Amid a deadly shooting in the business school at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Dec. 6, police officers mistook the gunman for a bystander and urged him to get out of the building during the frantic search for the suspect and victims, the Associated Press reports. With weapons drawn, two Las Vegas officers climbed stairs to a second-floor walkway overlooking the ground floor of the business school during the episode that left three professors dead and one wounded on the 30,000-student campus. The shooter, Anthony Polito, 67, appears for a few moments in more than five hours of footage made public Wednesday. The video provides the first look at the suspect in the building after opening fire on the top floors of the five-story school.
When the rampage began, students and staff had been eating lunch and playing games in a large courtyard just outside the school, which sits across from the student union. The video shows Polito wearing a long black trench coat over a white shirt and moving calmly through the first floor of the school as officers swarmed the building. “Get out! Get out!” the officers shouted at Polito while pointing to an exit. Clark County Undersheriff Andrew Walsh said the officers did not know they encountered the gunman inside the building. A minute later, Polito left the building, pulled his weapon and was killed in a shootout with university police officers.