Newly released body camera footage shows Las Vegas police officers pausing for several minutes in the hallway of the Mandalay Bay hotel — as mass shooter Stephen Paddock guns down 58 people on the floor directly above them.
“Holy sh-t that’s rapid fire,” officer Cordell Hendrex utters in the chilling video, reacting to Paddock’s gunfire — which he later described as “like thunder all around and above us,” according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The officer and his first-day trainee, Elif Varsin, stayed on the 31st floor for four-and-a-half minutes, even as they heard the shooter’s position reported as “the 32nd floor, room 135.”
“I’m inside the Mandalay Bay on the 31st floor,” Hendrex says in the video. “I can hear the automatic fire coming from one floor ahead, one floor above us.”
In a report, he later wrote that he “froze right there in the middle of the hall” after being terrified.
Three armed Mandalay Bay officers were with the Metro cops during the incident.
Las Vegas criminal defense attorney Louis Schneider said Nevada law protects the officers from liability — unless they were moving slowly on purpose.
“In the limited context of this video, it looks like they’re moving deliberately slow, but that could be for safety purposes,” Schneider told the paper. “But if you wait on an active shooter, you end up using a lot of body bags.”
The footage was the eighth batch of records released since an April Nevada Supreme Court decision compelled the Metropolitan Police Department to hand over records. Media organizations sued for the records in the aftermath of the Oct. 1 bloodbath — in which Paddock broke a window in his hotel room and opened fire on thousands of music festival attendees.
“Every officer’s actions that night are being evaluated,” Metro spokeswoman Carla Alston said in a statement Wednesday.