The grainy pictures that have leaked out show the floor of Stephen Paddock’s Mandalay Bay casino room.
In the middle of the pictures, first shared by Boston 3 reporter Jacqui Heinrich, are two long rifles used by the madman to kill 59 strangers and seriously wound nearly 600 others.
But the empty shell casings laying strewn around the weapons are what is truly chilling to witness.
They’re strewn haphazardly across the carpet, an eerie reminder of the death and carnage Paddock inflicted at random on the thousands of innocent concert goers just moments beforehand.
EXCLUSIVE: photo from inside #MandalayBay shooter’s hotel room shows gun, ammo, hammer, bipod, optics @boston25 pic.twitter.com/4B2iRhquq5
— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 3, 2017
EXCLUSIVE: second photo from inside #MandalayBay shooter’s hotel room shows another weapon used in worst mass shooting in modern history pic.twitter.com/gD5IHS7Mk2
— Jacqui Heinrich (@JacquiHeinrich) October 3, 2017
Investigators are scrambling to figure out what drove Paddock to show up at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino with at least 10 suitcases filled with guns and open fire from his 32nd floor suite on a country music festival attended by 22,000 fans.
Law enforcement and family members could not explain what would motivate a one-time accountant with no known criminal record to inflict so much violence.
Las Vegas police said he had 23 guns at the hotel, including semiautomatic rifles, and 19 at his home along with thousands of rounds of ammunition.
The 64-year-old gunman killed himself in the hotel room before authorities arrived.
On the surface, Paddock didn’t seem like a typical mass murderer, said Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI hostage negotiator and supervisor in the bureau’s behavioral science unit. Paddock is much older than the typical shooter and was not known to be suffering from mental illness.
The brother of the gunman in the mass shooting Sunday night at a music concert in Las Vegas said there’s no logic to explain the shooting. Eric Paddock said his brother played video poker to “stay at home in the casino.″
“My challenge is, I don’t see any of the classic indicators, so far, that would suggest, ’OK, he’s on the road either to suicide or homicide or both,” Van Zandt said.
Nevertheless, his actions suggest that he had planned the attacks for at least a period of days.
Some of the rifles had scopes, the sheriff said. And authorities found two gun stocks that could have let him modify weapons to make them nearly fully automatic, according to two U.S. officials briefed by law enforcement.
“He knew what he wanted to do. He knew how he was going to do it, and it doesn’t seem like he had any kind of escape plan at all,” Van Zandt said.
Nevada Fire Department Chief Greg Cassell told Townhall that he’d “never” seen so much ammunition in one person’s possession before.
Asked about a potential motive, Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said he could not “get into the mind of a psychopath at this point.”
“I can’t even make something up,” his bewildered brother, Eric Paddock, told reporters Monday. “There’s just nothing.”
Public records offered no hint of financial distress or criminal history, though multiple people who knew him said he was a big gambler.
“No affiliation, no religion, no politics. He never cared about any of that stuff,” Eric Paddock said as he alternately wept and shouted. “He was a guy who had money. He went on cruises and gambled.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article