Stephen Paddock, the 64-year-old suspect behind the Las Vegas mass shooting, possibly planned to escape the hotel room he was positioned in after raining bullets down on a nearby country music festival, police officials said Wednesday.
Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, speaking during an evening press conference, told reporters that he believed Paddock may have planned to flee the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino’s 32nd floor, where the gunman was located as he fired upon the Route 91 Harvest Festival. Nearly 60 video
people were killed in the attack and almost 500 were injured.
“This is my assumption, only my assumption, and nobody has been able to dispel my assumption as of today,” Lombardo said, before commenting on several security cameras Paddock had stationed both outside of and within his hotel room. “I believe, because of his countermeasures placed in the peephole and in the hallway ... he was doing everything possible to figure out how he could escape at that point.”
When asked by another reporter if there was any evidence that Paddock had planned to escape, Lombardo said simply: “Yes.” He declined to go into specifics about what that evidence might be.
Investigators said earlier that Paddock had rigged several security cameras in the hallway and on the peephole of his hotel room door to monitor activity outside. Jesus Campos, an unarmed security guard who approached the door, was shot in the leg after Paddock reportedly saw him and fired more than 200 rounds into the hallway, according to The Daily Beast. The guard later radioed his colleagues who helped authorities locate Paddock’s room.
“His bravery was amazing because he remained with our officers, providing them the key pass to access the door, and actually continued to help them clear rooms until our officers demanded that he go seek medical attention,” Lombardo said of Campos.
Authorities also said a search of Paddock’s car, parked at the Mandalay Bay, found 50 pounds of an explosive shooting target called Tannerite, as well as an additional 1,600 rounds of ammunition. Lombardo declined to say if investigators believed he was planning a larger attack, but also noted that there was “well in excess of thousands of rounds still present in the room” when Paddock was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“It remained in the car for some reason,” Lombardo said of the material.
Investigators with the sheriff’s office and the FBI, standing alongside Nevada Sen. Dean Heller (R), urged media to refrain from speculation and said any investigation would take time.
“We like to deal with facts,” said Aaron Rouse, the special agent in charge for the FBI’s Las Vegas division. “Theories are great and everyone can have a theory, but we need to deal with facts, the sheriff needs to deal with facts. We are reliant on that to do our jobs. That’s what we will focus on.”
Lombardo also said that a yellow piece of paper found in Paddock’s hotel room was not a suicide note.
Investigators are still searching for a motive in the attack. They interviewed Marilou Danley, Paddock’s girlfriend, shortly after she arrived in Los Angeles from the Philippines, but Rouse said they had not taken her into federal custody.
Danley said Wednesday in a statement that she was “devastated” by the attack, but that she had no indication Paddock had any plans to carry it out.
“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 like this was going to happen,” she said in the statement, which was read by her attorney.
The statement noted that Paddock had bought her a last-minute plane ticket to the Philippines just two weeks ago and had wired her $100,000 to buy a house for herself and her family, which she thought might have been “a way of breaking up” their relationship.