Las Vegas police have released officer bodycam video from the night of the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
Las Vegas police on Wednesday released officer bodycam video from the night of the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in modern history. The videos from two officers take you inside the killer’s hotel suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay about an hour after the Oct. 1 massacre ended. An initial clip shows officers plugging their ears as an explosive charge breaches the door to the suite. You see them entering and clearing each room, calling out «rifle, rifle, rifle,» as they come upon the dozens of weapons gunman Stephen Paddock had amassed. The area appears dark, with part of one room lit only by Paddock’s laptop, as the fire alarm flashes and sounds. Guns are seen strewn on beds and thousands of rounds of ammunition littering the floor. Also found was the body of the shooter, having killed himself around 45 minutes earlier. Police said Paddock, a 64-year-old former accountant and high-stakes video poker player, killed 58 people and injured almost 500 when he opened fire on concert-goers through a hotel window. It was a tense and time-consuming process to clear the hotel. The video shows officers moving cautiously down the halls of the hotel, trying desperately to find the gunman. Sweat could be seen pouring down the face of one officer as they tried to differentiate hotel guests from the shooter himself. The footage doesn’t show what the first officer through the door saw because he didn’t activate his body-worn camera. The newly released videos represent a sample of hundreds of hours of body-camera recordings that don’t answer why Paddock opened fire, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo told reporters Tuesday. The sheriff’s department did not want to release the video, saying the footage could cause further trauma to the survivors and family members. However, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled the body-camera footage has to be made public. Authorities have not uncovered a motive for the attack.
