A shooter opened fire at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a three-day country music event, in Las Vegas on Sunday night, reportedly killing more than 50 people and leading to hundreds more injuries, according to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD).
Las Vegas shooting: what we know so far
More than 50 people are dead and hundreds more were injured as a result of the shooting.
Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images
The gunman is dead, Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said at a press conference early Monday morning. And police had located a woman they were seeking who had been traveling with him. LVMPD said they believe he acted alone.
The gunman has been identified as Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old man from Mesquite, Nevada. Police said they found “numerous firearms” in his hotel room. In their statement, police said that Paddock opened fire on the crowd from his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino around 10 pm. Police said that after officers responded to the call and breached Paddock’s room, they found the suspect dead.
So far, there is no information on his motive for the deadly shooting. So police have yet to classify it as a terrorist attack.
What we know
- At least 59 people were killed and more than 500 were injured as a result of a shooting at a Las Vegas country music concert, according to police. The casualty count could change as police continue their investigation.
- Police identified the suspect as 64-year-old Stephen Craig Paddock, who was found dead in a hotel room after he, police believe, killed himself. Paddock reportedly carried out the shooting from his hotel room.
- Paddock, who is from Mesquite, Nevada, is believed to have acted alone. He had more than 10 rifles with him in his hotel room, according to police.
- Officials have denied that this was an Islamist terrorist attack — although ISIS has taken credit for the shooting, a typical practice for the terrorist group regardless of whether it is responsible for such events. Police say they do not see any connection to international terrorist groups.
- More than 22,000 people were reportedly in attendance at the country music–focused Route 91 Harvest Festival during the shooting. It was the last concert of the three-day event on the Las Vegas strip, which organizers said was sold out.
- Reports of the shooting came first on Sunday night, when the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department reported an active shooter in the vicinity of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas strip.
- Audience members reported multiple rounds of sustained gunfire. “It just kept coming,” Robyn Webb, a witness, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “It was relentless.”
- According to the Times, Las Vegas police cleared upper floors of the hotel from floors 29 to 32 and swept the Ali Baba Restaurant, and the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in response to additional unconfirmed reports of a shooting at that location.
- Police warned the public to avoid the strip. Parts of Las Vegas Boulevard and I-15 were closed following the shooting, and the McCarran International Airport stated via Twitter that some flights had been diverted and that all flights out of Las Vegas had been “temporarily halted” due to the shooting. As of Monday morning, the airport is fully operational, but experiencing some delays for non-commercial due to street closures around the airport.
- Police also located someone they believed to be Paddock’s traveling companion, a woman named Marilou Danley. Authorities do not believe she was involved in the shooting.
- Eric Paddock, a brother of the suspected shooter, has made a statement to police, and has spoken to media on behalf of the family. “We are completely dumbfounded,” he told the Orlando Sentinel. “We can’t understand what happened.”
What we don’t know
- The final death and injuries toll
- The shooter’s motive
- Who the victims were
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