Stephen Paddock, 64, killed 58 and injured hundreds as he fired more than 1100 rounds from his suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel
Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock ranted about the federal government ‘confiscating’ guns and was enraged by the Waco and Ruby Ridge sieges, witnesses have claimed.
Police documents released yesterday about the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history included reports from at least two people claiming they had spoken to Paddock about his paranoia.
A jailed man who gave a statement in November to police and the FBI recalled a man he believed to be Paddock telling him that FEMA ‘camps’ set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were ‘a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and … confiscating guns.’
‘Somebody has to wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,’ the man said Paddock told him less than a month before the October 1 shooting that killed 58 people and injured hundreds.’
He added: ‘Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.’
In a handwritten account, a woman said she overheard a man she later said was Paddock talking with another man at a Las Vegas restaurant just three days before the massacre.
She told police that Paddock seemed angry about the 1990s standoffs at Waco, Texas, and Ruby Ridge in Idaho.
‘At the time, I just thought ‘strange guys’ and I wanted to leave,’ said the woman.
Statements from witnesses of one of the nation’s worst mass shootings have been released by Las Vegas police
Concert goers spoke of jumping over dead bodies to get to safety and of seeing their friends and even parents get shot
Many ducked for cover with friends or relatives, and one man said a police officer was driving through the horrific scene ‘throwing’ injured people into a pickup truck and taking them to hospital
At the hospitals, hallways were lined with stretchers carrying the wounded, as survivors still at the scene tried to cover the dead the best they could
The claims by those people and others could not be verified because the names of all witnesses were blacked out in the 1,200 pages of police reports and accounts that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department made public after losing court battles to keep them secret.
Police and the FBI have not determined a motive in the ongoing investigation. Authorities said they believe Stephen Paddock acted alone and the attack had no link to international terrorism.
Law enforcement refused to provide any additional information including refusing to say whether the reports were credible.
The documents released yesterday also detailed terror, confusion and compassion among people helping the wounded after gunfire rained from a 32nd floor hotel room on a crowd of 22,000 people attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival concert on the Las Vegas Strip.
One woman told police she refused to leave her lifeless friend, whose eyes were still and lips turned blue, until a group of men picked her off the ground and guided her to a fence. One left a red bandanna on her friend’s face.
One woman told police that Paddock seemed angry about the 1990s standoffs at Waco, Texas (pictured), and Ruby Ridge in Idaho
A stagehand made a run for his pickup truck when he was suddenly surrounded by people begging for a ride away from the scene.
‘I told them to get in however they could,’ he said.
A woman who fell wounded said another woman who pushed her was shot five times. She decided to play dead.
‘A good guy just grabbed me and said, ‘Love, you’re gonna die here if I leave you here,” she told police.
A housekeeper at the Mandalay Bay described her discomfort at Paddock sitting at a table eating soup and staring at her as she cleaned his hotel room four days before the shooting.
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said early this month the police investigation was not finished. He also apologized to the public for the release of information that he said would ‘further traumatize a wounded community.’
Police and the FBI refused to answer questions from The Associated Press about the account from the man who said he met with Paddock outside a Las Vegas sporting goods store after posting an online ad to sell schematics to convert semi-automatic guns to fire automatically.
The man said Paddock became upset and launched into a tirade about gun control when the man rejected an offer of $500 apiece to modify semi-automatic guns to fire automatically.
Clark County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak, who shared the release of public information with Lombardo and FBI Special Agent in Charge Aaron Rouse after the shooting, told the AP on Wednesday he had been assured that no motive has been identified.
Sisolak said he hadn’t heard of the jailhouse account and he could not say whether it was credible.
Las Vegas police two weeks ago made public video from two officers’ body cameras showing police blasting through the door of the hotel suite where Paddock is seen motionless on his back with a pool of blood staining the carpet near his head and a cache of assault-style weapons strewn about.
Media outlets sued to obtain videos, 911 recordings, evidence logs and interview reports to shed light on the response by public agencies, emergency workers and hotel officials during and after the shooting. The department has not provided all the materials it collected.
One woman told police she was laying next to her mother as gunfire rained down, when she said told her daughter she had been hit.
‘She said ‘I got hit, I got hit’ – I then saw blood come out of her mouth,’ the woman said in parts of the documents published by NBC.
Another woman told police of hospital hallways fully lined with stretchers carrying the wounded.
‘They couldn’t get the names of everybody just because there were so many people,’ she said.
Another man who visited the hospital that night said he and a group of others were piled into the tray of a pickup truck and sped off to hospital by a law enforcement official.
‘I got hit running, right in the back,’ he told police.
He said an officer ‘threw me and several other people’ into the tray of the truck before taking the group of injured people to hospital, in documents seen by CNN.
One woman told police about the moment her friend was hit and could not get up.
She pleaded with her friend, before a man stepped in and tried CPR, and a second man finally came and placed a red bandanna over the woman’s face.
More than 1200 pages of redacted witness statements were released on Wednesday, which showed the raw fear and confusion victims felt as bullets rained down from above
One man said the concert area was ‘lit up like a fishbowl’ and people desperately trying to escape were confronted with the gore of what was happening
A woman is seen sitting along on a curb nearby the scene of one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern US history
Bodies were covered with sheets as first responders worked to help the injured out of the concert area
Stephen Paddock broke two of his windows before firing for about 10 minutes onto about 22,000 people watching a Jason Aldean set below
A Las Vegas woman who had attended the country music concert told police she saw a man drop to the ground with his ‘eyes wide open, lifeless’.
The woman then sprinted for cover on the stage, jumping over the dead body of a security guard on her way there, and texted her sister-in-law: ‘OMG, there’s tons of gunshots and people dead everywhere!’.
Making matters worse, one man told police he was confronted by the full gruesome reality of the situation when floodlights came on at the concert venue.
He said the concert area, now spattered with blood and full of dead and injured people: ‘lit up like a fishbowl’.
Other witnesses told police about their personal interactions with the shooter, whose motive has still not been determined more than six months on.
A housekeeper at the Mandalay Bay hotel said Paddock would stay in the room as she cleaned.
The 64-year-old would sit at his computer and usually order soup from room service, and would stare at her while she worked.
A man who claimed to have met Paddock just weeks before the shooting told police the man had been paranoid law enforcement and the military had a plan to start taking away people’s guns.
Pictured: The inside of Stephen Paddock’s hotel suite as it was when police barged in
Paddock had shot himself and was seen with his head lying in a pool of blood and surrounded by bullet casings. Guns were seen strewn all over the room
A man who spoke to Paddock weeks before the mass shooting said the 64-year-old was paranoid the military and police were plotting to take away people’s guns
Authorities have characterized Paddock as a gambler on a losing streak who was obsessed with cleanliness.
They said he may have been bipolar and having difficulties with his live-in girlfriend, who was in the Philippines when the shooting occurred.
Paddock was a retired accountant who amassed a millionaire’s fortune, owned homes in Reno and Mesquite and earned casino perks wagering thousands of dollars on high-stakes video poker.
Police reported finding just $273 in cash the hotel room where Paddock was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.
Paddock, a retired millionaire who was believed to be on a gambling losing streak, was found with only $273 in cash in his room