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2nd Person of Interest Was Identified in Days After Las Vegas Shooting, Documents Show

Documents released Tuesday revealed that police investigating the mass shooting last October in Las Vegas were seeking to question a second man in connection with the attack.

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2nd Person of Interest Was Identified in Days After Las Vegas Shooting, Documents Show
By
JENNIFER MEDINA
and
MITCH SMITH, New York Times

Documents released Tuesday revealed that police investigating the mass shooting last October in Las Vegas were seeking to question a second man in connection with the attack.

The identity of the man has not been previously reported. It is unclear whether the man identified in the documents as a person of interest remains under investigation. The authorities have said that Stephen Paddock was the sole gunman responsible for the attack but that there was one additional person of interest still under investigation whom they declined to identify.

On Tuesday, a Nevada court unsealed hundreds of pages of search warrants, including an affidavit filed less than a week after the shooting that identifies the gunman’s longtime girlfriend as a person of interest. The authorities subsequently said that the girlfriend, Marilou Danley, was not considered a suspect and that she had continued to cooperate with local and federal investigators.

The records also included another person of interest, Douglas Haig, whose name the judge ordered redacted. The Las Vegas Review-Journal used an unredacted copy and identified Haig.

Haig’s whereabouts was unknown and he could not be reached for comment.

A Douglas Haig in Mesa, Arizona, who is an engineer at Honeywell Aerospace, also operated a company called Specialized Military Ammunition, a limited liability corporation his wife opened in 2012. In October, Haig told Newsweek that he had been interviewed by agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He said that he did know Paddock and had not sold ammunition “for a long time.” On Tuesday, a website for the company noted “We Will Be Closed Indefinitely. Check back to see if/when we are up and running again.”

In the documents released to the Review-Journal, investigators from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department wrote: “Until the investigation can rule otherwise, Marilou Danley and Douglas Haig have become persons of interest who may have conspired with Stephen Paddock to commit Murder with a Deadly Weapon.”

Officer Larry Hatfield, a spokesman for the department, declined to comment on whether Haig was still considered a person of interest or whether he was the person the sheriff said remained under investigation.

At a news conference Jan. 19, Sheriff Joseph Lombardo emphatically said that Paddock was the sole gunman in the shooting, which killed 58 people and injured hundreds more. He said that the FBI had an open investigation into an unnamed person and that charges could be filed in the next several weeks. He said Danley would not be charged.

“There was one shooter in the 1 October massacre,” he said at the news conference. “There was only one person responsible, and that was Stephen Paddock.”

But Lombardo has also made it clear that there is another person still under investigation in connection with the shooting, and the court documents show that investigators believed there were others involved.

“Given the magnitude of the incident, it is reasonable to believe multiple suspects and months of planning were involved in this premeditated massacre,” officers wrote repeatedly as they asked for search warrants in October.

The documents also give a glimpse into how the investigation began in the days after the attack.

A search warrant return filed with the court Oct. 16 lists a large number of guns and ammunition seized from Paddock’s rooms at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, including 21 rifles with magazines, two rifles without magazines, 114 other magazines, a handgun, roughly 5,280 live rounds and 1,050 casings.

The police also removed a can of bear mace, along with many more mundane items: a Gatorade bottle, a Sprite can, handwritten notes, forks, a coffee mug, hairs and an eyelash, sandals and 54 towels. Officers also seized a passport, a glass cutter, a drill, a butter knife, razor blades and several suitcases. In all, there were more than 140 handwritten entries on the search warrant return.

Nearly a month after the shooting, officers filed a search warrant seeking a “black flower vase with Styrofoam insert and fake flowers” from the hotel. Police officers said they reviewed photographs of the crime scene and saw the vase and flowers, which hotel staff said “were not part of their décor.” Officers said they believed Paddock purchased the items from a Walmart in Mesquite, Nevada, a few days before the shooting. They asked for the search warrant to be sealed.

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