periods when they were on benzodiazepines.

A year earlier, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry published a study titled, "Benzodiazepine Use and Aggressive Behavior." The authors wrote: "It appears that benzodiazepine use is moderately associated with subsequent aggressive behavior."

There are most certainly people of all ages that can benefit from certain prescription medication. However, the most worrisome aspect of Paddock's ties to this medication is that the majority of mass shooters in recent U.S. history have links to these same meds.

This is not some conspiracy theory either. The side-effects listed by the drug companies themselves include delusional thinking, suicide, and homicidal ideation.

One single psychiatric medication prescribed to help people quit smoking has been tied to an epidemic of aggression and suicide.

In only five years, 544 suicides and 1,869 attempted suicides were reported to the FDA as "adverse events" in connection with the drug Chantix, according to documents obtained by America Tonight under the Freedom of Information Act.

More photos have been leaked of the hotel room:

Note in the second photograph (which depicts the legs of Paddock's corpse) what could be a note on the small table.

While police are looking in to how those photos were leaked, they have released the first bodycam footage of the shooting, showing the chaos on the ground:

The latest press briefing revealed that the shooting itself lasted 11 minutes and involved more than 12 volleys of gunfire:

Update (Oct. 5): Marilou Danley has released a statement through her lawyer saying Paddock didn't give her any indication of what he was about to do: "He never said anything to me or took any action that I was aware of that I understood in any way to be a warning that something horrible like this was going to happen ... It never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that he was planning violence against anyone." She also clarified that Paddock had sent that $100k transfer to her: "Danley said that Paddock had bought her a ticket to go to the Philippines, and wired her $100,000 to buy property in the country. She also said that the money transfer made her worry that it was his way of breaking up with her." Here's the full statement:

Danley's brother in the Philippines told reporters he called her immediately upon hearing the news about Paddock. He says she told him, 'Relax, we shouldn't worry about it. I'll fix it. Do not panic. I have a clean conscience,' adding that she didn't sound in shock or surprised at all.

Sheriff says accomplice likely - mystery woman being sought

In the latest police press briefing, LVMP Sheriff Lombardo revealed some interesting details. It turns out that piece of paper on the table (visible in the photos above in a previous update) was a note. Lombardo says it wasn't a suicide note, but hasn't released any other details about its content.

As TFTP writes:

According to the most recent information released by police, they claim Paddock fully intended to get away with the shooting. However, they claim that plan backfired and instead he left a note and killed himself. "He was doing everything possible to see how he could escape at this point," Lombardo said.

In line with what Paddock's brother Eric has said to reporters, investigators are looking into whether or not something happened within the last year to trigger Paddock into this behavior and plan, specifically a "mental issue" dating to October of last year. Lombardo also speculated that Paddock must have had help of some sort:

"Look at this. You look at the weapon obtaining, the different amounts of tannerite available, do you think this was all accomplished on his own, face value?"

"You got to make the assumption he had to have help at some point, and we want to ensure that's the answer. Maybe he's a super guy, superhero-not a hero, super-I won't use the word. Maybe he's super - that was working out this out on his own, but it will be hard for me to believe that."
...
"It's troublesome this individual was able to move this amount of gear into a hotel room unassisted," Lombardo said. "It's troublesome for the amount of stuff he had at both residences unassisted."

Police are also looking for a woman seen with Paddock in the few days before the shooting. Could this be the woman concertgoers say told them they were all going to die? Investigative reporter Laura Loomer obtained room service receipts for his room, and Mandalay Bay server Tony Hernandez Armenta posted receipts on Facebook. Another MB employee told Loomer that Paddock had the vista suite since the 25th, and the connector room since the 28th (police and previous reporting have only mentioned the 28th). He apparently made the reservation on the 9th. The receipts reveal that Paddock had ordered room service for 2, which suggests he had a guest for at least part of the time he spent in the hotel.

Paddock may actually have had a separate target during the shooting. A source told the LVRJ that two bullet holes were found in the jet fuel tanks adjacent to the music festival grounds.

Police have released this updated timeline of events:

• 10.05pm: First shots fired by Paddock. This was seen on security cameras at the Route 91 Harvest Festival venue.
• 10.12pm : First two officers arrive on Mandalay Bay's 32nd floor and announce the gunfire is coming from directly above them.
• 10.15pm: Paddock's last shots ring out, as seen on a police body camera.
• 10.17pm: The first two officers arrive on the 32nd floor.
• 10.18pm: A Mandalay Bay security guard tells the officers he was shot and points them to Paddock's exact location.
• 10.26-10.30pm: Eight more officers arrive on the floor and move systematically down the hallway, clearing each room and looking for injured people. They move this way because they no longer hear gunfire.
• 10.55pm: The officers arrive in a stairwell nearest to Paddock's room.
• 11.20pm: A "breach" is detonated and officers enter the room. They see a man dead on the ground.
• 11.27pm: The officers let off a breach to the second adjoining hotel room. Officers realise there is no one else in the room and announce over the radio that the suspect is down.

The New York Post and ABC report that the weekend before the shooting, Paddock tried to rent a room overlooking a rap concert. Police would not speculate on whether Paddock may have been planning an earlier attack.

In other news, Trump visited some of the survivors in hospital. Some highlights:

Gunderson, despite being shot in the leg, stood when he shook the Trumps' hands and later posted a video of the interaction to his Facebook page.

"I will never lie down when the president of this great country comes to shake my hand!" Gunderson wrote on Facebook. "There may be plenty of issues in this country but I will always respect my country, my president, and my flag. Shot in the leg or not, I will stand to show my president the respect he deserves!"

Update (Oct. 6): Read Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley's SOTT Focus for a collection of multiple streams of evidence suggesting: multiple shooters and multiple shootings at various hotels during and after the Mandalay Bay events. Available here: The Las Vegas Massacre and Occam's Razor

FBI Deputy Director McCabe has commented that he is surprised that Paddock provided so few clues about himself and his motives, which has "proved challenging". His lack of an online profile, private life and lack of many close friends all contribute to that. Meanwhile, some angles of this story are developing:

Marilou Danley: According to two "former FBI officials who have been briefed on the matter" (according to NBC), Paddock's girlfriend has revealed to investigators that Paddock exhibited some strange symptoms: "She said he would lie in bed, just moaning and screaming, 'Oh, my God,'" one of the former officials said. State and federal law enforcement have confirmed he had been prescribed Valium.

Investigative leads: Police say it is unclear exactly when - between shooting the hotel security guard and the police breaching his room about an hour later - he took his own life. Investigators are currently examining the "six media devices" found in the room, and Paddock's web browsing history. Paddock allegedly booked two rooms at a Chicago hotel withe a view of the Lollapalooze festival in August, and to have researched music concerts playing at Boston's Fenway Park "for months". He also rented a room overlooking the Life Is Beautiful festival in Las Vegas in September.

Second-shooter agents told to stand down: True Pundit says FBI officials have told them that an FBI HQ directive has told agents to focus solely on Paddock and ignore any further hunt for a second or third gunman.

The directive came as a shock, as FBI insiders said they were pursuing leads that while Paddock was sniping innocent victims from his 32nd-floor perch at Mandalay Bay, another gunman wielding an AR-15 5.56 caliber weapon was closer to the ground shooting from another angle.

FBI officials said they were following the hunch based on forensic examination of audio recovered from phone video of concert goers.

From those videos, federal law enforcement sources said the were following leads that indicated in addition to Paddock's gunfire from the Mandalay Bay - where he was likely using an AR-10 rifle based on audio examined - additional gunfire from an AR-15 rang out at the same time from an opposite position on the ground much closer than Paddock's location from high above the event.

The multiple shooter effect, FBI sources said, would be to create a 'kill box" where concert goers trying to escape Paddock's bullets would meet gunfire at the limited exit of the venue.

Fired CBS exec: The legal exec fired for saying she wasn't sympathetic to Republican gun toters getting massacred is now complaining that she's "being harassed online".

Jet fuel target: As reported above, some speculate that Paddock also targeted the jet fuel containers further across the street from the festival. Apparently this location is a hangar for the secretive CIA airline "JANET". (Recall that Paddock worked for one of the predecessors of Lockheed Martin in the 80s.)

Dawna Kaufmann, an investigative journalist and author of Final Exams, told Radar she has monitored air traffic transmissions from McCarran.

"Each day many flights go from McCarran to various intelligence agency outposts, including Area 51," she said. "But most flights go to Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, 35 miles northwest of Vegas."

"Creech is where a joint US/UK program is housed for identifying drone targets in Iraq and Afghanistan or any other Middle East hot spot."

"All of the drone attacks that have taken out enemies have been given the go-ahead by military brass at Creech."

Was Paddock firing at the location? Or were shots coming from that location, perhaps receiving return fire from police?

ISIS claims: ISIS oddly has tripled down on their claim that Paddock was one of them, saying he converted to Islam 6 months ago. Former Trump campaign official James Brower posted the following statements online, and in interviews:

"There is a video, this video will prove the motive. He had a secret digital profile that was uncovered over the last 24 hrs."

"Motive will be pretty shocking, I won't say much but it will definitely change a lot of things going forward."

"I'm being told the video basically speaks about a network, they wouldn't tell me directly if it was ISIS but they threw little hints that it was," Brower told Infowars.

"The reason the video more than likely is never released is because they believe it will trigger the "cells" he speaks of," according to Brower.

"There should be a statement on motive soon," he added, "They believe he was inspired by ISIS."
...
Brower claims the source leaking his the information is an individual within the Trump cabinet. The former Trump campaign official did previously release information about Paul Manafort being wiretapped before it became public.

Brower also claims that Paddock's digital profile "showed he researched many of the massacres committed by IS lately in Europe."

However, Fox News reports that after "Analyzing Paddock's computer, cellphone and other electronic devices, investigators have found no obvious ideological motive, no clear connection to extremists or activist groups or outward display of mental illness."

Update (Oct. 7): NBC is reporting that "senior law enforcement officials" are stumped by two discoveries:

1. A cell phone charger was found in Paddock's room that doesn't match any of his devices.
2. During a period when his car left the hotel garage, one of his key cards was used to get into his room.

These support what was reported in our updates above: the receipts suggesting Paddock was not alone in his hotel room.

According to IRS records, Paddock earned $5 million in 2015, most of it from gambling. He took 20 cruises, many in Europe and the Middle East (Jordan, UAE). Danley accompanied him on 9 of the cruises.

Despite this, police still say they are "very confident" Paddock acted alone:

Investigators have also reviewed "voluminous amounts of video from numerous locations," but McMahill said that they have not "located any other person that we believe to be a suspect at this point."

He added that investigators are also aware that the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) has claimed responsibility for the shooting, but said that they have found "no known nexus" to terrorism or connections to ISIS.

"What I cannot confirm to you today, and what we continue to investigate is, whether anybody else may have known about this incident before he carried it out," McMahill said.

Sheriff Lombardo has revealed that the note found in the hotel room contained numbers - police are trying to determine their meaning.

Mainstream media pundits are uncharacteristically questioning the lack of good information released by authorities so far. That includes Ann Coulter:

"[N]ow that's what I find most interesting - [the media] seem strangely reluctant to pursue this," Coulter said. "They've decided, 'He's a white man. We got our story. Don't look for any other facts.'"
...
"I think the media wants to say it's a white male," she added. "They decided that from day one and any other information might change that narrative. And they simply don't want to know. But as I pointed out in my column this week - this is how conspiracy theories arise. You won't tell us this stuff. Oh and the woman shouting 'you're all going to die' 45 minutes before the concert started. Do we know - OK, it's probably just a crazy woman, but could we find out?

Update (Oct. 9): This one's from a few days ago, but possibly relevant: Chief Medical Doctor of the Emergency Department at Vally Hospital Medical Center and longtime Chief Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Doctor Jeffrey Davis said on camera that on the night of the shooting he received a call from his hospital about the mass shooting and was told the hospital would initiate what is called a 'mass casualty incident' or 'disaster drill'. Whatever that means, it coincided with a FEMA/DHS/ICE mass casualty training exercise scheduled for Oct. 1-3.

Director of External Affairs for the Center for Domestic Preparedness, FEMA, and DHS, Richard Brewer told Intellihub's Founder and Director Shepard Ambellas in a phone interview that he could not confirm which state the drill was taking place in and 'terminated' the call.

He later said that the training was conducted in Anniston, Ala. But some online think it's possible that drills were being run in hospitals at the same time as the response to the attack (citing the usual "no blood hoax" interpretations of videos).

Apparently Paddock was known to have hired prostitutes on his trips to Vegas. One allegedly spoke anonymously to the UK Sun, describing Paddock as paranoid, obsessive, and into "really aggressive and violent sex", including living out rape fantasies:

Paddock also boasted about his bank-robber father, saying that 'the bad streak is in my blood' and 'I was born bad', according to texts seen by the Sun on Sunday.

The 27-year-old woman said Paddock, 64, would often rant about conspiracy theories including how 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government.

The escort, who said Paddock paid her $6,000-a-time for their meetings, also had texts in which he described tying her up 'while you scream for help'.

She spoke out after family members revealed that Paddock often consorted with prostitutes who were laid on by hotels while he paid regular visits to the city.

Officials close to the investigation into the shooting revealed that Paddock may have hired an escort in the days before the massacre.

Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts, told Fox News that Paddock was known to his staff and seemed like 'a rational man' - he'd been visiting Vegas since 2006 once or twice a month in recent years. He described him as "The most vanilla profile one could possibly imagine. A modest gambler at least by our standards, you know, nothing serious, paid promptly, never owed any money anywhere in Las Vegas. He didn't fit the profile of a problem or compulsive gambler." He also described the steps taken since 2015 to beef up hotel security:

"I got every consultant and adviser I can think of to come through from Ray Kelly to the people from Seal Team 6. It took us from Thanksgiving until May to develop and institute and recruit a program of counterterrorism and it will be two years this May," Wynn told "Fox News Sunday" anchor Chris Wallace.

"Basically we had to recruit and expand security by tens of millions of dollars to cover every entrance, to retrain the entire workforce -- from housekeeping and room service -- and people are in the tower and observing people. We had to cover every exit and every aspect of the building to see if we could identify and preempt any kind of terroristic or violent action. It is never perfect, of course, but what you can do, to use local vernacular: you can change the odds," Wynn said.
...
"We also have rules about do not disturb," Wynn said. "If a room goes on do not disturb for more than 12 hours, we investigate. We constantly -- we don't allow guns in this building unless they're being carried by our employees and there's a lot of them. But if anybody's got a gun and we find them continually, we eject them from the hotel."

So far the closest thing the police have to a motive is speculation on Paddock's mental health: "severe mental illness that was likely undiagnosed":

The portrait, gleaned from interviews with hundreds of people interviewed over the past week, is that while Paddock might have been financially successful, he had real difficulty interacting with people. He is described as standoff-ish, disconnected, a man who had difficulty establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships.

Combing through his computer records, police have apparently found no evidence of an accomplice.

An image of a man that looks like Paddock, apparently accompanied by two others, is still under review and investigation. It is unclear if this image is of the gunman or if it will be meaningful.

One image?

Interview with officers who breached the room

Police say the note found in the hotel contained calculations on bullet trajectory to maximize the effect of shooting at long range. This comes from K-9 unit officer David Newton, who was one of the first to breach the hotel room and see Paddock's body, an experience he called "very eerie" and "like out of a movie":

"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," the officer claimed, adding that the shooter "had that written down and figured out so he would know where to shoot to hit his targets from there."

CBS's interview with the officers involved in the breach is available here. In the video, one of the K-9 officers says they received reports that hotel security were taking fire from a shooter on the 29th floor, but also reports of a shooter on the 32nd floor, which initially led them to believe there were multiple shooters in the hotel. He also says that Paddock had screwed shut the stairwell door near his room with a piece of metal and screws. Once they discovered this, the SWAT officer that accompanied them was easily able to pry off the metal.

Newton says they saw about 3 phones and 2 laptops among the numerous rifles and clips strewn about the whole room, and a lot of tools, including drills and drill bits. When asked about Lombardo's statement that Paddock had an escape plan, Newton says that based on what he saw, he thought the plan would have been to "shoot it out with us". "He could have held us off for hours."

One more interesting fact: the "SWAT team" that breached the room wasn't actually a SWAT team, it was a self-improvised team comprised of various officers - two from a K-9 unit who were training nearby when they heard the news, a detective and a SWAT member.

Paddock had apparently practiced shooting in the desert in the days before the massacre. According to the WSJ:

The gunman who killed 58 people here Sunday appears to have gone out to the desert to practice shooting two days before the massacre, according to a law-enforcement official familiar with the investigation. Investigators have uncovered video footage from a home-surveillance system that shows Stephen Paddock driving alone to an area on the outskirts of Mesquite, Nev. where locals go for target practice. The footage shows Paddock heading to the area on the Friday before the attack, the official said. A spokeswoman for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department didn't immediately return a request for comment.