By Ken Ritter, AP
A court on Wednesday approved a total of $800 million in payouts from casino company MGM Resorts International and its insurers to more than 4,400 relatives and victims of the Las Vegas Strip shooting that was the deadliest in recent U.S. history.
The action makes final a deal announced earlier this month and settles dozens of lawsuits on the eve of the third anniversary of the shooting that killed 58 people and injured more than 850 at an open-air concert near the Mandalay Bay resort.
Clark County District Court Judge Linda Bell, in her brief order, cited “near-unanimous participation in the settlement among potential claimants.”
Authorities said more than 22,000 people were attending an outdoor music festival when a gunman firing military-style weapons from windows on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay rained rapid-fire bullets into the crowd.
MGM Resorts, owner of the hotel and the concert venue, acknowledged no liability with the settlement. It will pay $49 million, while its insurance companies will pay $751 million.
“We are grateful that the decision brings families, victims and the community closer to closure,” the company said in a statement. It noted the anniversary of the Oct. 1, 2017, event, calling it “a time of great sadness and reflection.”
Memorial ceremonies are scheduled Thursday at several venues in Las Vegas, including a reading of the names of the slain beginning at 10:05 p.m. — the time the first shots rang out.
Attorney Robert Eglet, the plaintiffs’ lawyer who spent a year arranging the settlement with clients, legal firms and attorneys in at least 10 states, said amounts to be disbursed will be determined by two retired judges and he’s hopeful that payments will begin going out by the end of the year.
“There’ve been no objections and we expect no appeals,” Eglet told The Associated Press. “We’ll send out notices of the order. After 30 days the $800 million will be deposited.”
The case will be dismissed at that time, he added.
Eglet previously said that everyone involved “recognized there are no winners in long, drawn-out litigation with multiple trials where people and the community are reliving the event every time we try a case.”
A line-by-line list of victims, identified by their initials only, runs for more than 170 pages of a 225-page civil complaint filed Sept. 9 seeking compensation and punitive damages from MGM Resorts. It accused the casino company of negligence, wrongful death and liability in the 2017 shooting.
Millions of dollars could go to the most severely and permanently injured, Eglet said, depending on factors including age, number of dependents, type of injuries, previous and future medical treatment, and ability to work.
A minimum $5,000 would go to each person who filed a claim for unseen injuries and did not seek medical attention or therapy.
Administrators of the account will be retired Nevada Judge Jennifer Togliatti and retired California Judge Louis Meisinger, with help from the Virginia-based claims management legal firm BrownGreer.
Court filings in the case don’t mention the gunman, Stephen Paddock, who killed himself before police closed in.
Las Vegas police and the FBI determined the 64-year-old retired accountant and high-stakes poker player meticulously planned the attack and acted alone. They theorized he may have sought notoriety, but said they never determined a clear motive for the attack.
Why were they liable for even a penny??????????????//
Well, they didn’t admit any liability.
IOW, they paid for this to go away because fighting it ran the risk of being more expensive since there were “dozens of lawsuits” to be litigated individually.
If they are not liable, why do they have to pay? Why does the insurance company have to pay?
MGM was not aware of an arsenal that the shooter took to the room. They were not aware of his intent. Everything MGM did was legal. What the shooter did was illegal.
Attorney Eglet is a liar. Eglet is the winner. He is the winner. He is getting paid truckloads of money to wrongly force MGM and their insurance company to pay victims of an illegal action to which they had nothing to do with. This is akin to a guy killing another guy with a shovel in a grocery store, and maggot Eglet comes along and leverages lawsuits against both the shovel manufacturer and the grocery store. Giant blood sucking tick.
they got a tap on the shoulder
and then were offered a deal they couldnt refuse
this makes the whole thing go away
no discovery
no evidentiary hearings
no testimony that points to something other than the official narrative
now nobody can find out what really happened
this is a W in the win column for the deep state
remember:
HILLARY WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PRESIDENT WHEN THIS HAPPENED
THIS WAS GOING TO GUT AND IN SO DOING SEAL THE FATE OF THE 2ND AMENDMENT
Of course! They couldn’t have the cattle asking why Soros bet $42M against MGM stocks few weeks before Oct 1, or how many 100s of millions he made from it. That might lead them to find out most of MGM’s top execs did the same thing.
I’m intrigued… Is there anything to this?
There might have been more than that.
There have been…discussions…whispers…of white hats averting a “sum of all fears ” scenario.
Look it up. You decide.
To make it go away without finding out the true motivations or if anyone else was involved.
If I was the judge, I would have demanded full disclosure of all evidence regarding the shooting.
Steve Paddock, may his name and line be forever cursed, was a Democrat stalwart. This was a reprisal against those he saw as denying his savior, Hillary, her due coronation.
Paddock was a pilot who flew a plane owned by the FBI. There’s much more to this than so-called “domestic lone wolf terrorism.” If you think it wasn’t an actual conspiracy involving elements of our own government, you’ve got your head in the sand.
This, and the PA judge who ruled PLCAA unconstitutional, are very troubling.
Both place responsibility for how a product is used, on the maker and seller of that product, not the user, even when the product functions as it was designed and intended. This would seem to be a very dangerous precedent (especially if including tobacco’s) for any US-based manufacturer of, well, anything.
No, this had nothing to do with the guns used, but rather was principally a premises liability and lack of adequate security case. There probably was no liability, but the cost of defense was prohibitive due to the massive number of plaintiffs and the large number of lawsuits filed.Plus there is always a risk of a runaway jury, inconsistent verdicts, years of appeals… It would take several lifetimes to try them all. This is what typically happens in mass tort litigation.
Good assessment of the situation.
And you know, he did wheel in a couple dozen 5.56 and 7.62 rifles and a couple thousand rounds of ammo, right under the noses of the security guards in a supposedly secure environment so someone was asleep at the switch.
“And you know, he did wheel in a couple dozen 5.56 and 7.62 rifles and a couple thousand rounds of ammo, right under the noses of the security guards in a supposedly secure environment”
Guests at resorts commonly bring a lot of luggage, golf bags, ect, to the hotel room.
Nothing unusual about that in the least.
Guns fit just fine in golf bags.
Unless you believe hotel guests checking in should be thoroughly checked, just in case they might do something nefarious?
What a good little Nazi you would make! 😉
I was at a data science symposium in Boston about 3 years ago. I was outside smoking and talking to one of the valet parking dudes when they started wheeling out cart after cart of matching luggage. He told me it was a Saudi who was only staying 3 days and he and his wives had 400 pieces of luggage. He said it was common for rich people to have a hundred at least.
They weren’t liable at all, it’s disgusting that it’s cheaper and easier to just pay it away. What do people want, hotels to go through every suitcase on the way in?
The day hotels begin setting up TSA-style checkpoints just to enter is the day I never go to Vegas again.
Mandalay should not have been subjected to this unless it was proven that their staff knowingly collaborated with management’s approval. Otherwise, they simply aren’t responsible for their customers’ actions.
They should have put up some no weapons stickers. That would have prevented the killing for sure. This was a planned mass murder, terrorist attack. This settlement is like suing the twin towers and pentagon for getting hit by a planes… Gotta get some money for those victims, er, their lawyers.
The owners of the twin towers were sued after 9/11. Any time there’s a bunch of money in play some lowlife will try to get some the easy way.
Still odd they paid out. And hard to believe cheaper that fighting. $800M! Thats a lot of fighting. And, after the first few cases are tossed, plantiffs give up. Seems weird.
I worked for a very large company once that said they had never been successfully sued for sexual harrassment. They fought each and every one, which made people wary of filing charges. Giving in like this only invites more.
I realize this is a settlement, not an admission of guilt. However I find this whole mass lawsuit very disturbing to what I would call justice. Just because so many people were suing, they had to buckle because of even higher potential court costs?!!!! So this isn’t about what is right and what is just. The gunman had no money, so they go after anyone with a deep enough checking account for a payday. Americans everywhere should be ashamed of this settlement. I realize that if the casino fought even one case and lost, the floodgates of lawsuits would open up and they’d bankrupt the company. Damn…this is so damn sad.
^ This.
How is it the hotel is liable for what a crazy guest did illegally???
When 25,000 people agree to be locked up inside a jail in Hell….they signed a waiver…
if anyone is liable..its who ever was in charge of security for that music event and the music event companies…
Do the victims or their families actually get any cash, or do the lawyers split all that, and leave the victims MGM gift certificates?
Good point: the attorneys representing the plaintiffs are most likely going to get 33% of the award which is a windfall of $267 Million. I wonder how many of the plaintiff’s attorneys will be retiring after that?
What a miscarriage of justice. In my humble opinion, 99.9% of the liability in this case rests solely on the scumbag/s who injured, maimed, and/or killed the victims.
The murderer didn’t have 800 mil to distribute.
ONE HELL OF A LOT OF MONEY TO SPEND ,for just the second amendment ..i truly believe the LETTER AGENCIES was the proud papa of this along with our african president..
Those with the biggest pockets…
If you wonder why everything is so expensive, it’s because of this. Almost a billion dollars coming from the hotel and insurance- insurance that will, I assure you, pass that cost on to all its customers- and they onto you.
Someone wounded in an event like this should not be on their own, financially. But we should have a way to deal with it that does not involve this sort of legal ‘settlement.’ Wanna guess how much of that 800 million went to the lawyers???
I can understand why the hotel chose to settle. A few years ago, an eighteen-wheeler, owned by Werner Enterprises, struck a pickup on I-20 in west Texas. The roads were icy. The pickup lost control and crossed the median into the path of the Werner truck. The pickup’s driver suffered serious brain injuries, her 7-year-old son died and her 14-year-old daughter suffered catastrophic brain injuries. Even though the cause of the accident was the pickup driver’s loss of control, a jury awarded them $90 million. Note that the Werner driver maintained control of his truck even after the crash. That wasn’t enough for the jury which appeared to believe that he had the duty to anticipate and compensate for the pickup driver’s negligence.
Texas juries are notorious for this. I used to work for a major railroad that ran through Texas. If someone got hit after going around properly functioning crossing gates, it was routine for a jury to blame the railroad. Most places, cops will ticket someone who goes around crossing gates. In Texas, the cops go around them.
In civil trials, the jury system is f—ed up.
Which is why level crossings are disappearing. I know of only few in the outskirts of Sydney on a minor suburban line.
After LAWYERS fees that’s about 750K per family but should be about 1.8 MIL
I find this outrage hilarious. Almost everyone here echoes the sentiment that the plaintiffs are entitled to nothing and the casino is not liable. Well.
Any other day, this same crowd howls about so-called gun-free zones and demands that private property owners be held liable for the public’s welfare should someone freak out and go on a shooting spree on their property while they were “forced” to disarm. Curious, that.
Here’s a tip: if you cannot articulate some semblance of an underlying principle that guides your reasoning, then chances are you’re just emoting and not reasoning, at all. If you can specify such a principle, however, then applying it consistently will help avoid these hilarious contradictions in positions.
Bingo.
Two words- extraordinary measures. Your average run of the mill self declared gun free zones don’t have any preventative measures in place ( metal detectors being the most common) to stop someone from coming in off the street and shooting people. The murderer in Las Vegas had to go to extraordinary measures to break/cut the glass on a shatter resistant window that wasn’t designed to be opened.
Jonathan – Houston,
I can provide a simple principle:
Human life and human dignity have immense — nearly infinite — value. As such, human life and dignity should prevail in any conflict of desires/rights.
One realization of that simple bedrock principle: stealing is wrong.
Another realization of that simple bedrock principle: restitution is right.
If we can “righteously” steal from people, then people have no inherent value nor dignity. And if we are not required to “make it right” when we steal from someone or create/enable a dangerous condition that harms people, then people have no inherent value nor dignity.
The reason that this lawsuit and settlement are horribly wrong is because MGM did not steal from the concert patrons and MGM did not create/enable a dangerous condition that injured the patrons and therefore requires restitution.
The reason that land owners should be liable for injuries if they forbid effective self-defense — without implementing effective measures to defend patrons — is because the land owner created/enabled a dangerous condition that harmed people.
And before you chime in that land owners have infinite private property rights, I will tell you right now: that principle violates human dignity since that means a person has NO rights on private property that they do not own. Saying it another way, your right to life is not dependent on your map coordinates or whoever claims to own the ground upon which you are standing.
To illustrate that last point, consider the scenario where a violent criminal kidnaps a woman and then dumps her on someone’s private property. Even though that woman is on private property without permission of the property owner, the private property owner cannot righteously kill the woman because that woman still has dignity and her inalienable right to life.
The above point clearly shows that private property owners most certainly do NOT have infinite authority on their property to enforce any and every desire or policy that they choose. The really important question, then, is how far can private property owner desires/policies go before they would violate the human dignity and life of guests? That is an entirely different discussion and one worthy of having.
This kind of bullshit is one of the major things wrong with out society.
Wow aint it great your dead love ones can be turned into a jackpot!!..I bet all that money will easily erase that person’s memory from them earth!…The new get rich quick scheme from a FALSE FLAG
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