Steven Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter who murdered 58 people and wounded hundreds of others with bursts of gunfire from the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, was so precise in his preparation for the massacre that he had with him a note containing handwritten numbers for wind, trajectory, and distance in his hotel room.
Interviewed on 60 Minutes, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officer David Newton from the K9 unit stated that when he entered Paddock’s hotel room, he saw the note. Newton told Bill Whitaker of CBS:
I did notice — a note on the nightstand near — his shooting platform. I could see on it he had written the distance, the elevation he was on, the drop of what his bullet was going to be for the crowd. So he had that written down and figured out so he would know where to shoot to hit his targets from there.
Whitaker asked, “What were the numbers? I am just trying to understand, were they calculations?”
Newton replied:
Yeah, he had written, he must have done the calculations online or something to figure out what his altitude was going to be on how high up he was — how far out the crowd was going to be and what at that distance and what the drop of his bullet was going to be. He hadn’t written out the calculations; all he had was written out the final numbers that were on the sheet.
Asked what he saw when he entered Paddock’s room, Newton said:
An armory. So many guns, so many magazines, stacks and stacks of magazines everywhere. In suitcases, all neatly stacked against pillars that were in the room, all stacked up, rifles placed all throughout, all kinds of monitors and electrical equipment he had in there. It just looked almost like a gun store. … I saw a few phones, laptops, couple laptops he had in there, a lot of drills and drill bits, all kinds of tools … the dust from the explosive breach, and you’ve got the flashing lights. I mean, it looked straight up from out of a movie.
