Hotel guest doors down from mass shooter relives the horror
A man who was staying just a few doors down from the hotel room where Stephen Paddock unleashed a hail of gunfire on Sunday night awoke to the sound of what he thought were fireworks.
Sonny Morgan, who flew to Nevada from his home in Lawrenceville, Georgia, to attend a work conference, was fast asleep on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino when Paddock opened fire.
“I kinda thought that it may have been some fireworks…and then it just kept going and going and going,” Morgan told 11Alive.
The smell of gunpowder wafted into his room, and Morgan called the hotel’s reception to report sounds of gunfire.
Broken windows are seen on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino after a lone gunman opened fired on the Route 91 Harvest country music festival
(David Becker/Getty Images)
Staff members told him to barricade himself in the room, and Morgan built a pillow fort before getting down on the ground.
Police and SWAT officers burst onto the scene after the gun smoke set off the fire alarm and helped authorities pinpoint Paddock’s location, according to Randy Sutton, a former lieutenant with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department who spoke to the Washington Post.
Morgan, still unaware what was happening amidst the chaos, thought someone was trying to blow up the hotel in a terrorist plot, and called his wife to tell her he loved her.
Sonny Morgan, who awoke to the sound of gunfire, told 11Alive, “I kinda thought that it may have been some fireworks…and then it just kept going and going and going.”
(Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
A SWAT team managed to breach Paddock’s room with an explosive, and the 64-year-old gunman was found dead inside.
Paddock used a hammer to break the windows of his room before he opened fire on the 22,000 concert-goers across the street from the hotel, killing 59 people and injuring 527 others.
It remains unclear what his motives were, although his actions and cache of weapons suggest the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history was planned in advance.
Paddock used a hammer to break the windows of his room before he opened fire on the 22,000 concert-goers across the street from the hotel, killing 59 people and injuring 527 others.
(David Becker/Getty Images)
Morgan said authorities eventually broke down the doors of his room and “made sure that I wasn’t a bad person” before he was evacuated.
Morgan, who has since been relocated to a new room in the hotel before he heads home on Thursday, says he’s still coming to terms with what happened after piecing together the night’s events from news reports.
“The view out of where I am now is probably very similar to the view the guy had…I can see down into exactly where the folks were. I can see the windows where they were broken out….It’s really weird,” he said.
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