Las Vegas police release terrifying 911 calls, roof video of October 2017 carnage
Las Vegas police on Wednesday released audio of frantic 911 calls made by people attending the concert near Mandalay Bay when the country's deadliest mass shooting in modern US history broke out last year in October, killing 58 people. The audio and a surveillance video were made public by authorities nearly eight months after the carnage.
Police reportedly released 518 audio calls and a video taken from a camera atop the Mandalay Bay resort that provided a bird's-eye view of the country music festival where the carnage occurred last year.
"Shots fired! Shots fired! Hurry!" a woman can be heard screaming on the phone during one of the 911 calls, crying as a dispatcher asks her location and the call gets disconnected.
The dispatcher calls back and another woman answers the phone and says, "Machine guns are being fired into the Route 91 festival. It's coming from above, I would assume from the Mandalay Bay side over by the Luxor."
The gunfire indeed came from above, and a 64-year-old high-stakes video-poker player, Stephen Paddock, was at the helm of it as he opened fire with his assault-style rifles from the 32nd-floor windows of Mandalay Bay hotel. His target was the crowd of 22,000 people who had swarmed across Las Vegas Boulevard to attend the Route 91 Harvest Festival.
The 911 tapes released by the authorities are terrifying as people plead for help in desperation and fear.
A woman calls a 911 dispatcher and says that she is hiding under the concert stage and that there are people shot everywhere.
"There's a lot of people here that need ambulances," the woman tells the dispatcher. "There's people shot everywhere!"
In one call, which is time-stamped for nearly two minutes after police stated that gunfire was reported, one man can be heard telling a dispatcher that his best friend has been shot in the stomach. When the dispatcher asks if he's hurt too, the man says, "send everyone!"
"No, but there's a hundred people on the ground bleeding out, right now. Send everybody! There's ... people running for their lives right now. Please, there's another person shot in the leg. Please, hurry up!"
The last names and phone numbers of the callers were beeped out on the recordings released by the police. The audio clips were made public after multiple media organizations, including the Associated Press, obtained a court order for their release.
One of the calls to 911 came from a man who identified himself as a military special forces member without a weapon. The man said that he head automatic weapon fire.
"I have no idea where he is," the man says of the shooter. "It's a chopper that's going off. There's at least 20 that are down, it looks like. We're in the middle of the festival. I don't have visual on target."
Another caller tells a police dispatcher, "We just ran from the concert. Can you tell us what's going on? We were there. It was bad." The man reportedly made the call after he made it safely to a nearby motel room where he and some others present at the concert took shelter.
The dispatcher asks if he is injured. "No," he replies then sobs. "Just not shot."
The clips released are the fifth batch of records which have been made public without any comment from Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo and his department.