Press. voanews.com
Days and months
before carrying out the worst mass shooting in recent U.S. history, Stephen
Paddock rented hotel rooms overlooking other music festivals in Las Vegas as
well as in Chicago, law enforcement authorities said.
Media reports
citing law enforcement officials say Paddock reserved two rooms in Chicago
overlooking the Lollapalooza festival, which draws hundreds of thousands of
music fans yearly, in August. Paddock did not check in to the room and it is
unknown whether he was in Chicago that weekend, as first reported by TMZ.
Rooms were also
reserved in Paddock's name in a Las Vegas building that overlooked the Life is
Beautiful alternative music festival a week before he attacked a country music
festival late Sunday, Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of Clark County said.
Hotel employees
at Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay resort, from where Paddock shot and killed 58 people
before killing himself, said that he had specifically requested an upper-floor
room with a view of the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
President Donald
Trump visited Las Vegas Wednesday to console victims and meet with police and
other first responders. Speaking next to first lady Melania Trump, he praised
emergency workers and medical staff who responded to Sunday's massacre. "What
I saw today is just an incredible tribute to professionalism," Trump said.
"It makes you proud to be an American."
Trump praised
first responders, who said they were able to respond so quickly to the attack
because of a new emergency program they had trained in and tested for years. "Our
training paid off. It was much bigger than we ever imagined but we were able to
handle it," Clark County Fire Chief Greg Cassell told reporters Thursday.
Sheriff Lombardo
said it is crucial to talk to anyone who knew gunman Paddock in the hunt for
possible accomplices. Meanwhile, the number of wounded in the Sunday night
massacre has been lowered from more than 500 to 489. Lombardo said some victims
were counted twice in the confusion following the shooting.
Earlier Wednesday,
the lawyer for Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, said Danley had no idea
Paddock was planning any violence. "He never said anything to me or took
any action that I was aware of that I understood in any way to be a warning
that something horrible like this was going to happen," Danley said in a
statement read by her attorney, Matthew Lombard.
Danley spent
much of the day being questioned by FBI agents in Los Angeles, where she
arrived from the Philippines. Her attorney said she was in the Philippines to
visit family. Paddock sent her $100,000 while she was there, telling her to buy
a house. Investigators found 23 guns inside Paddock’s hotel room and 12
so-called "bump stock" devices that can enable a rifle to fire
continuously. The gunman also set up multiple cameras looking out into the
hallway outside the room, apparently to monitor the police response.
Sheriff Lombardo
said Paddock fired about 200 rounds of ammunition into the hallway outside his
suite, wounding a security guard who had come to investigate. The wounded guard
stayed in place to help police despite his injuries. Another 26 guns were found
at two of Paddock's homes in the state of Nevada.
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