LAS VEGAS_Ten months after Stephen Paddock killed 58 people at a country music concert, Las Vegas police said Friday that they have closed the investigation without being able to determine a motive for the worst mass shooting in modern American history.
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo released a 187-page final report on the massacre at the Route 91 Country Music Festival on Oct. 1 that concluded Paddock acted alone. He was direct in confronting conspiracy theorists who have suggested there was a second gunman or that Paddock had not acted alone.
A trio of Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers spent 10 or more hours a day over the past 10 months examining doctors' reports, the autopsies, interviews with Paddock's girlfriend, financial records and probing Paddock's connections with a brother who was arrested in Los Angeles several weeks after the Vegas shooting on child pornography charges. Child pornography was found on a hard drive of one of Paddock's computers in the Mandalay Bay hotel room where he shot down at more than 22,000 concertgoers below.
The vexing question of why Paddock opened fire on the crowd has been at the core of the case since the beginning and Lombardo said it was only possible to stitch together pieces of information about the 64-year-old based on outside information. Paddock shot and killed himself in his room at Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino before police could enter his room.
Paddock was in his room on the 32nd floor of the hotel where he opened fire and used more than 1,000 rounds of bullets to carry out the deadly attack. Police said he had more than 5,000 rounds in his room, along with two dozen guns. He also had explosives in a parked vehicle at the casino.
The report also detailed information about Douglas Haig, who allegedly sold armor-piercing bullets to Paddock before the shooting. Haig had pleaded not guilty to criminal charges brought against him.
Lombardo said that there are no plans to charge Paddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, in connection to the crime and that while the report is a "living document," the case is officially closed. He said the FBI will release a report later this year on the shooting.
It is also the latest release by Las Vegas police, who over the course of the spring and summer have been regularly releasing hours of body camera footage, scores of 911 calls and police reports connected to the shooting.
Those releases have detailed the carnage, chaos and confusion of the night in dramatic detail. However, Lombardo said the report would not address specific actions of officers that night _ explaining that those were internal personnel matters.
