From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, a lone gunman with no history of crime,

booked a suite at a Las Vegas hotel and fairly shot at least 59 people.

What we know about one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history.

And a single day in Puerto Rico as President Trump arrives to survey the wreckage from Hurricane Maria.

It's Tuesday, October 3rd.

Richard Perez-Penya, what do we know at this point about what happened inside this hotel room in Las Vegas?

A man named Stephen Patek who lived in Mesquite Nevada and who was a wealthy person who liked to gamble apparently,

had checked into a high-level suite in the Mandalay Bay Casino Resort.

It's this very fancy, luxurious hotel casino on the south end of the Las Vegas strip.

He'd been there for a couple of days in a suite that had multiple rooms on the 32nd floor, so very near the top.

Apparently smashed out the windows with a hammer and had an arsenal with them.

And in the two windows that he smashed out, he had set up on tripods, rifles with scopes.

They were AR-15 style assault rifles, which apparently we don't know this for certain yet,

but seem to be the main weapons that he used in the shooting.

And what was happening on the ground below where he was finding his targets?

So this was this three-day country music festival called the Route 91 Harvest Festival.

And at the time of the shooting, the police were estimating there were 22,000 people on this scene.

Yeah, it was basically just a big empty lot where they had set it up.

All of a sudden we just heard like three or four little pop pop pop.

And a lot of people at first thought,

everybody kind of looked around and said, oh, it's just firecrackers.

...