Earlier this year Americans suffered through the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
Stephen Paddock opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort, killing 58 people and injuring over 500 others.
Now, the FBI reveals we may not know Paddock’s motive until October 2018.
From Fox News:
Want to finally know why Stephen Paddock gunned down 58 people in Las Vegas in early October?
Be prepared to wait a while – possibly until next October – the chief of the FBI’s Las Vegas office revealed this week during an interview in which he said the agency probably wouldn’t brief the public until their report is released sometime before the tragedy’s first anniversary.
“Now that’s a long time for some people, but speaking for the FBI, that’s light speed, all right?” Special Agent in Charge Aaron Rouse told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Wednesday.
Rouse said reports from other agencies investigating the mass shooting will be released at different times, but the FBI’s one is “focusing a large part on the why” which is “what everybody wants to know.”
That burning question has not been answered, but Rouse said evidence still suggests Paddock was the only person involved in the attack and that he has not been linked with any affiliations or ideologies. The FBI previously denied claims by the Islamic State that Paddock was responding to a call to intensify attacks against Western countries bombing its territories in Syria and Iraq.
More from Review Journal:
“I believe that there is one person and one person alone to blame for what happened on One October, and that is Stephen Paddock,” Rouse said.
During the course of the investigation, Rouse said, the FBI brought in about 400 different specialists to help catalog evidence.
The Route 91 Harvest festival venue itself, where most of the victims were shot, was about 15 acres large and took investigators 14 days to document.
Rouse said the gunman’s 32nd-floor Mandalay Bay corner suite, as well as the hotel hallway, took 13 days to document.
“We’re going to have, I think, the best digital schematic of what happened and where it happened and how it happened that you can come up with,” Rouse said.
Continued:
All items important to the investigation were sent to the FBI’s central lab in Virginia. About 97 percent of all inconsequential items collected — items left behind by concertgoers in the chaos — have been returned to their owners.
Commenting on the sheriff’s early shift on the order of events surrounding the shooting, Rouse said, “Things change from time to time.”
When asked to clarify the current order of events, Rouse refused. When asked if any red flags were missed before the shooting, he replied, “Too soon to say.”
More:
“No one, I think, saw it coming,” Rouse said. “And I think that that’s important for people to realize.”
In the initial hours and days of the investigation, Rouse said, the FBI filed 12 federal search warrants and issued over 500 federal grand jury subpoenas.
Rouse said FBI investigators have about 22,000 hours of surveillance and cellphone footage to comb through, along with about 250,000 separate photos.
[Note: This post was written by John S. Roberts]
