Las Vegas Mass Shooting Victims Sued By Mandalay Bay Owners As MGM Seeks To Avoid Liability
According to Fox News, MGM Resorts International, the corporate owners of the Mandalay Bay casino, have filed suit in federal courts in Nevada and California against over 1,000 victims of last year’s Las Vegas concert mass shooting.
MGM is claiming it has no liability for the massacre, and says any and all claims by victims against the hotel must be dismissed. A spokeswoman stated Monday that the plaintiffs have no liability of any kind to the defendants, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“The Federal Court is an appropriate venue for these cases and provides those affected with the opportunity for a timely resolution. Years of drawn out litigation and hearings are not in the best interest of victims, the community and those still healing.”
Las Vegas lawyer Robert Eglet represents multiple victims of the shooting in their case against Mandalay Bay. He argues that in 2014, a man was found with multiple weapons inside the hotel in an incident eerily prophetic of the October 1 shooting last year. The incident, says Eglet, should have spurred a tightening of security.
MGM countered with an argument based on a law passed after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which broadly defines terrorism as any unlawful act inside the United States that causes “mass destruction, injury or other loss.” MGM had hired Contemporary Services Corp., whose services had been certified by the Department of Homeland Security for “protecting against and responding to acts of mass injury and destruction.”
The certification, it is argued, relieves the security vendor from liability in case of terrorist acts, and MGM’s stance is that that protection extends to Mandalay Bay. However, the FBI defines terrorism as an act of terror associated with extremist ideologies of a political, religious, social, racial or environmental nature, and did not view the Las Vegas shooting as a terrorist act because the gunman lacked any such motive.
Twitter reacted swiftly to news of the suit.
Good morning. The world is insane. MGM Resorts Sues More Than 1,000 Las Vegas Shooting Victims to Avoid Liability in Massacre – Newsweek https://t.co/S4gAiqmmtb
— John McNamara (@johnthemcnamara) July 17, 2018
This is outrageous. I have stayed at the Mandalay Bay & love the place. But this is not only against human decency, but how could they not recognize this PR nightmare. Boycott. MGM Resorts sues 1,000 victims of Las Vegas mass shooting, denying liability https://t.co/NNzbhC2YpV
— Dr Paul D Flannigan (@PaulDFlannigan) July 17, 2018
Eglet told the Review-Journal that the action is nothing more than a “preemptive strike” to get the cases moved to federal court and that the suits are a “blatant display of judge shopping” that “quite frankly verges on unethical.”
“I’ve never seen a more outrageous thing, where they sue the victims in an effort to find a judge they like. It’s just really sad that they would stoop to this level.”
In 2014, a man was arrested with multiple weapons at Mandalay Bay in what Eglet points to as a “precursor” to the massacre, saying that the presence of Kye Aaron Dunbar was arrested in a 24th-floor Mandalay Bay room with guns including an assault-style rifle, a tripod, and a telescopic sight bears similarities to the Oct. 1 shooting.
In April, the Nevada Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling on another MGM case from 2010; the original ruling found MGM not liable for attacks on a California couple, Carey Humphries and Lorenzo Rocha, inside the New York-New York, another MGM property. Humphries and Rocha were attacked by a man at the casino, and she suffered a fractured skull. In October, a three-justice panel overturned the ruling, stating that there had been other incidents of violence at New York-New York; therefore the owners should have known the attack was foreseeable and done more to prevent it.
