Five lawsuits from hundreds of Mandalay Bay mass shooting victims filed in California court

Hundreds of victims, members of victims’ families and witnesses in the Mandalay Bay mass shooting on October 1 have filed five lawsuits against MGM Resorts International, Live Nation Entertainment Inc. and the perpetrator Stephen Paddock’s estate in a California court.

One lawsuit, the largest of the five, was filed by 450 people who were either injured or witnessed the shooting. The other four were filed by families of the deceased and seriously injured.

MGM Resorts International’s subsidiary is Mandalay Corp., owner of the Mandalay Bay Hotel, from the 32nd floor of which Steven Paddock opened fire on a crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival less than two months ago.

The suits contain charges ranging from inadequate exits and lack of sufficient training for staff at the event venue, to failure by the hotel to monitor Paddock’s activities, train its staff or deploy sufficient security measures, to assault and battery against Paddock’s estate.

Interestingly, earlier suits also named Slide Fire Solutions, which makes the “bump stock” device that converts firearms to give them a rate of fire close to an automatic weapon, but none of the five new suits filed on Monday include them.

The reason for that: Houston-based Muhammad Aziz, the lawyer heading the suits, says that most of his clients support the right to bear arms.

His statement: “We want to focus on hotel and venue security, not turn this into a gun rights case.”

Paddock, the perpetrator of possibly the most horrific mass shooting in recent memory, is said to own millions of dollars worth of real estate in California, where the cases have been filed, as well as Texas.

Monday’s lawsuits were all filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. The decision to appoint someone to handle Paddock’s estate will be made at a court hearing scheduled for December 7.

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