About a year and a half ago now, on October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock targeted the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip and opened fire, killing 58 people and wounding 422. The tragedy is the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in modern US history, and since then, MGM Resorts, which owns the Mandalay Bay resort where the shooter was located, has faced many lawsuits related to the shooting.
At the time, the victims’ attorneys said that “the festival did not have adequate exits or properly trained employees for when the crowd began trying to evacuate, resulting in additional injuries and exposure to the gunman’s fire.” Now MGM has an idea of how much these lawsuits are going to cost them, and they estimate it could be as much as $800 million.
In a quarterly report, MGM Resorts told the Securities And Exchange Commission on Thursday that it expects to pay between $735 million and $800 million to settle liability lawsuits that resulted from the shooting, saying that they believe “it is reasonably possible that a settlement will be reached” by next May. Meanwhile, company spokeswoman Debra DeShong said mediation sessions over several months have resulted in progress, and that the goal is “to resolve these matters so that all impacted can move forward in their healing process.”
MGM said it has $751 million in insurance to pay toward a settlement, but Robert Eglet, a lawyer handling mediation talks for plaintiffs, believes it’s too early to have an estimate for the settlement range, saying, “We’re not even close to resolving all the terms and issues before we have a settlement. It’s true that a settlement is possible, but I will tell you it’s not probable. Nothing is signed. We have a long way to go before we have an agreement.”
Learn more about the shooting here, and revisit Jason Aldean’s first-person account of it here.
