A wounded person is walked in on a wheelbarrow as Las Vegas police respond during an active shooter situation on the Las Vegas Strip. Credit:AP "This individual was status-driven based on how he liked to be recognised in the casino environment and how he liked to be recognised by his friends and family. So obviously that was starting to decline in the short period of time," the sheriff said. "He was going in the wrong direction." Lombardo said investigators still don't understand precisely what set Paddock off a little more than a year ago when he began stockpiling weapons and scouting locations around the country. Paddock fatally shot himself at the end of his 10-minute-long attack, and hard drives that had been removed from the computers found in his room have not been found, the sheriff said. Paddock has been described by those who came into contact with him as an anti-social, highly intelligent, arrogant high-stakes video poker player who would often stay for free in casino hotel penthouses for weeks at a time because he gambled so much. He also made money on real estate investments.

Stephen Paddock opened fire on a festival crowd from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort and casino. Credit:AP But Lombardo said Paddock had "gone up and down" in his wealth and had recently been losing money. His Australian girlfriend, Marilou Danley, a former casino concierge who lived with him in Mesquite, Nevada, continues to be interviewed and is still considered a "person of interest," Lombardo said. Clark County sheriff Joe Lombardo said Paddock was losing money and suffered bouts of depression. Credit:Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP The sheriff used the interview to try and set straight the initially confusing timelines offered by authorities in the days after the shooting.

The chief questions have centred around the fact that Paddock was able to fire at the crowd for a full 10 minutes, though a hotel security guard had been shot before the rampage began, and had reported it. Gunman Stephen Paddock with his Australian girlfriend Marilou Danley. She is still considered a person of interest, Sheriff Lombardo said. What happened was this, the sheriff said: The security guard, Jesus Campos, had been alerted that a room on the 32nd floor had a door that had been held open for a long period of time. He found that the door to that floor from the stairwell had been barricaded, and he radioed in to report that at 9.59pm. Campos, Lombardo said, then took the stairs to the 33rd floor, exited, walked to the elevators and took one back down to the 32nd floor. He was shot in the leg as he walked outside Paddock's door. Photos from inside the Las Vegas hotel room show some of the 33 guns Stephen Paddock amassed over a year. Credit:Twitter/@MikeTokes

"So subsequently you have a couple minutes of him going up, going down the elevators and back down the hallway and then he encounters the suspect," Lombardo said. "He receives a wound, he attempts to go through his radio and then he also confirms his communication with dispatch via cellphone." All of the timelines have shown that Paddock opened fire on the crowd at 10.05 p.m. What time did Campos report that he had been shot? Police have never said, and Lombardo didn't elaborate on that in his Wednesday night interview. Cece Navarrette sits near a cross for her cousin, Bailey Schweitzer, who was among 58 people killed. Credit:AP "We didn't know shots were fired until 10.05pm," Lombardo said. "That's when we actually determined - through calls for service, computer-aided dispatch, body-worn cameras, other people's observations through videos in Uber, taxis things like that - we feel pretty comfortable in that the large amounts of firing by the suspect occurred at 10.05pm." Two Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers already were at the Mandalay Bay on another call and began working their way up the stairs as the shooting began. They, too, came across the barricaded stairwell door.

"So that was right around 10 minutes they were able to do that. So that's pretty amazing in public safety time you call dispatch, you get a revise, you formulate a plan, you ascend the stairwell, you have no idea what floor it is, you're receiving information from disparate directions, and then you encounter this blocked doorway - and that was right around 10 minutes," Lombardo said. "And then our other officers ascended via the elevator bank and came out into the foyer or hallway from the elevator bank there - right around 12 minutes. During that time, the suspect had stopped firing. And so when we don't hear any firing taking place, then it becomes slow and methodical." At that point, he said, it was important to extract people from adjacent rooms to ensure their safety and plan a breach of Paddock's room. By the time they entered, the gunman had shot himself. "I honestly believe that he believed the wolf was at the door - being us, LVMPD - and that is when he made the decision to take his life," Lombardo said. Loading

Paddock expended more than 1,000 rounds over the 10 minutes he fired, in what authorities were able to identify as 12 bursts. The pauses between them, Lombardo said, could have resulted from either jammed or faulty weapons, or the need to replace clips as they were emptied. Los Angeles Times