Mandalay Bay Hotel Owner Sues 1,000 Las Vegas Shooting Victims
MGM Resorts International, the owner of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas wherein a gunman rained down deadly fire on a crowd below last year, is suing more than 1,000 of the victims of the incident.
In October last year, slain gunman Stephen Paddock was staying in one of the rooms of the Las Vegas hotel, seemingly in wait until the moment he broke the windows and started shooting at the concert crowd gathered below.
The incident resulted in 58 people killed and at least five hundred injured, before the Nevada retiree finally turned a gun on himself. The 64-year-old gunman was dead by the time police breached his hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, according to ABC News.
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Paddock was able to bring in at least one machine gun, semi-automatic guns and a stock of ammunition in his room. Authorities have also found 19 more guns and even explosives when they raided his home in Mesquite, Nevada.
Hotel owner MGM Resorts is now faced with potential lawsuits from the victims of the incident, which now went down as the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, according to the New York Times. Many of them cite the lapse in hotel security that allowed the gunman to somehow bring in high-powered rifles and the ammunition for them into his hotel room.
"It's all about immunizing themselves from liability and staying out of state courts," Craig Eiland, a Texan lawyer representing hundreds of the shooting victims, said in outrage.
"They want to say that it does not matter how negligent MGM was," he added, pointing out that the management is hoping that technicalities will let them avoid responsibility for letting Paddock smuggle his deadly arsenal all the way up the 32nd floor of the hotel.
"It's outrageous, and that's not what the law is, and we would all be less safe," he added.
