Photos have been leaked of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s hotel room from which he shot dead 59 people and injured hundreds more.
The 64-year-old stationed himself on the 32nd floor room of the Mandalay Bay Hotel which overlooked the Route 91 festival where thousands were enjoying some country music.
Images obtained by Fox25Boston purport to show Paddock’s staggering arsenal of weapons.
One of the photos shows the hammer that police believe was used to smash open the windows inside the hotel room.
Authorities said on Monday that Paddock had used as many as 10 suitcases to transport the arsenal to his room in the Mandalay Bay Hotel.
Sunday’s mass shooting was the deadliest of its kind in recent US history.
One of the performers at the festival, Caleb Keeter, said he has since changed his mind on gun control in the US.
The guitarist for the Josh Abbott Band opened up on Twitter, lamenting ‘how wrong’ he had been as an advocate for the Second Admendment his ‘entire life’.
He wrote:
I’ve been a proponent of the 2nd amendment my entire life.
Until the events of last night, I cannot express how wrong I was. We actually have members of our crew with CHL licences, and legal firearms on the bus.
They were useless. We couldn’t touch them for fear police might think that we were part of the massacre and shoot us.
A small group (or one man) laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of fire power.
Enough is enough.
In a staggering section of the statement, Keeter revealed that he was so pessimistic about the shooting that he wrote farewell letters to his parents and partner.
He added:
Writing my parents and the love of my life a goodbye last night and a living will because I felt like I wasn’t going to live through the night was enough for me to realize that this is completely and totally out of hand.
These rounds were powerful enough that my crew guys just standing in a close proximity of a victim shot by this fu*king coward received shrapnel wounds.
We need gun control RIGHT. NOW.
My biggest regret is that I stubbornly didn’t realise it until my brothers on the road and myself were threatened by it.
We are unbelievably fortunate to not be among the number of victims killed or seriously wounded by this maniac.
It remains unclear what Paddock’s motive was behind the massacre. Reportedly a wealthy property owner, he made his living through ‘gambling and speculation’.
His brother Eric said he and his family were ‘dumbfounded’ by the news.
He told MSNBC:
He’s not an avid gun guy at all. The fact the had those kind of weapons is just – where the hell did he get automatic weapons? He has no military background or anything like that.
He’s just a guy who lived in a house in Mesquite, drove down and gambled in Las Vegas. He did… stuff. Ate burritos.
The family were raised in Sun Walley, California, brother Bruce Paddock told NBC.
Their dad, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was a notorious bank robber who was on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted list between 1969 and 1977.
