Raw audio was released Friday of a Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino security guard reporting the early shots of a mass shooting that left 58 dead and about 500 wounded outside the hotel.
On the 24-second recording released by MGM Resorts International, security guard Jesus Campos can be heard talking to a dispatcher about shots being fired on the 32nd floor of the high-rise hotel.
“Hey, there are shots fired in 32-135,” he says.
The number was a reference to the hotel room where gunman Stephen Paddock had collected a large number of weapons and was preparing to open fire on a large crowd gathered across the street for the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival.
Campos was shot in the leg as he approached the room. The 64-year-old gunman had positioned cameras on the hotel room door and on a cart outside, and shot some 200 rounds through the door as Campos was outside, hitting the security guard once, police said.
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The 25-year-old Campos has only spoken publicly about the shooting once, on Ellen DeGeneres’ television show, where he described how he had called in his report of shots fired to hotel security after having been shot in the leg.
Neither the police nor the hotel have said when hotel authorities notified police. Paddock’s shooting rampage went on from inside the hotel room for 10 uninterrupted minutes.
There is no time stamp on the audio released by MGM and officials offered no explanation as to why they chose to release it Friday.
It’s been two weeks since law enforcement officials have provided new information about the shooting, and continuing questions about the timeline have invited a wide range of conspiracy theories.
At a news conference on Oct. 13, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said that an earlier timeline released by police, which suggested Paddock had shot Campos at 9:59 p.m., six minutes before he started firing on the crowd, may not have been correct. Instead, Lombardo said, 9:59 p.m. was when the security guard first reported that he’d encountered a doorway that Paddock had blocked.
Both hotel officials and police say Campos reported “shots fired” very shortly after he was shot, and shortly before the fusillade began at 10:05 p.m.
Since there is no time stamp, the new recording neither proves nor disproves that.
