What Will Happen to Las Vegas Shooting Suspect's Mandalay Bay Hotel Room?
Mandalay Bay Hotel [Wikimedia Commons]
LAS VEGAS, NV — One week after Stephen Paddock allegedly opened fire on a crowd from his suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, hotel management appears to be debating what to do with the hotel room that was used to stage the deadliest modern mass shooting in U.S. history.
Paddock’s room, No. 32125, has shattered gold-tinted windows that are now discreetly covered over, the New York Post reports.
According to Mike Lichtenwalder, who shared a photo taken from the room on his Facebook page, the room is called a “vista suite” and is often requested for weddings due to the panoramic views.
MGM Resorts International has not yet revealed what it plans to do with the space.
Some experts have suggested that the hotel might want to consider sealing up the room, or even the entire floor, to avoid becoming a destination site for so-called “dark tourism.”
Officials facing similar decisions at the schools, churches, and other places where mass shootings have taken place in recent years have taken different paths.
Some, like the San Bernardino, California, community center where a husband and wife killed 14 people in 2015, have reopened. Others, including THE Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 people in July 2016, remain closed.
Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 20 children and six adults were killed in 2012, was demolished and rebuilt four years later.
Columbine High School was remodeled — the cafeteria where many students were gunned down was transformed into a bright atrium and filled with art. Several other areas of the school were redone as well so that the school looked completely different when students returned to campus — which school officials said was the intention.
Other options for the Mandalay Bay that have been suggested include building a memorial, or throwing a fundraiser for the victims and families. A spokesman for Mandalay Bay declined to comment on its plans.
“The hotel was absolutely a victim as well, and by transforming some space into something that honors the victims, they could hopefully promote healing and actually some good,” Kim Miller, president of Florida-based Ink Link Marketing, told the New York Post.
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Read more: New York Post
