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 BehaviorLike 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 soughtIn 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 RazorFBI 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:
- A cell phone charger was found in Paddock's room that doesn't match any of his devices.
- 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 roomPolice 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.
Comment: Beilman's LinkedIn page, where he is listed as employed by General Motors, previously with Ultralife Corporation from 2007-2012. Ultralife was just awarded a $49.75 million federal contract from the U.S. Army for non-rechargeable batteries. Beilman had worked on "Plastic enclosure design, electromechanical assembly, lithium ion battery, battery chargers, solar chargers, power supply design, as well as ancillary support equipment for both military and medical customers. Transitioned new products from prototype to production floor."