Iraq War Veteran Played a Crucial Role in Helping Police Locate Las Vegas Gunman

Iraq War veteran and Fort Worth, Texas, resident Chris Bethel helped Las Vegas Police track down the location of the Las Vegas shooter — 32 floors above where dozens of innocent concert goers were murdered in cold blood.

Bethel was in Las Vegas for an IT conference and was staying in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, just two floors beneath the shooter, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock of Mesquite, Nevada, when the first shots rang out just after 10:00 p.m. Sunday night. KTVT-TV in Dallas reported that’s when Bethel called Las Vegas Police.

“I could just hear the gun shots. Continuously. Just full automatic. There’s explosions going off. It was like, a bomb just went off man. And then there were more gun shots,” Bethel said, according to KTVT-TV.

There was no bomb, other than the explosive device police used to blast through the shooter’s hotel room door, but there were gunshots — hundreds of them. Hundreds of feet below, Bethel said he just saw “everybody running.”

“I kept looking at the windows to see if I could see any kind of muzzle flash to see if I could see where the shooter was. I crouched by my front door. In hopes that I might get the opportunity to see the shooter if he ran by and I could identify him,” Bethel said.

Moments later, police arrived on the scene, but when they entered the shooter’s room. Bethel said it was about 10 minutes after he made the call to police that he received a call from LVPD saying that they had found the shooter.

Police found Paddock in his hotel room with self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Paddock was later pronounced dead.

But for all the lives Bethel may have helped save by calling police, he said he still feels he didn’t do enough.

“I feel like I couldn’t get a hold of somebody quick enough to let them know. And it felt like it took them too long to get over there, to take him out, to get him. It’s actually eating me up inside,” Bethel told KTVT.

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