Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Vegas: The Endless Itch That Demands Scratching

h/t WRSA and Captain's Journal


So, comes out the info-tidbit that a helicopter, falsely "squawking" the transponder code for an inbound scheduled commuter jet flight, was hovering and then departing from the rooftop helipad of the hotel to the immediate west of the Mandalay Bay, with that departure just after the shooting stopped, and before police arrived either at the MB suite, or overhead in a police helicopter.
"Flight records and information obtained by Intellihub show that at least one assailant may have been extracted via helicopter for a 10:21 p.m. EXFIL from the southwest rooftop of the Delano Hotel just four minutes before Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department helicopter N911WY arrived in the vicinity for the first time since shots were fired at crowd goers attending the Route 91 Harvest Music festival"
RTWT

1) The Delano is still within the effective range of .223 weapon or weapons shooting minute-of-massive-crowd.

2) The east tower rooftop end appears to have a platform at that eastern end, allowing someone to see over the 15' tall rooftop parapet, directly at the concert crowd in question.

3) Rounds fired from that point at the crowd pass the Mandalay Bay tower in close proximity to the suite Paddock was found dead in, creating the exact false echo location problem I mentioned, with supersonic bullet cracks coming at the beaten zone of the target venue just about exactly 1 second behind the source point, from the 4+ acre wall of glass of the MB's north and southeast 43-story wing walls.
Which phenomenon, exactly as noted, including by me, only about twenty times since the incident, is something well-known, going back to military snipers like Carlos Hathcock only as early as the year 1965, and used by him that far back precisely to fool targets about from where they were being shot.

4) This gives you a second shooter (if necessary), or a primary shooter, with Paddock simply being DOA, getting cold, and waiting to be discovered, while allowing the actual shooter(s) all the time in the world to stroll over, step into their bird, and depart. If they used brass catchers, they're effectively invisible afterwards. They'd probably even have time for a second person or team, unarmed and unsuspected, to sanitize the shooting roost before departing inside the building, at their leisure.

5) You still need someone to shoot (and miss 199 times) 200 rounds at Mall Cop Campos, and then either step out, unscrew the stairwell door, rescrew it from the stair side, and depart up or down unseen and unknown; or else even easier, simply walk a few doors down the corridor on floor 32 at MB, enter another (uninvolved) room, and wait to be escorted out as a "frightened bystander" by LVMPD an hour and change later.

6) Which also tells you where the missing video camera flash drives and laptop hard drive walked away to, if they were ever present in the room during the shooting to begin with.
QED

FWIW: This is what actual facts look like: they explain things better, and they don't confuse it further by bringing up more questions than they answer.

Continued unknown: who, and why.

All of which is rampant speculation (which doesn't make it wrong per se). Just entirely unverified guessing.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

AESOP,

Just saw this. No information if credible: https://vimeo.com/240383357

Aesop said...

It's horseshit from a confused tower operator with zero situational awareness, and just trying to be prudent with numerous inbound heavies loaded with potential victims.

You had hysterical people in cabs ninety seconds after the shooting telling the cabbie they saw "thousands" of dead people. Which turned out to be 58. Wee difference.

And some good number of the 21,400 uninjured mob who fled the shooting breached airport property fences in their quest to get out of the kill zone, which triggers nine thousand kinds of official problems and reaction, from airport cops one step above Paul Blart Mall Cop levels of training for actual emergencies.

Take EVERY report of shooters, hither and yon within five miles of the target site, and shitcan them. Unless you also have shell casings, dead people on site, and HD video evidence, it's all Bigfoot sightings by blind people: blind with hysterical fight-or-flight panic, playing "telephone", and unaccustomed to dealing with stress and adrenaline 99.99999% of their lives beyond their burger being cold, or getting the wrong dipping sauce for their McNuggets.

This is exactly why prosecutors and police detectives want physical evidence over "eyewitless" testimony, in nearly every case. People are not video cameras, and they mis-remember and invent shit to fill in the blanks in their memory, with a demonstrable and remorseless propensity to accuse the innocent, ignore the guilty, and make the rest up out of whole cloth.

See "fisherman's stories, and other lies".

RSR said...

Aesop -- worth noting that cops in Dateline or 60min interview, whatever it was, mentioned LAPTOPS, in the plural. Yet only discussion of one laptop w/ missing hard drive...

Secondly, how much analysis can be done on the brain of (self-inflicted?) gunshot wound to the head? Last week cops were rolling that out as a major investigative angle instead of more traditional leads...

RSR said...

*Cops that made entry to that suite.

RSR said...

Delano looks to be ~500 yards before elevation additions vs 300 for Mandalay for the same... Given 5.56 and AFAIK no GSW victims having died following hospitalization, a 500 yard range makes more sense...
At 500 yards, 5.56 is ~200 ft/lbs energy which is about the same as 22lr at muzzle... At 300 yards, 5.56 is ~450 ft lbs which is approx .40 s&w energy at muzzle...

Again, Aesop your ER expertise might shed some more light here.

Aesop said...

Re: the laptops: it's swiss cheese analysis: there are so many holes, you can never tell what's missing.

As far as 5.56, the rule of thumb for ERs is that those with pistol bullet injuries tend to live, and rifle victims tend to die, due to energy delivered, minus the holy grail of location, location, location.
IOW, a bullet to the brain from a .22LR kills much better than a hit to the foot with a .44Mag or .30-06.

The survival rate for Vegas is what one would expect from <200 victims delivered to a Level I trauma center 5 minutes' travel from the scene of the shooting, given spray-n-pray marksmanship.

A guy doing scoped .308 kill shots one-per-five-seconds would have killed twice as many people, but only fired 1/10th as many shots in the same ten-minute rampage. But that's circa-1900 technology, and ain't nobody going to strike terror into people's hearts (except the immediate victims) using a deer rifle your great-grandfather owned.

But scatter 23 black rifle props, with super-high-cap magazines, and an eeeevil bump-fire spray-n-pray stock, and you have a perfect storm of hysteria, which still did NOTHING except reveal the incompetence or deliberate obfuscation of the investigation by the feds, which in my mind is tantamount to outright announcing this was Operation Even Faster & Furiouser, on steroids.

And it failed.

But it informs us that to TPTB, innocent bystanders are cannon fodder to get their gun-banning agenda implemented. And it also indicates that next time (and there will be a next time), they'll follow the old Hollywood maxim of every catastrophic stunt:
"More! Bigger!! Faster!!!"

Aesop said...

And proof of the pudding:
WhoTF has laptopS?? Most people own ONE at a time, not multiple ones, and they don't tote multiples around.
Just like they don't tote 23 rifles up to a room to do a shooting that, at worst, might require 2-4.

A Texan said...

This entire incident is getting to be like the "Hitler survived WW2 and lived in South America" conspiracies - in the sense that there is SOOOO much BS that has come out, along with a few facts, that it is getting to be pretty much impossible to tell what is truth, and what is fiction. Which, by itself, leads me to believe that this was the intention. I'm no police officer or detective, but I could have easily designed a more effective investigation just from watching a bunch of detective shows on the boob tube. That the FBI hasn't (not CAN'T, but HASN'T) done a better job is indicative of purpose. Nobody phucks up this badly by accident.

Now the only question is: "Why?" NOT why did someone do this shooting, but "Why was the investigation willfully phucked up this badly?" I have my own theory, but that's for another time.

Jennifer said...

Daily mail reporting the sheriff announcing a COP had a weapon discharge in paddocks room during investigation...

Anonymous said...

Has Mayor di Blasio issued the routine exoneration of Islam for today's terror attack yet?

Jennifer said...

You are following events in manhattan, right?...

Anonymous said...

Same old equine excrement: "lone wolf...self-radicalized...travel and shop, shop and travel, see something/say something...and remember, we are not canceling the Halloween Parade...blah, blah, blah"

Funny, 16 year since 9/11, 24 since first WTC attack, and all these wolves sure seem to look like they come from the same pack. And by now, we have rounded up enough of them to make several packs.

Aesop said...

Whatever.

Round them all up, and deport to country of origin.
If their home countries won't accept delivery, try dropping them from a C-130 at altitude.

This is going to continue until any given person reaches one of two possible viewpoints:
1) "It's better that I die than that they get deported." or
2) "I'll see your jihad, and raise you one crusade."
There is no third option.

Islam, and Western democratic republics are mutually incompatible worldviews.
You can't co-exist in a cage with a hungry tiger.
You either get a gun, or sit in his food bowl.
Choose.

RSR said...

AFAIK, only one of the cops that made entry into the room was not on the TV show interview.

Doug Poppa (former LV PD and MGM security consultant) has repeatedly reported on shots fired since the shooting happened -- was transmitted over unsecured police radio... Also, the lead investigators for LV PD have been the officer involved shooting FIT team, not homicide detectives: http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/charge-las-vegas-mandalay-bay-shooting-investigation/2017/10/25

Here's his take on the Lombardo news: http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/sheriff-lombardo-admits-las-vegas-swat-officer-fired-weapon-suite/2017/10/31

Poppa wrote this before the Lombardo press conference and very much recommend reading: http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/trust-anything-sheriff-lombardo-mgm-resorts-international-say/2017/10/30
"Why trust anything Sheriff Lombardo or MGM Resorts International say
[...]
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo who runs the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) had the nerve to tell the public, “I don’t want anybody to think that they are unsafe by staying in one of our hotels.”

That was very nice of Lombardo to plug the hotels, his corporate supporters who helped put him in office.
[...]
What the public was told at several press briefings that were held by Lombardo and Undersheriff Kevin McMahill was nothing short of convoluted timelines, hotel check-in dates of the gunman and in the words of Lombardo, “unverified” information.

Lombardo assumed that the public in their need for information about the massacre wanted to be fed false and misleading nonsense apparently obtained from an inept police investigation that couldn’t even get simple facts nailed down from the start."
Click above for balance which is a great summary of LV PD errors and omissions to date; again, highly recommend.

All of Poppa's articles can be found here: http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/author/doug-poppa

RSR said...

Aesop -- in regards to 5.56, @ 350 yards, it should have been above 2k fps at that range. At 550 yards, it should have been above 1500 fps...

If the goal of the shooter was to kill/maim and alleged shooter being meticulous, etc, one would think that he would have used ballistic tips, hollow point, soft point, etc, ammo that would have been more devastating at expected ranges/velocities than FMJ...

Given 2600 fps/~150 yard fragmentation for FMJ, we know the shooter was beyond that... But given ~50 folks allegedly in critical care (IIRC) due to GSW injuries (many likely torso), one would think that even at 350 yards given hydrostatic, etc, effects, that injuries would be greater than they are... Just food for thought. Too much stinks here to immediately discount.

Just wondering if a longer 500-600 yard range of the Delano might be more plausible given extent or lack of critical, life-ending injuries?

Time -- not much evac appeared to happen during 15 minutes shooting. So timeline from shot to hospital was likely above 30 minutes from shot to ER for most folks. More time to treatment. No idea how efficient ER triage was at getting serious injuries in place. This piece is interesting: http://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/10/07/in-the-minutes-and-hours-after-the-las-vegas-shooting-heres-what-an-emergency-room-nurse-from-utah-saw/
First arrived at 10:20 and treated until 3:30. 12 dead on arrival, 4 more died in ER.

Speaking of ER, saw video interview one nurse who claimed she got a call at 9:30 pm to come back in after just leaving shift at 9pm... Shooting not starting until after 10. Who knows accuracy of that recollection though.

RSR said...

Intellihub posted this following the original Aesop top post source article: https://www.intellihub.com/vegas-flight-records-reveal-air-assault-extraction-possible/
"What if the entire Oct. 1 operation was conducted via an advanced air assault? Flight records show it could be likely
Preface: I want to make clear that I am in no way saying that this scenario for sure happened. I am merely reporting on data which I’ve found after scouring hundreds of hours of information, flight data records, and video footage captured between the hours of 9:40 and 10:30 p.m. on the night of October 1 (i.e. If it happened this is how it occurred.)"

And posted this prior to the original Aesop top post source article: https://www.intellihub.com/flight-records-lvmpd-helicopters-transponder-went-dark/
In brief, LV PD helicopter went dark after picking up presumable swat team; intellihub alleges that guns they're carrying are M249 saws... I personally can't tell from brief glimpse but looks a little too think for a saw.

RSR said...

Clicking around, for GSWs 2k fps seems to be the threshold between Gustillo-Anderson Type III wounds and I-II... So any shooter scenario beyond 350 yards should be considered credible based on wounds I've seen... Aesop, do you agree?

Aesop said...

1) All towns are company towns, Vegas is just monolithically moreso, given it has but one product: entertainment/lodging for same. So the sheriff anywhere is going to do the same thing Lombardo does, he just has less deniability. Watch Jaws; even Hollywood gets this. Hometown Homer knows where his bread is buttered.

2) The wounds are really immaterial, as the venue was festival seating, with people spread across a venue 50-150 yards across, and most of those hit probably can't pin down where they were when hit to within a 25y CEP. Neither can the dead, except the ones who were DRT and not moved by anyone.

3) Anyone not DRT (from head, heart, or major vessel wounds), who gets to the ER within the Golden Hour could expect a >98% chance of survival. True in Iraq/A-stan, true in Vegas.

4) What if the assault were conducted by the 82nd Airborne?
Or Navy SEALs?
Or guys firing .223 miniguns from hovering helos?
Or death ninjas from Hydra or Cobra?

Well, besides the immediate imperative to kill every one of them, then kill all the pilots, then kill everyone who knows about killing the pilots and assaulters, then kill all of them, then kill the ones who killed the ones who killed the ones who...
get the idea yet?
At some point, you have to taper the thing down.
That's why you start small.

There's nothing about this shooting that necessarily requires so much as a second shooter.
Assuming Campos is credible (though I've seen nor heard from not a single witness from floors 31, 32, or 33 at MB who heard the gunfire fired down the hall at Campos, let alone the 10 minute assault going on; WTF?? Usually they're falling all over each other to tell their "I Was There!!" story on Oprah or The View by Day 1.5), somebody had to be inside 32-135 shooting down the hall, and at the venue.
(There is absolutely no reason to presume or need it to have been Paddock.)

Aesop said...

(cont.)
The entire question is if, and who, it was. Once you get to another person besides Paddock, there's nothing that makes a shooter on the Delano better or worse for fitting the facts, it just points to a much wider conspiracy, and a bigger op in reality, than anything the Vegas Keystone Kops or Lying Fibbies have revealed or hinted at.
But positing such a hitherto-unknown Delano shooter does no harm to the facts we know, which is the strongest argument in its favor, and it explains things like the dearth of evidence from Paddock's suite, and the silence of the authorities once they realized they had nothing other than a dead body to lead them to believe Paddock was involved in any way.

Which, if you're TPTB, and you're legit, has you scared shitless. And if you're bent, and trying to make the legend fit the facts, also has you scared shitless. Because the worst frame is a bad frame, for the guys who have to try and sell it.
The next-of-kin of the framee have bigger fish to fry, and Paddock himself isn't talking to anyone.

And the video surveillance from the entry/exit and gambling floor cams (of which the FBI has sole entire custody, and of which not a single frame supporting the Paddock:Lone Shooter Theory has been forthcoming to date) may support the idea that Paddock was there doing nothing but gambling for five days, got popped in the head, and then all his toys were brought in by someone else and spread around the room.

We do know we're getting but a fraction of the truth, an unknown quantity of lies, and biblical levels of stonewalling silence, and that none of it adds up with the facts of the incident. A week's worth can be attributed to official incompetence. Everything subsequent is purely deliberate cover-up and yarn-spinning, which has reached such levels it's detectable by blind retarded kids from half a mile away.

Personally, I think the dam's going to break someday, and they won't be able to contain this indefinitely. Too many people are looking at it, involved with looking at it, and/or know enough about what really happened to keep quiet forever, and there are just way too many loose ends.

I think someone's going to find the Jesus Nut, and the whole thing will fall apart.

RSR said...

Great reply Aesop. Thank you. Quickly running through:

There were several hotel witnesses.
On 32nd floor: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Santa-Clara-woman-on-same-hotel-floor-as-Las-12246562.php
Hotel room right below Paddock's: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article177047656.html
Guy two floors below: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-las-vegas-shooting-hotel-witness-20171002-story.html
Guy 2 floors above: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-shooting-chris-bethel-below-stephen-paddock-recalls-frantic-scene/
Top floor of Mandalay: https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Woman-Captures-Las-Vegas-Shooting-From-Floors-Above-Gunman-449229133.html

RSR said...

Vegas shooting video from top of Mandalay Bay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owb-YGyKztc

Vegas shooting from the cab driver: https://youtu.be/5hXJhnNRu1E

Share both as video from Cabbie is much louder on the audio end than top floor of the hotel; top floor is 43rd (they skip numbering for 40s and 50s, so House of Blues Foundation Room where first video was shot lists at floor 63, but is in fact 43...).

Cab driver was opposite side of Mandalay from Delano during that video.

RSR said...

More info from Lombardo: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/11/02/las-vegas-shooting-paddocks-girlfriend-may-be-hiding-something-sheriff-suggests.html

"Stephen Paddock’s girlfriend may be hiding something from investigators who are trying to piece together the motive behind the Las Vegas massacre, the city’s sheriff suggested in a wide-ranging interview with a local television station.

Marilou Danley, who is still a person of interest in the case, has told authorities that she never knew the attack was coming. Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, in his first TV appearance in nearly three weeks, told KLAS that investigators he’s spoken to believe this assessment is accurate. But he added that something appears to be off about the manner in which Paddock amassed his arsenal of weapons.
“There is a lot of people that have hundreds and hundreds of guns, but for this individual to do it at a certain point in time and to do it all with such robust action, you would think that Ms. Danley would have some information associated with that,” he said. “But currently we haven’t been able to pull that out of her, if it’s in her.”

Lombardo added that Danley will be interviewed again this week and he suggested she could have prevented the massacre, which left 58 dead and hundreds injured."

"No motive for the Oct. 1 shooting has been revealed yet, but Lombardo said that since September 2015, Paddock – a high-rolling gambler – had lost a significant amount of wealth.
[...]
The sheriff said Paddock was narcissistic, had some bouts of depression and was very status-driven, based on how he liked to be recognized in the casinos and by his family and friends, which was starting to decline."

"Paddock fired off more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition from his room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino and had access to over 4,000 more, Lombardo told KLAS.

The shooting spree stopped after, according to Lombardo’s belief, Paddock realized the authorities were closing in."

"A hard drive that was missing from one of Paddock’s laptops found in the room after police entered has still not been recovered."

"Security footage obtained by police from Mandalay Bay is still being investigated and Paddock was not seen in the presence of any other individuals while moving around the property, Lombardo added."