WASHINGTON — Around the same time that Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock began firing shots from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay on Oct. 1, a Northern Virginia man was at the hotel’s front desk checking in.
John Gauchat, of Gainesville, Virginia, was one of thousands in Las Vegas that day ahead of the NetApp Insight conference. He checked in around 10 p.m. and was assigned a room on the 31st floor, one floor below Paddock.
“I consider myself very, very lucky…I might have been outside when the gunshots were going off,” Gauchat told WTOP.
He did not hear any gunfire, and there were no signs of trouble until he made his way to a bank of elevators.
Gauchat tried twice to get on an empty elevator, only to be kicked off by police officers and what appeared to him to be hotel security. He took the third elevator that arrived to the 31st floor, exiting with a woman he did not know, but who was attending the same convention.
Once out of the elevator, Gauchat spotted something alarming: police officers using recessed doorways as cover to move through a hallway.
“I’m former military; I was in the Army in the ’90s, and I recognized what they were doing. They were certainly in tactical formation moving down, trying to get to the end of the hallway,” he said.
When the woman, who got off the elevator with Gauchat, started walking in that direction, he grabbed her. “I got her attention and had her just look down the hallway at the police … and I said, ‘You might want to give it a minute. You don’t know what you’re walking into.'”
At her request, Gauchat walked the woman to her room.
Then, in a different hallway, as he unlocked the door to his room, he saw another security team on the move and took a short video.
Once in his room, Gauchat locked the door, turned on the TV and finally learned what was happening. “As I was watching the news, it was all very surreal to me,” he said.
Gauchat’s room did not overlook the shooting scene — which he’s thankful for — but instead provided a view of what appeared to become a staging area for dozens and dozens of emergency vehicles. He could also see police helicopters shining spotlights on the roofs of buildings.
That night, alarms went off and announcements were made telling hotel guests to stay in place because of police activity.
Gauchat couldn’t sleep, and around 4 a.m., a SWAT team came to his door, asked him a few questions and looked around his room. The team used master keys to enter other nearby rooms where no one answered the door.
He praised hotel management and convention organizers for working to make him and others at the hotel feel safe. He said Mandalay Bay added a new security measure the day after the shooting, requiring guests to have a room key in order to use the elevator.
And just like the rest of the country, Gauchat is still trying to make sense of why the shooting happened.
“If (Paddock) was crazy, I could take that and move on. But as there’s no evidence of him being crazy so far, that makes it troublesome for me,” he said.
