A man riding upon a Las Vegas double-decker bus on the Strip pulled out a gun prior to shooting and killing one individual before he barricaded himself and began a standoff lasting hours before the gunman finally surrendered.
A standoff started at around 11a.m. local time on Saturday inside the bus as it had been stopped on Las Vegas Boulevard.
Witness Accounts
“He was on the bus. He was shooting people on the bus. He was just contained to that location. He never exited the bus,” Tom Roberts, the Assistant Sheriff from Clark County said.
Two individuals had to be taken to a nearby hospital following the shooting, said the spokeswoman for the University Medical Center, Danita Cohen. One died while the other remains in stable condition.
For several hours, the police crisis negotiators, as well as robots along with armored vehicles began to surround the bus as authorities were uncertain of how many victims remained inside.
A former player for the NBA, Scot Pollard, that was staying in Cosmopolitan Hotel, said to The Associated Press over the phone that he witnessed several people, as well as staff, ran through areas near the casino screaming “get out of the way.”
“We can hear them negotiating. We can hear them saying things like ‘No one else needs to get hurt,’ ‘Come out with your hands up. We are not going anywhere. We are not leaving,’ ” he stated.
Bus and Reports
The bus was being operated by South Nevada’s Regional Transportation Commission. The agency stated that the driver had not been hurt.
It is yet to be known how many passengers were inside the bus during the incident, but those who had been there seemingly fled. Police initiated a hotline to search for those passengers in order to gain a witness report of the ordeal.
