When you listen to what the sounds youre hearing right now that is by all accounts automatic weapons fire. That is a highly sophisticated, highly regulated weapon in this country. And this person, Stephen Paddock, was on the 32nd floor simply firing indiscriminately at a packed crowd of Country Music fans below. Pete williams has been tracking down his sources, giving us new information all morning long on a story that happened about five hours ago. Pete, whats the latest you can tell us . Reporter were told now, matt, that when the authorities entered his hotel room they found several weapons. We dont know yet what kind of weapons those were, and we know theres an urgent trace going on to try to figure out what the weapons were. One question here is we know that hes dead and the assumption here among the federal authorities ive been talking to is that he was shot by the police that breached the room, but were working to confirm that whether he shot himself or whether he was shot by the authorities. We think he was shot by the police when they basically blew the door open into his hotel room. Once they figured out where the shots were coming from. The suspect, Stephen Paddock, 64 years old, born april 9, 1953. Lived in mesquite, nevada, where a search is going on now of his house. This woman, marilou danley, was his roommate there and some eyewitnesses have said they saw the two of them together at the hotel. But now theres a lot of work going on. Its pretty hard to travel anywhere in america without leaving a record. You buy gas, if you use a credit card at the gas station, if you check into the hotel, if you buy something on the road with your credit card. Thats going to leave a record. So one of the tasks of the federal authorities helping the police here will be to build a backwards time line to try to figure out when did he check into the hotel, did he rent the room . Did she rent the room . Did someone else rent the room . Those are all important questions. And i say rent the room, i mean reserve the room, book the room. When did he get there, when did he buy the weapons, those are all questions to be answered. No indication of the motive. No indication of terrorism, but they simply dont know why this happened. Why did this man choose to shoot anybody much less this many people at this venue . Were told by the federal authorities that he was known to local Law Enforcement, paddock was, but in what capacity, whether it was some arrests, some complaints, we dont know the answer to that question yet. He was not on a federal radar list, a federal database of potential terror suspects but he was apparently did have some runins with police there. I dont know what the nature of those was. And unfair to ask you this, pete, because i know the information is sketchy. When we think he was shot by police, do we have any indication that he turned a weapon on Police Officers and exchanged any fire with them . Reporter ive heard no indication that any of the Police Involved in breaching the room were injured. Now we have heard reports that there were offduty Police Officers from several podsedniks at the concert, just attending like any other concert goer, and some of them were shot. Ive heard no indication of police being injured or shot in blowing the door open into the hotel room and shooting him. Pete williams, stand by. Thank you very much. From the University Medical center in las vegas, some of the wounded are being treated. Denita, good morning to you. Good morning, matt. Can you tell me how many people youre treating now and give me some sort of idea what their conditions might be . Sure. We have received upwards of 50 people here at the umc Trauma Center. Its a standalone Trauma Center. And on that side of our hospital we received about 30 patients, many of those were critically injured, two of those patients, unfortunately, passed away. Several people also drove themselves here to our Emergency Department which is on a separate side of umc here. We have a very large campus, and they were treated danita, sorry to interrupt. This is the sheriff joseph lombardo. Now the number of injured, i do not know yet. We are looking at in excess of 50 individuals dead and over 200 individuals injured at this point. That is why im portraying it in that manner. Now the suspect, i am going to provide you his identity at this point. His name is Stephen Paddock. Last name spelled paddock, with a date of dirth 4 9 1953. As far as his history and background we havent complete that had yet. Weve located numerous firearms within the room that he occupied and thats like i stated earlier will be a long and tedious investigation. Now were bringing in all the resources of the fbi to assist us in this investigation. In particular to witness victim advocates and csi to help process the scene ensuring we are getting all the evidence we can possibly obtain. Furthermore, i want to provide you the phone number i said i would provide in the first briefing. That number for family and friends to get an update on loved ones is 18665355654. One more time, 18665355654. Obviously this is a tragic incident. One that we have never experienced in this valley. So what were going to try to do is the best we can to get our First Responders back on their feet responding and conducting the proper investigation and ensure that we have the safety of this community at heart. My condolences go out to the loved ones that lost their lives and their families, and we will do the best we can to make it as easy as possible to get you information as we know it. I think its important for you to see the fbi county fire. It shows we have full support of all the Government Entities to solve this situation as soon as possible. Any sense of motive . Not yet. How many officers [ inaudible ] . I dont know yet because theres some officers from other jurisdictions that were attending the concert, so i dont have an accurate number of that yet. Have you gotten an update on your officers . One was critical but hes stable and one of my officers was off duty attending the concert and lost his life. Can you give us details . No, i dont have any more details on the firearms. All we know they were rifles and thats all i know at this point. Were executing a search warrant on the room as we speak. [ inaudible ]. How are you doing . Were holding up. Were going to do the best we can. I dont want to say thats what were paid to do because no one is paid to do what were experiencing now. Theyre doing a fantastic job and well have to look out for their wellbeing moving forward. You said there were numerous other firearms found in Stephen Paddocks room . In the room of the hotel. We have officers at his residence and will execute a search warrant shortly. How do you recover from this . Moving forward. Thats a hard question to answer at this point. Its too early in the process and please give us time so we can do a good job. Thank you. I will provide an update on a regular basis at approximately a twohour window at a time. As you can imagine a freeze of our signal. That was joseph lombardo, the Clark County Sheriff with jurisdiction over the las vegas area, and he has just delivered the phone number i provided, we will get that information out, but right now im not comfortable providing that information because were overwhelmed in the medical services at all the hospitals right now. United Blood Services has responded and once they get all their personnel on the ground and more people in place well be able to provide that info. [ inaudible ]. Looking for their loved ones. [ inaudible ]. Yes, maam. Theres two locations where they have been responding, one is at South Central area command in close proximity to the mandalay bay and here. Preferably we would like them to come to Police Headquarters on Martin Luther king so theyre not responding with people in that area. And the families, what kind of emotion . All right, thank you very much. Have a good night. Weve been listening to a briefing from joseph lombardo, the Clark County Sheriff, and he has delivered devastating news that we now know more than 50 people have been killed in this mass shooting in las vegas. The suspect dead, Stephen Paddock, shot by police after opening fire on a crowd of concert goers. Devastating, even more so when you consider we spoke to danita cohen at the las vegas Medical Center just seconds before that News Conference and she was telling us that that Medical Center is treating 30 people who are in critical condition. You get a sense how high this toll may actually go. More than 200 injured and as you mentioned some of them with grave wounds. Some people having to drive themselves to nearby hospitals. More than 50 killed, among them an offduty Police Officer who worked for the sheriff. You could hear his voice shake. This is just an absolutely devastating incident thats taken place. Importantly because weve been following this all morning, the police have said now they believe they are in touch with this woman who was the person of interest, marilou danley, that somehow they are in contact with her. So we will stay on that and try to find out whats happening there. They believe theyve found the two vehicles. The other piece of information it sounds like this was a hotel room with numerous firearms. Thats right. To put this in perspective, i believe we just passed the oneyear anniversary of the pulse nightclub shooting down in orlando where a gunman walked into that packed nightclub and killed 49 people. We now know in las vegas that upwards of 50 people have been killed in this shooting. It would make it the worst mass shooting in u. S. History. And we are still counting the toll. I mean, honestly, you have thousands of concert goers sitting and just being fired upon from the 32nd floor of a hotel with a highpowered rifle and automatic weapon. As described by our Law Enforcement experts. It kind of takes your breath away as weve just learned of the scope of the carnage here. Do we still have danita cohen available to us . Danita, we apologize. We broke away there to listen to the sheriff. Shes from the University Medical center. Exactly. You were talking about the patients youre treating, the number of patients and the severity of their injuries. Hi again, matt and savannah. You were mentioning the pulse nightclub shooting. Ironically just a few months ago we had one of the Emergency Room Physicians from that shooting here at our hospital doing a debrief with our trauma team and emergency physicians. We are always on constant stand by as Trauma Center fully equipped to take care of very unfortunate mass casualties. This evening we did receive about 50 patients, about 30 of those went through our Trauma Center. Many of those are still in the o. R. As i talk to you right now. Some patients have, thankfully, been discharged but many admitted because of their injuries. The people who were brought to your hospital, two of those are deceased, so those we are assuming are those counted in the number of people that the sheriff just talked about . Correct. Those are counted in that number, passed away here at umc would be two patients. Some are critical, some discharged, many in the operating room or recovering from their injuries. Do you have any sense of how many of the scores of people that have come in how many are critical and in surgery needing that kind of traumatic intervention . About 12 patients were critically injured. I spoke with one of our trauma surgeons and he said he just kept the operating room doors wide open and was ready for the next patient and the next patient. This is exactly why our trauma surgeons are trained the way that they are. You might recall a few years ago we had the woman who drove onto the Las Vegas Strip and we had 13 patients come in from that unfortunate incident. We make sure everybody stays safe and returns home healthy. Well, if anybody has ever had the opportunity or the occasion to tour a level one Trauma Center, they are extremely impressive places staffed with very impressive people. And we know youve got a long day and days ahead of you, dania. We thank you for taking the time this morning. I will share your support with the rest of the team in the Trauma Center as we speak. Please do, danita. When we heard the sheriff talking on the other part of this there are so many people who arent sure if their loved ones are okay and dont know if perhaps someone they knew who was at the concert is among those who did not survive this attack. So this is just a horrific, horrific incident that took place in las vegas last night, more than 50 people killed, more than 200 injured. Were still trying to assess and count the toll. Police earlier on at a previous News Conference were putting a call out to anyone who was at that concert or in that hotel who perhaps took some cell phone video that could be of help in their investigation. I think their investigation has probably turned now into the background of this suspect who is dead, Stephen Paddock, and his associate or roommate or whatever you want to call her. But they are asking anyone with cell phone video who captured any images from the time during that shooting to please review the footage, see if its significant, and turn it over to them. And the Las Vegas Strip, no doubt, lots of closed Circuit Television cameras, no doubt the hotel has security cameras. These are just the very early hours, but police will be able to put together their investigation and have a very good idea of the movements of this suspect. But what we dont know and may not know for some time if ever is the motive. What on earth would possess someone to go into the top of a hotel room and just open fire on people trying to sit and listen to an outdoor concert in the closing days of summer early fall. This festival had been going on for three days, a harvest festival. A lot of Country Music stars had taken part in it. We talked to jake owen earlier. We know jason aldean was performing at the time this happened. We dont know how long Stephen Paddock was in that hotel, when he checked in, what he was planning, but we do know that at some point he either shot out the window of his hotel room or broke it in some other fashion and aimed what sounds like an automatic weapon at the crowd below, probably 300 plus feet below and 100 yards or so in the distance and just began firing. As we heard from a couple people this morning with an automatic weapon you pull the trigger and you wait for that weapon to run through the rounds in the clip and then you change the clip and in this case it seems like he did it several times. One witness said it seemed four or five minutes and another said a period of ten minutes or so. It took the police a little while to figure out where the shots were coming from and then triangulate, identify the exact room. A s. W. A. T. Team did get up in the elevator of the hotel, breached the doorway, possibly with some explosive device. We dont know if there was any gunfire exchanged with the suspect. We do know now that the police, it seems, were responsible for killing Stephen Paddock. Lets go to clint van zandt, former fbi profiler, Law Enforcement expert, who can talk to that very point just how difficult a situation this would have been. The first calls to come in you have a shooting going on at an outdoor festival. Im sure the initial thought was somebody there at the festival, how would police have determined where the shots were coming from, how difficult is that to go ahead, find a room, find the person, and make it stop, clint . Well, this is very challenging, i think, at first. Realize the shooter was on the 32nd floor. If you and i stand and look at any hotel youre looking at windows, at floors. Somebody has to count up, somebody counts sideways. It could be someone went past the room and heard the firing. But it would have taken Law Enforcement in this situation a while to find the exact room and realize every second that it took them to find the room there were more people being shot and killed. As matt has just pointed out this, unfortunately, has become the largest or the highest amount of deaths in a mass shooting, just surpassed orlando. Also, i was at Virginia Tech at the time of the shooting back in 07. That was 32. And we all know the 27 Young Children who died at sandy hook. The only reason i give you those numbers is because weve encountered some mass shooters that are doing just that, looking for the number, and its very easy to find when they go on the internet. Motive is going to be the challenge here. We understand its a fully automatic weapon. We know you can get those or if you know what youre doing you can change a weapon to fully automatic. Its not hard to get one into a hotel room. People lug dozens of bags to their room every day. Of course you cant run everything through a metal detector so this is yet one more challenge for Law Enforcement once we identify the individual who we know and the motive, how do you stop someone from repeating this in the future . What are the clip capacities available for a weapon like that . Yeah, matt, lets say it sounds like its relatively its an automatic weapon, how heavy a caliber, we dont know. If its your usual ar16 or m16, a military style weapon so many carried in the military or an an k47 that we hear about all the time, those magazines they put into that weapon, that can either have 20 or perhaps 30 rounds. So for this individual to fire and one of your previous guests said it went on for five to ten minutes, if he went up there with just ten magazines, thats potentially 300 rounds that he probably could have fired easily in a time period of three to five minutes. And, clint, you pulled the trigger on an automatic weapon with a magazine of 20 or 30 rounds in it, how long does it take to empty that out, just a matter of five seconds, right . Oh, just seconds, matt. You could dump those rounds in 1012 seconds and, i mean, if youve even practiced this, and we hate to say it but we see mass shooters sometimes will practice, you can practice, dump that empty magazine, go to a new magazine, you can do that in just a second or two, reload and keep doing this. Matt, youve developed information, Pete Williams has, that the shooter is 64 years old. The average mass shooter in the united states, matt, is 35 years old. So this individual is almost twice the age of the statistical probability. Now in a situation like this we dont care. We want to identify the particular shooter, but our youngest mass shooter is 11 years old. This may well be the oldest mass shooter, meaning at least four or more deaths. This may be the oldest in the country. So this terrible person has set a couple records we hope no one ever tries to break. And the method here, clint, such a heinous method. And you mentioned Virginia Tech, you mentioned we talked about the pulse nightclub in orlando, those shooters were on the ground. They were walking in close proximity to the people they were targeting. And heres a guy 300 feet in the air shooting out of a window at just a sea of people. Yeah, and realize, matt, were talking the distance after football field away. So without any sighting device we dont know if he had a scope or something hes simply looking at a mass of people that cant get out, that cant move, and hes not accurately shooting. Hes just spraying bullets like you would take a hose in your garden and water down flowers except he was mowing down human beings. Clint van zandt, clint, thank you very much. Im sure were going to be talking to you several times over the morning and through the coming days. And weve been just covering a story thats unfolded over these last few hours. It started at 10 00 local time in las vegas last night. The third night of a threeday festival, a concert, outdoor Music Festival. Jason aldean playing. All of a sudden the shots of gunfire and you hear it as we show you this video. You can hear that patter of the gunfire and this went on for several minutes. Everyone who has heard it fluent in these matters says this is an automatic weapon, an illegal weapon. It has inflicted mass damage, more than 50 people killed. This makes it the deadliest shooting in u. S. History. More than 200 injured. The sense you got from the sheriff that is not a final number. They are still trying to assess how many people have lost their lives today. And theyre desperately trying to save lives at the local University Medical center, a level one Trauma Center. Savannah and i talked to an eyewitness earlier, probably a couple hours ago now, who described in a way what was going on as the shooting was occurring that i think bears repeating because its something weve all heard of and can identify with. He said as the shots rang out it almost became that game of red light green light where when the shots were ringing out, everybody froze and dove to the ground. And in the moments of silence, presumably while this gunman was changing magazines on his automatic weapon, in those moments of silence, people got to their feet and ran as far as they could run until the shots rang out again and then they dove to the ground again. Its just horrifying to imagine yourself in that situation for five or ten minutes. The terror also the gunfire is coming from above you and around you and its an outdoor Music Festival and there isnt much shelter. There werent places to hide. Ive seen witness accounts of people hiding under cars, but obviously just an incredibly terrifying situation and then imagine youre Law Enforcement there trying to figure out as fast as you can where is this shooting coming from . Is it coming from a nearby hotel, what floor, which room, and they were able to find this suspect. They found him on the 32nd floor of the mandalay bay hotel. Broke through the door, shot him dead and ended the carnage but not before so many people lost their lives. Some of the eyewitnesses talked about there were some vending areas, areas where there were trailers like you would see at an Amusement Park or the state fair to the sides of the concert area where the crowd was standing and they ran and dove behind those vehicles just to get cover from these gunshots. You saw the shots of jason aldean continuing to play for a couple of seconds until he and the other musicians on stage realized exactly what was going on. Listen. [ sounds of gunfire ] and then watch as he runs from the stage. Obviously realizing the gravity of what was occurring. So many people said that because it took some time that they continued to play for a while. A lot of people thought its the last night of the concert, its fireworks, pyrotechnics. And then the realization of what actually had been going on. Tom costello, are you still with us . Reporter hi, guys. I am with you, indeed. This is just absolutely obscene to watch a mass casualty and mass murder take place right there on the vegas strip. There arent many words. I would remind us i think weve already gone through the fact this is the worst mass casualty shooting in u. S. History. The pulse nightclub in orlando lost 49 lives. Virginia tech was 32. Sandy hook was 27 including the victims mother, and the cafeteria shooting in texas in 1991, 23 dead. So 50 or more people now dead in las vegas as this shooting took place. As i was watching that scene of jason aldean really leaving the stage in a hurry, it struck me he was fortunate. He had cover. But his audience did not have cover. They were sitting out there in that open arena outside at night with this gunman perched 32 floors above them. And he was able to just rain terror down on them and rain death down on them as well. The other thing that struck me as you were talking to the nurse at the local hospital, i, as you know, cover Fire Departments and Police Departments around the country, and these mass incidents and preparing for them, drilling for them has become just part of their normal training. It doesnt matter how big or small the department is. They are constantly training for this. I was talking to a friend of mine who is with a smaller Fire Department in colorado. They that very day were training for a mass casualty training incident. This is just america in 2017, unfortunately, as we are seeing yet another mass casualty shooting event play out in las vegas. What we still dont know is, of course, the suspects motive. Was it political, was it religious, was it some sort of a personal grudge . The fact that he is 64 years old it occurs to me, makes it unlikely that he is any sort of a recent war veteran. So where did he get hold that have kind of firepower is obviously very interesting. We know the victims identity. It is Stephen Paddock, 64. And you can only imagine that every aspect of his life is now being looked at by Law Enforcement investigators, and they will know an awful lot about him in the coming hours that they did not know, unfortunately, prior to this shooting. Were going to take a pause here in a moment, top of the hour were going to continue our coverage. This has been an nbc news special report. The worst mass shooting in u. S. History. Nbc news special report. The worst mass shooting in u. S. History. Good morning. Breaking news. A gunman opens fire on an outdoor concert crowd in las vegas. More than 50 killed. 200 others wounded, the deadliest mass shooting in history. The gunman, 32 floor s up, at te mandal mandalay bay resort. The shooter was 64yearold Stephen Paddock. He was shot and killed by police. Witnesses describe moments of pure panic. We have complete coverage today, monday, october 2nd, 2017. From nne
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