Police release 16th batch of records from Las Vegas shooting
More than 10 months after the mass shooting on the Strip, Las Vegas police on Wednesday released another batch of records from the Oct. 1 attack.
It marked the 16th court-ordered release since early May of Metropolitan Police Department audio, video or documents from the tragedy, which left 58 concertgoers dead and hundreds more injured.
The new batch consisted of 22 body camera videos, which varied from about 30 seconds to 30 minutes in length. All captured scenes from sometime after the shooting ended, including some footage from within the Route 91 Harvest festival venue and some from surrounding areas of the Strip.
In one video, a team of officers responds to a disturbance call at the Excalibur. As the team moves through the casino, the officers shout at people playing slot machines to put their hands up.
“Only in Vegas would you still be (expletive) playing,“ an officer can be heard saying.
In another video, as a Metro officer speeds south on Interstate 15, a report of an officer near the festival venue with a gunshot wound to the neck comes over the radio.
“Just so we’re clear, if any of us is shot, we’re not waiting for medical to figure their (expletive) out, ‘cause it’s going to take an hour,” the officer said. “We’re going straight to the hospital. We’re going to toss them in the back of our car, the trunk, whatever we gotta do.”
Later, while waiting for orders at an outdoor staging area in the same video, one officer told a group of others that if they were injured, tourniquets should be used on them before other injured people.
“I’d like to save at least one of us first,” he said.
A separate video, filmed near the Mandarin Oriental, shows an officer explaining the many nearby roadblocks and casino lockdowns to straggling pedestrians on the nearly empty Strip.
“That’s fine. That’s fine,” one man says. “I understand y’all got a job to do. I ain’t mad about that.”
The man quickly adds another question: “How’s that officer doing? Have you heard anything?”
“I have not,” the officer says.
Two responding officers were injured Oct. 1. Off-duty officer Charleston Hartfield, who was at the festival with his wife, was killed.
“Well, good luck to you,” the man replies. “Be safe.”
“Thank you,” the officer replies.
Police previously released more than 3,000 pages of witness statements and officer reports, as well as 911 calls and other body camera footage. A Las Vegas Review-Journal examination of those records found that many officers experienced communication problems during the mass shooting response.
The newspaper and other media organizations sued for the records in the days after the shooting. Metro fought their release for months.
Metro released its own 187-page report on the shooting investigation in early August. A separate FBI report will not be ready until sometime after the one-year anniversary, according to The Associated Press.
Contact Rachel Crosby at rcrosby@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290. Follow @rachelacrosby on Twitter. Review-Journal staff writers Henry Brean and Jamie Munks contributed to this report.
