Las Vegas Shooting: Andover Native Says Venue's Design Made Escape Difficult
LAS VEGAS (CBS) -- An Andover native who works across the street from the site of the Las Vegas shooting attack said the concert venue's limited entry and exit points may have made it difficult for people to escape the gunfire.
Matt Perrault works at a radio studio across from the Mandalay Bay Hotel and said he knows the venue well. He told WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Ben Parker that one major problem in the wake of the shooting was that the area was designed for limited access.
"They want people to be contained in case anything happens inside of the venue, they can quickly figure it out and solve it and get police inside of the venue very quickly," he said. "It's intentionally set up to keep people inside that arena, inside that space."
Perrault described the size of the arena, and it's position in relation to the hotel--where authorities say 64-year-old Stephen Paddock fired into the crowd of thousands during the Route 91 Harvest Festival
"You can put a lot of people into this general admission type of setting where you put up a big stage, have a couple of big screens," he said. "But the problem with what happened tonight was, if you go up high on Mandalay Bay, you can look straight down and straight into that area."
Thankfully, Perrault wasn't in the studio at the time of the shooting--he was at home, about 15 minutes from the strip--but he described the police response.
"You just saw the police presence, just basically every single police officer that was available in Las Vegas, headed to the Strip," he said.
WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Ben Parker reports