Trump meets Vegas victims; he says U.S. in mourning, cites bravery

LAS VEGAS -- President Donald Trump visited hospital bedsides and a police base in Las Vegas on Wednesday, offering prayers and condolences to the victims of Sunday night's shooting massacre and thanking the first responders and doctors who rushed to save lives.

"America is truly a nation in mourning," the president declared days after a gunman on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel and casino opened fire on the crowd at an outdoor country music festival below.

The attack killed at least 58 people and injured 527, many from gunfire, others from chaotic efforts to escape. The gunman killed himself as officers approached his hotel room.

Trump's visit came as Marilou Danley, the longtime girlfriend of the gunman, Stephen Paddock, returned to the United States from her native Philippines and spent the day undergoing questioning by the FBI.

In Las Vegas, the president spoke of the families who "tonight will go to bed in a world that is suddenly empty."

"Our souls are stricken with grief for every American who lost a husband or a wife, a mother or a father, a son or a daughter," he said. "We know that your sorrow feels endless. We stand together to help you carry your pain."

His words in Las Vegas contrasted with his trip a day earlier to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, where he spoke of the "expensive" recovery effort on the island and highlighted the relatively low death toll there compared with "a real catastrophe like [Hurricane] Katrina" in 2005.

On Wednesday, Trump took a grim tour of the city, meeting face to face with victims and first responders. He spent about four hours in the city still reeling from the worst U.S. mass shooting in recent years.

In prepared remarks, he spoke of the courage displayed by those who risked or lost their lives saving loved ones and total strangers. He described an eyewitness account of police officers standing as bullets slammed around them and trying to direct concertgoers to safety.

He described a military veteran who had rushed to the scene in search of loved ones but quickly turned to helping victims, using plastic barriers as makeshift stretchers for the injured and frantically searching for anything he could use to make splints.

"The example of those whose final act was to sacrifice themselves for those they love should inspire all of us to show more love every day for the people who grace our lives," Trump said.

His first stop was the University Medical Center, where he spent 90 minutes meeting privately with victims, their families and medical professionals. Trump said he'd met "some of the most amazing people," including some who'd been "very, very badly wounded" because they'd refused to flee the shooting scene.

Trump said he'd invited some of those that he'd met to visit the White House if they're ever in Washington. And he commended the doctors for doing an "indescribable" job.

Trump then headed to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police headquarters, where he met with officers, dispatchers and others who'd responded to the shooting Sunday night.

"You showed the world, and the world is watching," he told them, "and you showed what professionalism is all about."

Until his final remarks, Trump focused his comments during the trip on praising recovery efforts and offering congratulations to police officers, medical professionals and survivors, rather than on grieving the dead. At the last stop, however, he spoke slowly and somberly of the lives ended or forever altered.

'NEVER OCCURRED TO ME'

Danley, 62, said Wednesday that she had no inkling of the massacre Paddock was plotting when he sent her on a trip abroad to see her family. She issued the statement after arriving in the U.S from the Philippines and undergoing questioning.

"He never said anything to me or took any action that I was aware of that I understood in any way to be a warning that something horrible like this was going to happen," Danley said in a statement read by her lawyer outside FBI headquarters in Los Angeles.

Danley, who was out of the country for more than two weeks, said she was initially pleased when Paddock wired her money in the Philippines to buy a house for her family. But she later feared it was a way to break up with her.

"It never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that he was planning violence against anyone," she said.

Danley, who has been called a "person of interest" by investigators, said she loved Paddock as a "kind, caring, quiet man" and hoped they would have a future together. She said she was devastated by the carnage and she would cooperate with authorities as they work to get inside Paddock's mind.

Investigators are busy reconstructing his life, behavior and the people he encountered in the weeks leading up to the shooting, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said. That includes examining his computer and cellphone.

But as of Wednesday, investigators couldn't come up with a motive for the attack.

"This individual and this attack didn't leave the sort of immediately accessible thumbprints that you find on some mass casualty attacks," McCabe said.

The 64-year-old high-stakes gambler and real estate investor specifically requested an upper-floor room with a view of the music festival, according to a person who has seen hotel records turned over to investigators.

The room, which goes for $590, was given to Paddock free because he was a good customer who wagered tens of thousands of dollars each time he visited the casino, said the person, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Authorities have said Paddock took 23 weapons in 10 suitcases into the room and set up cameras inside and out to watch for police closing in on him.

At a Wednesday evening news conference, however, Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters that none of the cameras Paddock put up in the hotel room were recording.

The sheriff also gave a timeline of the shooting. The first shots began at 10:05 p.m. Sunday and ended 10 minutes later.

When a security guard approached his hotel room, Paddock sprayed 200 rounds into the hallway, Lombardo said. The guard was hit only in the leg, however, and he proceeded to help police officers clear out rooms on the 32nd floor of the hotel, Lombardo said.

The sheriff added that Paddock planned to survive and escape, but didn't say how.

Still, investigators had little to work with in trying to determine what set Paddock off.

While he had a passion for high-stakes gambling at Nevada casinos, his game of choice was video poker, a relatively solitary pursuit with no dealer and no humans to play against. And while neighbors described Paddock as friendly, he wasn't close to them.

"He was a private guy. That's why you can't find out anything about him," his brother, Eric Paddock, said from his home in Florida. As for what triggered the massacre, the brother said, "something happened that drove him into the pit of hell."

COUPLE'S RELATIONSHIP

It was in a casino where Stephen Paddock met his girlfriend, who was a high-limit hostess for Club Paradise at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa in Reno, Eric Paddock said.

"They were adorable -- big man, tiny woman. He loved her. He doted on her," Eric said Tuesday in Florida. The two often gambled side by side, he added.

But employees at a Starbucks in Mesquite, Nev., described the couple's relationship differently. A supervisor at the coffee shop told the Los Angeles Times that Paddock often berated Danley in public. The Starbucks is the only one in town and is inside the Virgin River Casino.

"It happened a lot," Esperanza Mendoza, supervisor of the Starbucks, told the Times. He would verbally abuse Danley when she asked to use his casino card to buy food or other things inside the casino, Mendoza said.

"He would glare down at her and say -- with a mean attitude -- 'You don't need my casino card for this. I'm paying for your drink, just like I'm paying for you.' Then she would softly say, 'OK' and step back behind him. He was so rude to her in front of us."

Danley's sisters in Australia, where authorities confirmed Danley is a citizen, said in a TV interview that they believe that Paddock sent her away so she wouldn't interfere with his murderous plans.

According to court records, Danley may have lived with Paddock as early as August 2013, while she was still married to another man, Geary Danley of Bella Vista, Ark.

Geary and Marilou Danley were married in Las Vegas in 1990. According to court records, they jointly filed for divorce on Feb. 25, 2015, and the divorce was finalized the next day. During her divorce, Marilou Danley listed a downtown Reno apartment as her address. Property records show the apartment was owned by Paddock.

Paddock invested and sold several properties in recent years as a way to make money, according to relatives and property records. Neighbors at two other properties owned by Paddock in Reno and Mesquite said Danley lived with Paddock at those places as well and often disappeared with him for long stretches -- sometimes for months at a time -- during his visits to casinos.

At one point, Danley worked for an airline based out of the San Francisco Bay Area, said one longtime neighbor in Reno, where Danley and Paddock lived together in a retirement community. She later worked for Avon, the cosmetic sales company, and tried to sell those products to other residents, Elizabeth Tyee said.

Danley traveled all the time, and when she was at the home she shared with Paddock in the retirement community in Reno, Tyee said, it was never for very long. Danley would show up every three or four months and stay for no more than 10 days, Tyee said.

Paddock wired $100,000 to the Philippines days before the shooting, a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly because of the continuing investigation said on condition of anonymity. Investigators are trying to trace that money.

Paddock had no known criminal history. Public records contained no indication of any financial problems, and his brother described him as a wealthy real estate investor.

Stephen Paddock stockpiled 47 guns since 1982 and bought 33 of them, mostly rifles, over the past year alone, right up until three days before the attack, Jill Snyder, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told CBS on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, Lombardo, the Las Vegas sheriff, said Paddock had 1,600 rounds of ammunition and several containers of an explosive commonly used in target shooting that totaled 50 pounds in his car. The sheriff said he didn't know what Paddock was planning with the explosives, if anything.

Trump, as he has done all week, on Wednesday batted away questions about whether the shooting warranted taking a fresh look at tougher gun controls.

"We're not going to talk about that today," he said. "We won't talk about that."

Information for this article was contributed by Jill Colvin, Catherine Lucey, Ken Thomas, Ken Ritter, Michael Balsamo, Brian Melley, Jim Gomez, Teresa Cerojano, Andrew Dalton, Richard Lardner, Eric Tucker, Sadie Gurman and Tami Abdollah of The Associated Press and by William Wan, Sandhya Somashekhar, Aaron C. Davis, Marwa Eltagouri, Barbara Liston, Ally Gravina, William Dauber, Julie Tate and Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post.

A Section on 10/05/2017