Las Vegas Gunman Originally Booked Rooms Overlooking Lollapalooza, Life Is Beautiful
On Sunday night, an absolute piece of human shit named Stephen Paddock murdered 59 people and injured hundreds more at Route 91 Harvest, a country music festival in Las Vegas. And while Paddock, at least as far as we know, did not have a violent history, he may have been planning similar massacres at a pair of other big music festivals.
TMZ reports that Haddock booked rooms in a hotel overlooking Chicago’s massive Lollapalooza festival in August. His rooms were at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel, across the street from Grant Park, the site of the festival. Given that Haddock shot all those people from a hotel overlooking Route 91 Harvest, it seems logical to think that he was considering doing something similar to the massive crowd at Lollapalooza. Paddock requested “view rooms” that would look over the festival and though the Blackstone Hotel told TMZ that they do not guarantee specific rooms to guests, their computer system notes and guarantees Paddock would receive the rooms he asked for. A new TMZ report states that the hotel is investigating staff who broke policy. Those rooms had clear sightlines of the festivals’ main stage and entrance areas. Paddock apparently never showed up in Chicago.
Life Is Beautiful, a Las Vegas festival that happened on the same site as Route 91 Harvest the previous weekend, may have also been a target. Variety reports that, according to various sources, Haddock also booked “multiple condos” at a building called the Ogden, which was within sight of the festival grounds, during that weekend. Reps for that festival — which was headlined by Chance The Rapper, Lorde, and Wiz Khalifa — have declined to comment, as have reps for the owner of the Ogden.