LAS VEGAS — A gunman on a high floor of a Las Vegas hotel rained a rapid-fire barrage on an outdoor concert festival on Sunday night, killing at least 58 people, injuring hundreds of others, and sending thousands of terrified survivors fleeing for cover, in one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history.
Online video of the attack near the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino showed the singer Jason Aldean’s performance at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, a three-day country music event, being interrupted by the sound of gunfire. The music stopped, and as victims fell bleeding, concertgoers screamed, ducked for cover, or ran. “Get down,” one shouted. “Stay down,” screamed another.
• Police found the gunman, whom they identified as Stephen Paddock, 64, dead in his room at the hotel, along with at least 10 rifles. Investigators were still combing through Mr. Paddock’s background and searching his home on Monday.
• The Islamic State claimed that Mr. Paddock was one of its soldiers, but did not provide any evidence of its claim. The F.B.I. said there is no evidence so far that Mr. Paddock had ties to any international terrorist organization.
• Speaking at the White House, President Trump condemned the shooting as an “act of pure evil” and called for the country to come together, saying, “Our unity cannot be shattered by evil, our bonds cannot be broken by violence.”
Who was the gunman?
Mr. Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nev., had no significant prior criminal history, officials said.
Before dawn on Monday, the police searched Mr. Paddock’s house in Mesquite, a town near Las Vegas on the Nevada-Arizona border. The police moved cautiously at first, evacuating surrounding homes in case there were any explosives, but none were found. The Mesquite Police Department said no one was in the house; at least one firearm and ammunition were found, they said, but they gave few other details about what the search turned up.
The gunman’s father, Benjamin Patrick Paddock, had a troubled history, according to Eric Paddock of Orlando, Fla., a brother of the suspect. Benjamin Paddock was convicted of serial bank robbery in 1961, according to news reports from the time. After he escaped from prison, he was on the F.B.I.’s “Top 10” most wanted list for much of the 1970s.
Eric Paddock said he had made a statement to the police. In an interview with CBS, he said that his brother was “not an avid gun guy at all,” adding, “if he had have killed my kids, I couldn’t be more dumbfounded.”
“The fact that he had those kind of weapons is just — where the hell did he get automatic weapons?” Eric Paddock asked.
“He has no military background or anything like that,” he added. “He’s a guy who lived in a house in Mesquite and drove down and gambled in Las Vegas.”
He said Stephen Paddock had recently texted him to ask how their mother was faring after Hurricane Irma.
What about the ISIS claim?.
The Islamic State claimed on Monday that the gunman was “a Soldier of the Islamic State,” but the group did not provide any evidence for its claim. It has previously made false claims about its role in some terrorist attacks.
Aaron Rouse, the F.B.I. special agent in charge in Las Vegas, said htat so far there was no proof that Mr. Paddock had links to any international terrorist organization.
Citing a “source,” the terror group’s Amaq news agency said the assailant had “responded to calls for targeting Coalition countries.”
That phrase is a reference to a famous 2014 speech by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, a former ISIS spokesman, who called for sympathizers around the world to carry out violence in the group’s name on the soil of countries involved in the fight against ISIS.
In a second bulletin about the Las Vegas shooting, Amaq said the attacker had converted to Islam months earlier.
How did the shooting unfold?
The first reports of the shooting came at 10:08 p.m. local time. Officers were overheard on police radio channels reporting that they were pinned down by gunfire. Shortly before midnight, the Las Vegas police reported that “one suspect is down,” and soon after, the police said they did not believe there were any more active gunmen.
The ROUTE 91 Harvest Festival bills itself as “three days of country music on the Vegas Strip,” and Sunday night’s performance was the last of the festival. The site of the concert, the Las Vegas Village and Festival Grounds, operated by MGM Resorts, sprawls over 15 acres and has a capacity of 40,000 people. The festival’s website said this year’s three-day concert was sold out.
Tenaja Floyd of Boise, Idaho, said many of the people around her in the concert crowd thought at first that the sounds came from fireworks, but “I knew immediately, that wasn’t fireworks.” She said her mother, Jennifer, threw her to the ground and lay on top of her to protect her. As people started running out of the venue, she said, they thought they might be trampled, so they decided to join the rush to leave.
Video of the shooting captured nine seconds of continuous rapid fire, followed by 37 seconds of silence from the weapon and panicked screaming from the crowd. Gunfire then erupted again in at least two more bursts, both shorter than the first.
In the confusion after the shooting, the police also descended on the Ali Baba Restaurant, about a 10-minute drive from the Mandalay Bay, and investigated reports of a shooting at the New York-New York Hotel and Casino, not far from the concert ground.
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