In just 11 minutes, Stephen Paddock turned a Las Vegas music festival into a killing field.
From his 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay hotel, he fired more than 1,000 rounds into a crowd of 22,000 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on October 1, 2017, killing 60 people and wounding more than 800.
When police reached the room, the 64-year-old high-rolling gambler was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, surrounded by rifles and explosives. It was clear he never intended to walk out of his suite alive.
But he left no manifesto. No note. No explanation for the carnage. Nine years later, the tragedy at Route 91 Harvest stands as a devastating milestone in American history.
As the nation’s deadliest mass shooting by an individual gunman, it spurred debate on firearms laws, specifically on the bump stocks Paddock had used.
These attachments, which allow a semiautomatic rifle to fire repeatedly with just one pull of the trigger, were banned by the Trump administration in 2018, although the move was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2024.
In the wake of the shooting, hospitals improved triage and mass-casualty protocols, police departments increased training for sniper attacks, and organizers of open-air events added aerial surveillance and other heightened security measures. The shooting also prompted significant legal turmoil, with MGM Resorts finalizing an $800 million payout to survivors and affected relatives in 2020.
Yet despite the lasting impact on gun and emergency response policies nine years on, Route 91 has largely faded from the national consciousness, overshadowed by the endless stream of mass shootings that followed.
But for the survivors, who have told Daily Mail they relive those 11 minutes almost every day, October 1, 2017 has never ended.
Stephen Paddock, 64, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside the Mandalay Bay Hotel after he open fired on the Route 91 music festival from the 32nd floor
60 concert attendees were killed and hundreds more were wounded after Paddock fired over 1,000 rounds at the Las Vegas Village
People run from the Route 91 Harvest country music festival after apparent gun fire was heard
‘Many people forget it even happened,’ survivor Russell Bleck, 37, told the Daily Mail.
Yet for Bleck, sporting a ‘Vegas Strong’ tattoo on his forearm, it ‘feels like it happened just a year ago. It is really crazy as time doesn’t seem to pass after this.’
Before unleashing his 11 minutes of horror, Paddock meticulously planned the attack.
After checking into Mandalay Bay days earlier, he made repeated trips to his 32nd-floor suite, hauling more than 20 bags of guns and ammunition – sometimes with help from a bellman.
When staff questioned the mountain of luggage, Paddock said it was for a family reunion. As a high roller and regular at the Mandalay, he enjoyed privileges that ordinary guests did not.
To keep watch over possible approaching law enforcement, Paddock installed surveillance cameras in the corridor – placing one strategically on a room service trolley – before using a hammer to shatter two panoramic windows.
When hotel security guard Jesus Campos came to check on an open-door alarm, Paddock shot him through the suite door around the same time he started firing on the concertgoers below.
Amid the chaos, authorities had difficulty pinpointing where the bullets were coming from, and once they did, it took officers an hour to finally enter his suite.
‘I still have nightmares almost nightly about that night, October 1, 2017,’ Bleck said. ‘I wake up naturally on my own without an alarm at 7am every morning because of the nightmares.’
Bleck, 37, and his now wife Breanna, 36, were both high earners enjoying the Las Vegas lifestyle when they attended country music singer’s Jason Aldean’s performance on the third night of the festival.
Russell and Breanna Bleck were in the VIP lounge watching Jason Aldean perform when the first shots rang out
The Blecks have since moved to a quiet town in Ohio, away from crowds and their lucrative careers
But haunted by the memory of concertgoers being shot as they fled the VIP lounge, the couple told the Daily Mail they left Las Vegas and walked away from their lucrative careers in Sin City.
‘Life has extremely changed. We both had killer careers. We were career driven and worked so hard to get where we were only to have this happen and set us completely back to the beginning,’ Bleck said.
The Blecks now live in Ohio, in a small town of 700 people off of Lake Erie, far away from large crowds.
The Blecks aren’t the only survivors still reeling from the senseless massacre.
Natalie Grumet was celebrating being cancer free for ten years when she heard what she thought were fireworks – then felt a searing pain that made her think her face ‘was on fire.’
A bullet had shattered her jaw, leaving her critically injured.
Fifteen surgeries later, Grumet, 46, told the Daily Mail she is grateful for her recovery, though the resulting post-traumatic stress disorder has been ‘very challenging’ and the survivor’s guilt ‘really hard’ to overcome.
‘I had to heal mentally, physically and emotionally. I had surgery after surgery. I dealt with a lot of night terrors,’ she said. Having survived cancer and a mass shooting, Grumet now works as a motivational speaker in California.
Natalie Grumet, 46, was shot in the face during Stephen Paddock’s rampage
Grumet required 15 corrective surgeries to repair her jaw, which was shattered by a bullet
Identical twin sisters Natalia and Gianna Baca were also shot at the festival. Gianna still has bullet fragments in her hip, and Natalia’s wounds were so severe that she had to be intubated at the hospital.
‘October 1 will always be a part of who we are,’ said the twins, both 26 and still living in Las Vegas.
‘There was so much more to healing than recovering from being shot. There was fear, trauma, survivor’s guilt and trying to understand why we got to walk away when so many other people didn’t.’
In attempting to decipher what led Paddock to attack, authorities found few clues of what was to come in his background.
A former mail carrier, real estate investor, pilot and federal tax auditor with no known criminal record, Paddock led a seemingly unremarkable existence in a quiet Mesquite, Nevada, retirement community just 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
Yet, detectives uncovered troubling financial clues in the lead-up to the rampage.
A high-stakes video poker player, Paddock had suffered substantial gambling losses during the prior two years, and in the days before the attack, wired $100,000 to his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, who was visiting relatives in the Philippines at the time.
Observers, too, have spent years searching for Paddock’s motive. One theory, fueled by an FBI interview with a fellow casino gambler who knew him, suggested that Paddock was upset by the way casinos treated him and other high rollers and he ‘snapped.’
A small arsenal of rifles and explosives was found inside Paddock’s hotel suite
The Mandalay Bay Hotel, pictured in 2017 shortly after Paddock open fired from the 32nd floor
Photo released by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Force Investigation Team Report shows the interior of the Mandalay Bay hotel room 32-134 towards bathroom
The unnamed gambler told the FBI that the Mandalay Bay was ‘not treating Paddock well because a player of his status should have been in a higher floor in a penthouse.’
Las Vegas police pushed back on that theory in 2022, stating there was no strong indication that Paddock’s actions were driven by resentment toward casinos.
Another theory suggested that Paddock was influenced by a desire to achieve infamy similar to his bank robber father, who landed on the FBI’s most wanted list in 1969 after escaping prison and evading capture for ten years.
Several other far-fetched theories, such as a connection to ISIS, a botched arms deal and the idea of an accomplice, have been debunked over the years.
Ultimately, the FBI announced that it had failed to determine a singular motive for the attack.
‘Throughout his life, Paddock went to great lengths to keep his thoughts private, and that extended to his final thinking about this mass murder,’ the FBI stated in a 2019 report.
‘Active shooters rarely have a singular motive or reason for engaging in a mass homicide.’
Not even his brother, Eric Paddock, could make sense of the slaying.
In a raw and emotional interview with reporters less than 24 hours after the shooting, Eric said his ‘heart is torn and destroyed for all these people but I can’t tell you why Steve did what he did.’
A 2018 examination of Paddock’s brain by Dr Hannes Vogel, the director of neuropathology at Stanford University, concluded that the shooter had not had a stroke, tumor or other abnormality that could explain the attack.
Four months before the rampage, Paddock had been prescribed and picked up an order for diazepam (Valium), an anti-anxiety medication that can lead to aggressive behavior.
Paddock’s brother, Eric, gave an emotional interview after his brother’s rampage
‘There is something that happened that drove him into this pit of hell. I am praying for some data points, otherwise there is no other rationalization,’ Eric said.
‘He didn’t plan this for 35 years – whatever happened to my brother happened over the course of months.’
Evidence suggests that Paddock explored multiple other targets during his planning.
Investigators found that he had been researching large venues as early as May 2017, including Fenway Park in Boston, and in August had reserved a room at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago overlooking Grant Park where the Lollapalooza festival was taking place, although he never checked in.
Then, in September, he stayed at The Ogden in downtown Las Vegas during the Life Is Beautiful festival, reserving units that faced the outdoor event.
His internet searches around the same time included questions about open-air concert venues, SWAT weapons and tactics, ballistics and explosives.
Investigators were never able to establish definitively whether he intended to attack those earlier events.
When approached by the Daily Mail to speak on the ninth anniversary of the shooting, Eric declined to be interviewed. Danley also declined to comment.
For many survivors of the Route 91 Harvest Festival, the shooting did not end when the gunfire stopped. Some have continued to struggle with PTSD, and several survivors have died by suicide.
One of the most painful examples is Telemachus Orfanos, a 27-year-old Navy veteran who survived the Las Vegas shooting, only to be killed just over a year later in the Borderline Bar & Grill shooting in Thousand Oaks, California.
For Grumet, the Bacas and the Blecks, going down the conspiracy rabbit hole holds no appeal.
Grumet now works as a motivational speaker in California
Grumet told the Daily Mail she has made a choice to let go of the unanswered questions surrounding Paddock’s motive
‘I just had to make a choice for myself that I couldn’t let myself get lost down that road, because what would really come of it. Would any good come of it?’ Grumet said.
Obsessing over Paddock’s motive wouldn’t change what happened to her or aid her recovery, she said.
On October 2, the day after the anniversary, survivors and supporters will gather at the festival grounds for the groundbreaking of the permanent Forever One Memorial. In the years since the shooting, the grounds have been paved over for a parking lot for Raiders football games, with two acres in the northeast corner reserved for ‘a place of healing and remembrance.’
‘We may never have an answer to every question surrounding that night,’ the Bacas said, ‘and learning to live without every answer has unfortunately become part of our healing too.’
