When Mike Lichtenwalner, a wedding photographer in Las Vegas, learned, earlier this week, that Stephen Paddock committed his massacre of country-music concertgoers from a room in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, he began to search through his digital files of clients’ wedding photographs. Paddock’s room at the Mandalay—No. 32135—is what’s called a “vista suite,” Lichtenwalner told me. There are three such suites on every floor of the hotel, and people often rent them out for weddings. Lichtenwalner has photographed numerous weddings at the Mandalay Bay, and he has a “habit of taking photos of room signs,” he explained. One of his closest friends, he discovered, had stayed in that room when she got married, in 2010, and Lichtenwalner, who served as her wedding photographer, had taken a photograph from the window of the suite, of the view below.
On Tuesday morning, Lichtenwalner posted the photo to his Facebook page. Looking at the image, you can see out the hotel’s windows to the dirt lot below, where the Route 91 Harvest festival was held.
