The New York Times confronted the “shifting reports” on the Las Vegas massacre in a new way by constructing a timeline of their very own.
Noting that investigators have revised parts of the timeline multiple times, raising more questions than answering, the publication stepped in with a new technique of video forensics employed by a team of video producers and former Marines, according to a report published Monday.
The new timeline being offered by the New York Times appears to conflict with existing claims by authorities as to what happened and when on the night of October 1.
The publication formed its own timeline using 30 videos filmed by concertgoers, the Las Vegas police and witnesses, The team of digital investigators pieced together the footage to create the new timeline which apparently departs from some of the existing details revealed by local police.
The New York Times investigation placed the beginning of the shooting at 10:05 p.m. local time, which lines up with the official investigators’ timeline. Automatic gunfire, following some single shots, could be heard while country singer Jason Aldean was on stage at the Route 91 Harvest Festival.
But the Times put the shooting of Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos by gunman Stephen Paddock at 10:06 p.m., one minute into the attack. This conflicts with the latest timeline from authorities which said Paddock shot Campos first and then opened fire into the crowd uninterrupted.
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“Ours isn’t the definitive picture of what happened, more information will emerge, but it does give us new insights into what happened,” Senior Story Producer Malachy Browne told CBS News. “We analyzed every single burst of gunfire, which had its own fingerprint.”
Browne explained the process in a series of tweets.
1/ Here the steps we took and tools we used for our investigation mapping how the Las Vegas shooting unfolded https://t.co/WGjyimEpDA
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
4/ Organize and annotate the footage by location: front, rear and wings of the festival venue, on the streets outside, at the Mandalay Hotel pic.twitter.com/7qWWn7qGVk
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
6/ Annotated the bursts as I watched. The length, interval, pattern. Awful as they were, they became a scaffolding to build a timeline pic.twitter.com/iFQY96CEOj
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
The Times video team, using data like timestamps and geolocation information, concluded that Paddock fired over 900 rounds that night, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds more. The investigation revealed that the massacre could be broken down into twelve individual bursts of gunfire.
7/ Verify burst patterns by lining up the burst audio waveforms. Note the bullet spikes, patterns and pauses in these different videos pic.twitter.com/0QGydypldD
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
9/ This proved there were 12 main bursts of fire outward from the hotel, some relentless in frequency, and three intervals of over 1 minute
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
20/ I additionally slowed audio to isolate supersonic cracks of bullets from retort of gun chamber (thud) or bullets striking. Example: pic.twitter.com/96AzP0e7sN
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
Browne also explained how the video footage was used to piece together the unfolding horror.
14/ That scaffolding of a multi-location video timeline gave us a detailed picture of what was happening around the venue between bursts
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
15/ Moving on: By marking the time displayed in clocks at several points through the footage, we could approximate WHEN the firing began pic.twitter.com/xquBfEtiJc
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
17/ Back to the start time. Eyewitnesses sent me original videos. Installed phone app to extract EXIF data for video start time: HH:MM:SS pic.twitter.com/p95josoxvo
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
18/ Mark the video times, including @LVMPD vid, on the timeline. Sure, clocks can be off, but 6 of them point to a 3-second starting window pic.twitter.com/khdSjumEoe
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
The digital team also analyzed the bullet count and the rate of speed, with former Marines C. J. Chivers, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and David Botti all analyzing audio of the gunfire.
19/ Next, the bullet count. @huang_apiaries showed me how he did this piece with @larrybuch and @adamrpearce. https://t.co/rIgP2nQ6cR
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
20/ I additionally slowed audio to isolate supersonic cracks of bullets from retort of gun chamber (thud) or bullets striking. Example: pic.twitter.com/96AzP0e7sN
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
21/ Counted & marked rounds using these multiple audio angles of same bursts. @bottidavid, a former Marine working w/ @nytvideo, listened 2
— Malachy Browne (@malachybrowne) October 23, 2017
Many questions remain unanswered more than three weeks after the shooting, including the motive of the gunman who took his own life before SWAT officers arrived at the scene. The new timeline indicates officers were outside Paddock’s door at 10:22 p.m., seven minutes after the shooting ended.
The new timeline by the team at the New York Times may raise even more questions but the sheer scope of the work involved is staggering.
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“Together, the footage conveyed the horror and brutality of the assault from multiple locations,” Browne tweeted.
“Our investigation uncovered several key pieces of information. Perhaps most crucially, we were able to approximate the very second the first bullet was fired,” he concluded in the report. “By using data of such variety and quantity, we were able to tell a different kind of story.”
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Frieda@bizpacreview.com
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.
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