In the months leading up to the Las Vegas mass shooting, Stephen Paddock scoured the internet. “Biggest open air concert venues in USA,” he typed into a search browser in May. “How crowded does Santa Monica Beach get.” A Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department report released Friday lists other searches Paddock made in September, including expected attendance for the Life is Beautiful music festival in downtown Las Vegas, “How tall is Mandalay Bay,” and expected attendance for the Route 91 Harvest festival, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. He ultimately opened fire on the country music festival, killing 58 and injuring hundreds before killing himself.
Paddock also searched Las Vegas SWAT tactics, “do police use explosives,” and how certain bullets perform over different distances. The chilling details document the research that went into what the FBI has described as a “meticulously” planned attack. Although the new report fails to hypothesize a motive, it exhaustively explains the many actions Paddock alone performed in the months and days leading up to the massacre. “He was indebted to no one and in fact paid all his gambling debts off prior to the shooting,” the police report says. “No suicide note or manifesto was found.” “There was no evidence of radicalization or ideology to support any theory that Paddock supported or followed any hate groups or any domestic or foreign terrorist organizations,” detectives said. Paddock broke no laws while amassing an arsenal of mostly rifles in the year before the shooting. He purchased 55 weapons and more than 100 firearm-related items. In the 34 years before that, Paddock had purchased 29 guns. Investigators “do not anticipate charges being brought forward” against the gunman’s girlfriend, Marilou Danley, said Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo.