A year after the Las Vegas shooting — one of the single largest mass shooter incidents in American history — authorities are still digging, trying to find out why a gunman opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest Festival killing 58 people and wounding more than 850.
Since last October 1st, a clearer timeline of events has emerged tracking the shooter from his home to the Mandalay Bay Resort & Cansino, where he stocked one of the hotel’s “panoramic suites” with 23 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, turning his room into a veritable arsenal.
Shortly after 10:00pm, the shooter blew out two hotel windows and began raining bullets on the festival grounds well below and across Las Vegas Boulevard from Mandalay Bay. Using three cameras he’d set up in the hallway, the shooter held off hotel security, police, and emergency responders for several minutes, before shooting himself.
SWAT teams broke into the room around 11:00pm, to find the shooter dead and the room littered with hundreds of shells.
In the months that ensued, however, authorities have come no closer to understanding why a real estate investor-turned-professional gambler committed mass murder, The Wall Street Journal reports.
A 10-month probe, which interviewed hundreds of witnesses, friends and family members of the shooter (and his longtime girlfriend), “as well as searches of his computers, phones and internet history” revealed no terrorist ties and no apparent mental illnesses. The shooter had no strong political or religious affiliations, and while he had gambling debts, he was far from destitute.
A retired FBI profiler told The Wall Street Journal that the shooter is an “outlier” as far as mass killers are concerned. He was older, with no public profile, no social media manifesto or suicide note, and no record of prior “concerning” behavior. According to his friends and family the shooter didn’t have a list of “grievances” and hadn’t mentioned any targets, even though the FBI investigation found he’d cased out other venues.
The FBI and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department have pledged to keep digging. For now, they will hold a one-year memorial service to mourn with victims.