New Videos Show Las Vegas Police Helping People Duck Gunfire
LAS VEGAS (CBSLA/AP) — Some of the first Las Vegas police officers to respond to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history huddled with people taking cover, organized escape routes, carried wounded victims to safety and ducked behind barriers as bullets rained around them, according to video released Wednesday.
"It's coming from the Mandalay Bay!" an officer is heard saying on one video.
"Stay down!" he tells unseen people during bursts of rapid gunfire, while a dispatcher on his police radio says multiple people have gunshot wounds. "Over here! Get behind the police car!"
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department released 28 clips of police body-camera video ranging from a few seconds to more than two hours, totaling about 10 hours of footage. It was the sixth batch of information released under court order in a public records lawsuit from media organizations, including The Associated Press.
Names of the officers were not provided. Police and the FBI have declined to comment on any of the material released months after the Oct. 1 shooting, which killed 58 people and injured hundreds of others attending an outdoor concert.
Video, audio and documents have not shed light on a motive for the massacre. Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, the elected head of the Police Department, has said the investigation has not identified one.
One 28-minute clip shows an officer helping terrified concertgoers duck beneath the stage of the country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip to escape helicopter-sounding gunfire. He carried a wounded woman to a makeshift triage center in a parking lot, banding her bleeding leg with a tourniquet and driving her to a hospital.
"You gotta go! We're in the firing zone! He can see us from here!" the unidentified officer tells people near the stage after the concert turned to chaos.
With bullet still flying, some officers began to tend to some of the most seriously wounded victims.
Another clip has a radio dispatcher reporting "multiple casualties" before an officer parks and jumps from his patrol vehicle. He and other officers use it as a shield from the gunfire.
More shots are fired, and someone among the officers says, "I'm down, I got shot!"
Another video, lasting about 30 minutes and not identified with a time stamp, shows officers in a hallway outside the Mandalay Bay hotel suite where authorities say gunman Stephen Paddock killed himself before police reached him. The back of an officer's hand was sweating as he uncaps a bottle of water.
Another snippet shows the view from the collar of a male officer armed with a rifle while he and other officers search the hotel's casino floor.
The department also released 511 additional audio clips from 911 calls — a similar number to those made public last week.
In one, an unidentified man whispers to an emergency dispatcher that he's hiding in a broom closet at the Planet Hollywood resort, several blocks away from the shooting.
"We want to know if it's safe," he says in the call time-stamped two hours and 30 minutes after the gunfire began.
The information released by police has provided sometimes graphic and heartbreaking details of people screaming for help, falling during rapid gunfire and helping each other escape the carnage as gunfire rained down from the windows of a hotel room on the 32nd floor.
Newly released video bolstered written reports from officers who raced from casino to casino on the Las Vegas Strip debunking reports of multiple shooters and bomb threats.
A preliminary police report released in January said Paddock, a 64-year-old high-stakes gambler, researched police SWAT tactics, rented hotel rooms overlooking other outdoor concerts and investigated potential targets in at least four U.S. cities.
Lombardo has said he expects a final investigative report will be released next month. The FBI plans to release a report by the anniversary of the shooting.
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