A woman who thought she was filming fireworks at the end of country music festival in Las Vegas has described the moment she realized she was witnessing a massacre.
Forbes Riley was attending a part in a steak restaurant on the 63rd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel on Sunday when she heard a popping noise.
Riley said she took out her phone and started filming the Route 91 Harvest Festival crowd, before realizing that what she could hear was automatic gunfire.
‘The noise that I thought was fireworks was people dying,’ she told NBC.
Forbes Riley began filming the Route 91 Harvest Festival from the balcony of a steak restaurant on the 63rd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel after hearing what she thought were fireworks
A video shot from Riley’s phone shows the carnage unfolding.
It also offers a glimpse of the massacre from the point of view of killer Stephen Paddock, who had a similar view from 31 storeys below.
In the background of Riley’s footage several female voices can be heard talking. ‘Holy s***,’ one says. ‘What is that?’
‘That’s a machine gun,’ another one responds. ‘Did you hear the gunshot?,’ someone else asks.
Realizing the enormity of the attack they are witnessing, a man can be heard saying: ‘Look how many people are not moving right now.’
But Riley soon realized that, rather than witnessing a celebration, she was seeing a massacre unfold. In the video a man can be heard saying ‘look at how many people aren’t moving’
In total 58 people died and more than 500 were wounded by Stephen Paddock when he opened fire on the festival from a suite 31 floors below where Riley was filming
Below them some tiny figures can be seen fleeing the carnage, but many more are laying on the floor by the stage – either dead, wounded, or too terrified to move.
In total 58 people were killed during the attack and more than 500 wounded, making it America’s worst mass shooting in history.
Paddock spent days stockpiling 23 weapons in a suite on the 32nd floor of the hotel before smashing two windows with a hammer and opening fire.
He emptied hundreds of rounds into the crowd below using weapons modified with extended clips and ‘bump stocks’ which modify semi-automatic weapons to fire on fully automatic mode.
People on the ground recalled a seemingly never-ending stream of gunfire which created scenes of carnage as people rushed to get away
Paddock was eventually traced to a suite on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay, but shot himself dead before police could arrest him
He then used cameras he installed around his room to monitor approaching SWAT teams before engaging them in a firefight in which two officers were wounded.
As police breached the door of his suite to make an arrest, he shot himself dead.
Investigators are now trying to determine a motive and have taken his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, in for questioning.
She was in her native homeland of the Philippines at the time of the attack, which her sister believes was arranged by Paddock so she would not get in the way of his carefully laid plans.