2018 NJ State PBA
Main Convention
What Happened in Vegas
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officers
share wisdom learned from the mass shooting
■ BY AMBER RAMUNDO
Yasenia Yatomi will never forget her 15th wedding anniver-
sary.
At first, the memorable aspect was the fact that after so many
years of marriage, she and her husband had never really made
a point of celebrating their annual milestones together. There
was rarely an opportunity to do so, since both of their jobs with
the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) left
them with little free time and few shared days off.
So when Yatomi, then a K-9 commander, and her husband,
a member of the SWAT team, managed to schedule a night off
together, it was a big deal.
The view from their hotel room at the Wynn Las Vegas was
spectacular. The couple gazed out the window together, noting
how beautiful the Las Vegas Strip looked from above. But the
view changed when suddenly, the valley was illuminated by red
and blue flashing lights.
“It looked like a Christmas tree turned on,” Yatomi described.
“Never before had I seen so many red and blue lights activate at
the same time.”
In that instant, Oct. 1, 2017 became a date that Yatomi would
always remember for a different reason. It became the day that
she and so many other LVMPD officers responded to the dead-
liest mass shooting in American history at the nearby Mandalay
Bay.
“We did what any good married cop couple does and got
dressed to head to the venue,” she stated.
In front of the NJ State PBA audience gathered in Boca Ra-
ton for the 2018 convention, Yatomi shared the chaotic details
of the night that 58 people were killed at the Route 91 Harvest
music festival. A compilation of video footage from bodycams,
smartphones and surveillance put together by the FBI gave the
officers in the room an idea of what it was like to be there as
the bullets flew across the open-air venue and a crowd of 22,000
concertgoers scattered in hysteria.
“It was like a bad scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie,”
Yatomi detailed. “You saw stepped-on glasses, shoes that some-
how fell off individuals’ feet. You saw how people got mowed
down in the process of trying to help others.”
Yatomi helped set up an incident command post a sixth of a
mile from the active shooter, but it was a long time before any
of the LVMPD could pinpoint exactly where the gunshots were
coming from. During the course of an hour, 899 9-1-1 calls and
10,000 push-to-talks over the radio were made. Dozens of re-
ports of shots fired, hostages, arson and explosions were made
at hotels and casinos across the Strip. First responders were
sent on a wild-goose chase to put each of the calls to rest, un-
til the LVMPD climbed to the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay,
where a single perpetrator took innocent lives from a high van-
tage point.
“I’ll be very honest, it took us a while to gain our bearings and
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Captain Yasenia Yatomi shares
where she was the night of the Las Vegas shooting.
put a decent command post in place where we could respond
in a methodical manner to check each of those active shooter
calls,” Yatomi admitted. “That took sending hard bodies down
to the furthest end of the Strip, knocking on all of the doors and
verifying (threats) because the calls kept coming in.”
One of the many pieces of wisdom that resulted from the Las
Vegas shooting was communication. Yatomi shared one of the
important takeaways with PBA members, focusing on how dis-
patchers are trained to respond to a high traffic volume of 9-1-1
calls during a critical incident.
“Have a process in place for dispatchers to ask three ques-
tions: Are you injured? Do you have any information about
the suspect? Do you have eyes on the suspect?” Yatomi recom-
mended. “If the answer is ‘no’, take their number and hang up
the phone to free up those lines and continue the communica-
tion throughout the organization.”
At one point, a call came over the radio to report an explo-
sion on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay. That explosion was
the result of a makeshift team of five LVMPD officers and SWAT
operators who made an explosive breach into the perpetrator’s
room, where he was found dead. Finally, the gunshots stopped,
and the LVMPD was tasked with aiding a city struck by disaster.
Meanwhile, investigators went to work to find out how and why
this mass shooting took place.
LVMPD Director Annette Mullen took over the presentation
to share details of the investigation with PBA members. After
1,965 investigative leads, 20,560 hours of video footage, 251,000
images and 746 legal notices, the FBI was able to find out a lot
about the perpetrator, Stephen Paddock.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 40
www.njcopsmagazine.com
■ OCTOBER 2018 39