The Las Vegas gunman who slaughtered 58 people from a Mandalay Bay hotel window meticulously planned the attack — including the anticipated SWAT response, a detailed report of the massacre revealed Friday.
The preliminary, 81-page report from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department is filled with photos of Stephen Paddock’s arsenal and his 32nd-floor vantage point to his killing grounds.
It also revealed how Paddock researched potential mass-killing locations across the country, including in California. In May 2017, he used the Internet to search “how crowded does Santa Monica Beach get” and “biggest open air concert venues in USA,” according to the report.
Last September — just days before he killed 58 people and injured more than 800 others at a country-music festival on the Las Vegas Strip — Paddock searched for information on “swat weapons,” “SWAT Las Vegas” and “ballistic,” the report revealed.
In an afternoon press conference, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said Paddock, who killed himself after his 10-minute shooting spree, had an “extensive search history of ballistic and SWAT tactics.”
According to the report, Paddock purchased more than 55 firearms between October 2016 and September 2017 alone.
Photos taken from inside the killer’s hotel suite show some of the semiautomatic assault rifles in his arsenal resting on beds. One image shows a power drill he used to set up surveillance cameras that gave him a view of the hallway outside, the report says.
Another pic reveals the direct birds-eye view Paddock had of the concert venue from his 32nd-floor window, which he shattered with a hammer.
Lombardo stressed that the report was preliminary, saying he was “going against normal protocols” by releasing it to the public.
So far, authorities have been unable to pin down a precise motive behind the mass shooting, according to Lombardo.
“We hope that the work continues to be done on this case and eventually will help paint a more complete psychological picture on why Paddock committed such evil,” the sheriff said.
He repeatedly stated that Paddock was the lone shooter in the bloodbath, but said the FBI is still investigating a person of interest in the case.
The gunman’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley, to whom Paddock wired $100,000 in the days leading up to the massacre, is not expected to be charged, Lombardo added.
“I know and believe there is only one suspect who killed 58 people and injured hundreds more,” the sheriff said. “Only one person [is] responsible.”
The police report also revealed that authorities found “several hundred images” of child pornography on Paddock’s computer.
The killer’s estranged brother, Bruce Paddock, was arrested in October on child-pornography charges. He had more than 600 explicit images of minors in 2014, according to a complaint.