Balancing profitability with good taste and media impact, what would you do with Mandalay Bay room 135 floor 32 if managing the hotel were your job?

That room probably no longer exists, as of right now.

Once investigators no longer need to preserve it as a crime scene, and they turn it back over to the hotel management, the knocked-out curtain wall windows would be repaired, and that room -- actually a suite with a conventional room connecting -- would be permanently removed from the room inventory of the hotel, and that space would be completely repurposed.



File storage space is a possibility — and for the near future, if that space is used at all, the most likely one. Provided that it's strictly back office space where no visitors doing business with the hotel would be asked to enter, sales department or comptroller space is also a possibility. Security department use is a possibility.

Whatever its eventual use, it's going to be strictly back office or corporate space for MGM Resorts International (which owns Mandalay Bay and several other casino hotels, and can probably find some corporate use for the space not directly related to the operation of the Mandalay Bay itself), and the doorways leading into it from the corridor will be painted over to make the entrance as nondescript and unnoticeable as possible, much the same way as the door from the corridor to a utility closet or housekeeping area would be.

And the space would probably stand empty for a year or two before even staff would be comfortable being assigned workspace in it. Would you be comfortable having yourdesk moved to that spot?

That space certainly has no future as a guest room. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to be registered into it as a guest (actually, yes I can, but only the sick kind of person you wouldn't want in the hotel, period), and I don't think a permanent monument would be viable.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to see that entire 32nd floor corridor sealed off for a couple of years, until the disturbance has passed somewhat, and memories start to fade. And when it reopened, I would expect to see all of the rooms on that floor having been totally gutted and renovated, and looking very different from the way they do now.

What is the possibility that the hotel security guard, hotel management, police officers, and SWAT team members were all telling the truth, yet there is such a dispute in timeline?

Not surprising at all. Ask any lawyer in a situation where a car accident occurs on a crowded street, and there aren't but two witnesses who actually saw it and can be contacted and questioned. Odds are, one's going to swear the light was red and the other's going to swear the light was green, each will be as honest as the day is long and speaking in absolutely good faith, each will be describing it exactly as he or she remembers it, and that's about size of it. It's just the way of the world. Only one thing can be the truth, yet each witness is being absolutely truthful -- about his or her recollection of it, not necessarily what actually happened.



In the Las Vegas shooting, you had the shooter (who's not saying too much or answering questions right now), a couple of security guards, one or two maintenance guys, some Las Vegas cops, each member of an an entire SWAT team, hotel management, and the front desk staff involved. Each of them will have a unique individual perspective, they will each remember things differently. Each will have been, at the time, observing from a different vantage point in the hotel: some on the 32nd floor, some in the lobby. The only way we could know as close to the whole truth as is relevant is if somebody had been standing right next to the shooter at the time he started shooting, and lived to tell the tale.

But it didn't work out that way, and this investigation is going to be relying very heavily on security video, and reconciling the various individual perspectives and versions of the story.