Mandalay mystery deepens; Today Vegas, tomorrow the Moon

MGM Resorts International finds itself on the defensive following the Stephen Paddock killing spree. Rachel Sheppard, a California woman who survived three gunshot wounds, is suing MGM for negligence (she’s also going after the maker of the bump stocks that enabled Paddock to fire so indiscriminately). To that end, she’s obtained a court order that MGM preserve anything “of evidentiary value,” an order that will be revisited on Oct. 30. MGM, for its part, is taking Paddock’s suite out of rotation permanently. “This was a terrible tragedy perpetrated by an evil man. We have no intention of renting that room,” read a company statement. Good on MGM.

Simultaneously, security guard Jesus Campos (he of the controversial timeline) is on media lockdown, for fear his statements could have probative value in the expected wave of litigation. Worried that inconsistent accounts of the fatal event could crop up in court, MGM has only permitted him to appear on Ellen. No Hannity or Rachel Maddow for you, Jesus! (Campos, who had booked a slate of TV appearances, is at the center of a timeline that has been changed thrice over by Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, creating headaches for MGM’s public-relations department.) Las Vegas Metro says that Campos called for police backup immediately but an earlier timeline had him waiting six minutes before whistling in the law, a possibility that would open MGM to massive allegations of liability.

Campos’ union boss, deplorably, was booking Campos’ exploitive slate of interviews, before the guard went to ground. (Under pressure from MGM?) “I was in a meeting with MGM’s upper management and they were definitely concerned about how tough someone like [Sean] Hannity would be on him and they voiced their opinions,” said International Union, Security Police & Fire Professionals of America prexy David Hickey (left), who absolves himself of responsibility for the media circus. “I thought they were being negative, telling him that someone was going to be tough and how they were worried about his health — it wasn’t the thing he needed to hear four hours before the interviews were going to begin.” For conspiracy theorists, Hickey’s story was that MGM execs took Campos into a bedroom to have a private chat and that when Hickey went looking for him, Campos had disappeared.

Campos, who implied that Paddock had bolted shut an emergency-exit door next to his suite, did all his talking in what Fox News called an appearance that “did nothing to quell rampant speculation and rumors surrounding the horrific attack.” Adding to the confusion was Ellen DeGeneres‘ assertion that hers was the only interview Campos agreed to do. (Five others were booked, according to Hickey.) Helpfully, the DailyMail has posted all three of the disputed timelines and you can compare the discrepancy. For instance, the first has Campos approaching Paddock’s sniper’s nest at 10:14 p.m. — nine minutes into the barrage. In the second, he arrives at 9:59 p.m. — six minutes before Paddock starts shooting at the crowd. In the third, Campos also reaches the room at 9:59 p.m. and is shot six minutes later, presumably before Paddock turns his arsenal upon the festival grounds. The lawyers are going to have a field day with this.

While MGM seems to be doing the right thing, by and large, some wackdoodle took “#VegasStrong” to a really sick place, decorating his front yard for Halloween with 58 gravestones, signifying each Mandalay Bay fatality. Clueless neighbor Leo Rullodah told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “I still don’t understand why other people are offended.” Whoever was responsible for this doesn’t understand the difference between honoring the dead and exploiting them for cheap kicks.

* Budget Suites of America owner and UFO aficionado Robert Bigelow, having succeeded in attaching an inflatable pod to the international space station is thinking big, Las Vegas-style big. The Sin City businessman wants to orbit the Moon with an inflatable hotel, which he’s touting as a way to kick-start “significant lunar business development.” Don’t laugh: Bigelow has already enlisted Lockheed Martin and Boeing in the project. He’s also got an aggressive timeline, predicting it will be open for business by 2022. The “Bigelow Expandable Activity Module” is described as being superior to aluminum structures because its pods “provide for greater volume, safety, opportunity and economy.”

The space hotel would require mega resort-sized dollars ($2.3 billion) and Bigelow expects to get funding from NASA. The normally thrifty Trump administration seems positively inclined, and some of the first guests might be astronauts en route to a permanent installation on the Moon, or even headed to Mars. Bigelow has already been picked to pitch ideas for a “Deep Space Gateway” in the vicinity of the Moon. As outlined, Bigelow’s idea seems outlandish at first blush but the deeper you look, the more plausible it becomes.