“He was killed last night at Borderline,” his mother, Susan Orfanos, said, speaking rapidly into the telephone. When a gunman opened fire at the Route 91 Festival in Las Vegas last year, Telemachus Orfanos somehow survived. “I was at the Las Vegas Route 91 mass shooting as well as probably 50 or 60 others who were in the building at the same time as me tonight.” “This is the second time in about a year and a month that this has happened,” Nicholas Champion, a fitness trainer from Southern California who posted a group photo on Facebook of Vegas survivors gathering at the Borderline in April, said in a television interview. The Borderline, a popular hangout for country music fans, had become a place of solace for dozens of survivors of the Vegas massacre to come together for music, for healing and for remembering - “to celebrate life,” in the words of one.Īnd now, at least some of them belong to a group that seems uniquely American: survivors of two mass shootings. Just last year, they had fled the same chaos - gunshots, bodies falling - in Las Vegas, at a country music festival where 58 people were killed in the worst mass shooting in modern American history. “I remember looking back at one point to make sure he wasn’t behind me,” said Sarah DeSon, a 19-year-old college student.Īnd as they raced for safety, many of them thought: not again. Patrons dropped to the ground, dashed under tables, hid in the bathroom and ran for exits, stepping over bodies sprawled across the floor. He shot a security guard at the entrance and then opened fire into the crowd. Wearing dark clothing and a dark baseball cap, he set off smoke bombs to create confusion. Then all of a sudden, into “College Country Night!” at the Borderline Bar & Grill stepped a man with a gun.
The Lakers game was on the television, and if revelers weren’t line dancing they were playing pool. Country music was blaring and beer was flowing. Three planned gun rampages were apparently thwarted last week alone in separate incidents in Connecticut, Florida and Ohio.THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. Climo is reported to have told police that he belonged to a neo-Nazi group. They included Conor Climo, 23, from Las Vegas who allegedly planned to attack Jews and a gay bar in the city. Montoya’s arrest in California brings to at least seven the number of mass shootings or white supremacist plots that police claim to have intercepted since the Texas rampage. But in a pattern that has been seen before he subsequently walked back his pledges having been lobbied by the National Rifle Association.īut Trump is likely to remain under pressure over gun policy given the spate of arrests being made across the country of individuals apparently motivated to carry out copycat attacks after El Paso and Dayton. “There is no question that as a country and as a community, we are having a conversation about that and need to do more, and we should be doing more,” he said.ĭonald Trump promised to tighten background checks on the sale of firearms in the wake of the pair of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, earlier this month that killed 31 people. He recognized a “serious conversation” was taking place across the US about access to lethal weapons.
Robert Luna, the police chief of Long Beach, addressed the guns issue on Tuesday. Even so, several of the weapons in his possession are illegal in California including the assault rifles and investigators will try to find out whether he obtained them by nefarious means or out of state. It is thought that he had no prior criminal record, which would have freed him to buy some firearms over the counter. A key question being addressed by detectives is how Montoya came to amass such a stash of deadly weapons without drawing attention to himself. The alleged foiled plot to attack the Marriott once again puts the spotlight on America’s lax gun laws. In ensuing searches, police discovered the pile of firearms that included pistols, two assault rifles of the sort used in several recent mass shootings, a pump-action shotgun and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The fellow worker immediately sounded the alarm.