MGM Resorts disputes police timeline of Las Vegas shooting
Spokeswoman for hotel chain says cop's account of incident 'may not be accurate.'
The owner of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino is questioning the most recent timeline of events provided by police about last week’s Las Vegas Strip massacre.
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said Monday that gunman Stephen Paddock shot and wounded a Mandalay Bay hotel security guard outside his hotel room door and sprayed 200 bullets down the hall six minutes before he opened fire Oct. 1 from his high-rise suite on a crowd at a country music festival below.
That was a different account from the one police gave last week: that Paddock shot the unarmed guard, Jesus Campos, after unleashing his barrage of fire on the crowd, where 58 people were killed and hundreds were injured.
“This remains an ongoing investigation with a lot of moving parts. As evidenced by law enforcement briefings over the past week, many facts are still unverified and continue to change as events are under review," Debra DeShong, a spokeswoman for MGM Resorts International, said in a statement Tuesday. "We cannot be certain about the most recent timeline that has been communicated publically, and we believe what is currently being expressed may not be accurate."
Las Vegas police earlier that day defended changes in the timeline.
“We can’t put Band-Aids on everything,” Officer Larry Hadfield, a spokesman for the department, told Fox News on Tuesday when asked about it. He said the information police release is what they know at the time and everything is subject to change as the investigation develops.
Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox News’ senior judicial analyst, said on “Cavuto: Coast to Coast,” that the news from the new timeline is not that the security guard was shot earlier than previously stated, but that the news was "that the agent of the hotel who should have been carrying with him a recording device -- a device which would have allowed the head of security or somebody in security to listen in – was shot at 200 times by an automatic weapon.”
He continued, “So Mandalay Bay knew of the existence and presence and workability of the automatic weapon six minutes before he started killing people. That should have triggered an enormous response,” he said, considering the argument lawyers could make to a jury, if it gets to that point.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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