Las Vegas: the mysteries of the most massive shooting in American history

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The recent shooting in Las Vegas, which killed 58 people and injured more than 500, shocked the United States and the world. Many of the facts of this case have already been established: it is known, for example, that the shooter carefully prepared for the crime, and also considered several other large events as possible targets. But one of the main questions remains absolutely unclear - the motive.

About the mysteries of the most massive shooting in US history - material New York Times in translation The idealist.

The man who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub last year claimed to be an Islamic State member in a 911 call. The sniper who shot and killed five police officers in Dallas told police his goal was to target white people. The man who attacked a black church in Charleston posted a racist manifesto online.

In incidents of mass shooting, the criminals confessed to their motives: the fight against abortion, as it was during the shootings in Planned Parenthood, admitting to being an Islamic State member in a Facebook post on the day of the San Bernardino shooting, asking members of Congress if they were Republicans before a shooting at a baseball game.

But four days after the attack of Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas, which resulted in the death of 58 people and hundreds were seriously injured - his motives remain secret, despite the enormous pressure on law enforcement officers from the public.

"In the interest of the safety of this community or any other in the United States, I believe it is important to provide this information, but I don't have it," Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of the Las Vegas Police Department said in an interview Thursday. "We don't know that yet." .

No grand manifesto was found. There is no evidence of Paddock’s aggressive behavior or extremist views. Unlike past killers, he did not call the police to explain his actions.

The FBI seized Paddock's computers and cellphones and sent them to a laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, for examination. Agents interviewed his girlfriend, Marilo Danley, in an attempt to determine his mental state at the time of the shooting, but Sheriff Lombardo said he was "not at liberty to speak out" about the information they received.

Of course, investigators may stumble upon explanations of motive at any time. “I am confident that we will establish this,” Sheriff Lombardo said. Agents travel across the country, interview family members and friends of the offender and look for signs of mental illness.

Paddock left a few hints that add only new questions instead of answers: a note was found in his hotel room, the exact content of which has not yet been disclosed by the authorities. Sheriff Lombardo said that it contains numbers that are analyzed for their significance, and that this is not a manifesto or a suicide note.

Paddock may have considered other locations, including Fenway Park in Boston, Lollapalooza in Chicago, Life is Beautiful in Las Vegas, before finally settling on a hotel room in Mandalay Bay, which has clear sight lines to Route 91, and right next to a country music festival. He collected expensive firearms over many months.

Investigators identified Paddock’s 47 trunks, including a dozen in his hotel room, which were upgraded to speed up shooting, and discovered a camera system that Paddock installed to monitor the area around its location.

Mr. Paddock got into a fuel tank near McCarran International Airport, said a spokesman for the airport service, Chris Jones, although a police official doubted that the criminal was intentionally aiming there.

Despite the sheer scale of the attack, its motives remain hidden behind a huge and haunting question mark, said Stephen B. Wolfson, district attorney of Clark County, Nevada, where the killings took place. He estimates that “99 percent of the time,” the perpetrator of such a crime will offer some kind of explanation, albeit a distorted one.

“Most of the time you don’t defend it, you don’t accept it, but you hear why,” Mr. Wolfson said in an interview on Thursday. “I’ve been dealing with cases like this for a long time and I don’t remember another murder like this where it’s impossible to name a reason.”

If Paddock had been taken into custody, perhaps we would have found out why, Mr Wolfson added: "He might have said, 'that's why I did it.' But since he killed himself, we don’t know anything.”

Katherine Schweit, a former FBI employee, authored a 2013 Bureau study that looked at 160 shooting incidents in the United States. The study didn't look specifically at motivation, but Schweit says many of the underlying reasons for crime were apparent to researchers. “A broken heart, race or religion, getting fired,” she said, “in some cases the motive is more complex. This isn't the first guy whose anger we can't understand."

“I think everyone wants an answer because meaninglessness is scary,” she notes. “It reminds me of the conversations we had after 11/XNUMX.”

Experts and law enforcement veterans warn that it may take time to establish the real motives of the killer, to collect electronic data from interrogations and to establish other circumstances of life that led to extreme violence.

Officials involved in the Las Vegas investigation said they will be taking an exhaustive look into Paddock's past, spanning multiple states and decades, to understand what led him to the windows of the Mandalay Bay Hotel with such an elaborate murder plot. The FBI says they want to understand his "path to violence."

Andrew Bringuel, a former member of the FBI motive analysis unit, said that investigators are undoubtedly exploring a number of motives that include personal, economic, social or political.

“He could take revenge,” notes Bringuel, who retired this year. - This could be a personal story. He could be a sore loser. Players like to talk about their winnings, but not their losses. I worked for the FBI for a long time. This organization knows how to carefully study the nooks and crannies of life. The bureau will have a hypothesis. Whether it can prove it is a separate question.”

Paddock's father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was a repeat offender who was on the FBI’s list of the most dangerous criminals and had a medical diagnosis of a psychopath.

But his brother Eric Paddock said that his brother was not interested in politics and had no obvious financial problems. He notes his brother's method of planning an attack, but nothing more.

“He planned his actions carefully,” Eric Paddock said. “It was very Steve-like.”

Andrew J. McCabe, deputy director of the FBI, confirmed in a television interview on Wednesday that Paddock has not yet been understood. He refused to rule out the possibility that there was no reason for the violence or that the investigators could not establish it.

"This is somewhat different from many crimes of the past," McCabe commented to CNBC, "because we don't have any obviously available evidence of ideology or motivation."

Paddock, according to him, before the crime did not come into the view of the police.

However, many killers are not known to law enforcement agencies before the attacks, and some experts warn that the secret around Mr. Paddock may be less aberrational than it seems. The number of massacres in recent decades has been largely or completely unexplained.

Photo: video frame

Investigators never found a convincing motive in the 1966 massacre of the year at the University of Texas, which was often described as the first modern mass shuting in which sniper Charles Whitman killed an 14 man by shooting a clock tower after killing his family.

Other attacks have taken months to explain in detail, like the killing of 12 people at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater in July 2012.

George Brauchler, the district attorney who led the prosecution of James Holmes of Aurora, said it was only after prosecutors received Mr. Holmes' journal and a thorough psychiatric evaluation that they were sure of the motive. That information, Mr. Brauchler said, convinced them that Mr. Holmes turned to violence under crushing feelings of professional failure and sexual rejection. Mr Holmes has also been treated for mental health problems and has been described by his defense as schizophrenic.

However, Mr. Brauchler said that his office had important information about Mr. Holmes’s mind for several days after the shooting, including information about a break with the girl. Las Vegas case is completely different, he said.

“The worst thing,” says Brauchler, “is never finding a motive.”

Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama professor who has studied mass shootings, said the killer's motive can be skewed by incomplete or incorrect information. He cited Orlando as an example: Omar Matain, an Orlando militant, was driven by fundamentalist views, and also supported the Islamic State and expressed affinity with the Hezbollah militant group.

“In many cases, even when they state a motive, it is for public effect,” says Lankford, “that is not necessarily the true explanation for their actions.”

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