Fifth Anniversary of the Mandalay Bay Shooting

Saturday, October 1st, 2022 will mark the fifth anniversary of the Mandalay Bay shooting where a 64-year-old man by the name of Stephen Paddock, opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas killing 60 people and wounding approximately 867. About an hour later he was found dead in his hotel room from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Since the Mandalay Bay Shooting or the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival Shooting, Las Vega’s resiliency has been at its peak, but not without issues plaguing the country such as COVID-19, rising crime rates, and inflation. Even with such, those who live in Las Vegas have proven that #LasVegasStrong is more than just a hashtag, it’s a sentiment of pushing through with extreme pride.

Notable Numbers of the Mandalay Bay Shooting

• 800 Units of Blood were donated to local blood banks following the shooting
• Only 15% of that blood went unused.
• 58 People died within two days of the shooting
• The youngest victim was 20 the oldest being 64
• A total of 24 firearms were found in the suite
• The MGM Grand settled with the plaintiffs of the attack and they recovered
• Over 1,000 rounds or bullets were fired over the crowd.
• Mandalay Bay settled out of court with the plaintiffs for 800 million in damages
• On the third anniversary of the shooting LVMPD officially updated the death toll from 58 – 60

A Premises Liability Nightmare for Mandalay Bay

It was determined that the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino were negligent in their security measures which allowed Stephen Paddock to bring 23 firearms up to his hotel room undetected. This raised the question of whether or not hotels are liable for the safety of their guests.

In the state of Nevada, a property owner has a “duty of care” to make sure their premises are safe for anyone who is lawfully on the property. This means that if you are injured while on someone else’s property, the property owner may be held liable if your injuries were caused by a dangerous condition on the property that the owner knew about or should have known about.

A property owner generally will not be held liable for your injuries if the property owner did not know and could not reasonably have known about the dangerous condition. For example, if you are injured in a slip and fall accident at a grocery store, the store will only be held liable if it knew or should have known about the spill that caused you to fall.

In the case of the Mandalay Bay shooting, there are many questions that still remain unanswered.

For example, it is still unclear how Paddock was able to bring so many guns into his hotel room without being detected. In addition, it is unclear whether or not Mandalay Bay had any prior knowledge that Paddock may have posed a danger to the hotel’s guests.

In November of 2017, 425 victims of the shooting filed a lawsuit against the owners MGM Grand Resorts International, then the owners countersued hundreds of victims claiming they did not breach their “duty of care”, and therefore it had “no liability”, of any kind for the attack.

Citations

Wikipedia Retrieved September 23, 2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting