Reno gunman fired from building connected to Las Vegas shooter

RENO — A gunman who took a hostage and rained gunshots on a downtown Reno street Tuesday night fired from a luxury high-rise where Las Vegas festival gunman Stephen Paddock apparently once owned a condominium.

The Reno gunman died when SWAT team officers shot him in the eighth-floor Montage unit where he had barricaded himself, Reno police Deputy Chief Tom Robinson told reporters.

Nearby Sparks Police Department, overseeing the police shooting investigation, identified the shooter Wednesday as Lucas Stone, 30, of Reno.

“The preliminary findings appear that the suspect was shooting at subjects that did not exist from the interior of his residence,” Sparks police said in a Wednesday statement.

Reno police officers spoke with Stone and the hostage inside the room, Sparks police said, adding he continued to shoot while the female hostage was inside the room with him.

The department also said two Reno police officers and one Washoe County Sheriff’s Office deputy shot their guns at Stone, but the department did not name them. Reno police and deputies formed a SWAT team, and after entering Stone’s room inside the high-rise, an officer shot at Stone, the statement said.

Stone died at a local hospital.

Aside from a neighbor who reported a superficial hand injury that didn’t require medical help, no one else, including the hostage, was hurt.

Reno Police Chief Jason Soto said Wednesday that preliminary information suggests the shooting was an isolated incident.

“It does not appear that this was a preplanned attack on our community,” he said in a statement.

Sparks police added there was no evidence to suggest Stone had been targeting people downtown.

The luxury high-rise is surrounded by some of downtown Reno’s most popular casinos. The building was a casino before it was converted into luxury condos, according to its website.

Property records show Paddock owned a unit at the Montage from December 2012 to December 2016. Paddock killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 others on Oct. 1 when he fired more than 1,100 rounds from the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas onto the adjacent Route 91 Harvest country music festival.

The Reno gunfire echoed the Las Vegas shooting two months earlier, especially for Mike Pavicich, who was in town on business from Las Vegas and was standing atop a parking garage at the neighboring Eldorado Resort Casino when shots rang out.

“When you heard it’s coming from above it reminds you of the guy shooting from Mandalay Bay,” Pavicich, whose wife is a nurse and who helped treat victims of the Las Vegas shooting, told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “It’s scary, you know? This is the same kind of town.”

Karl Fiebiger, who lives a floor below the unit where the gunfire was emanating, quickly left after police told him they had secured the floor. Police told him they worried stray bullets could penetrate windows and floors.

“Honestly, I knew the shooter was close, I could feel the windows vibrate, I could hear things falling from walls,” Fiebiger told the newspaper.

Trooper Chris Kelley of the Nevada Highway Patrol told the newspaper that shots were heard from the building for at least 20 minutes, and TV news reporters said they heard several shots after arriving, but the shots were sporadic, not constant.

In the Las Vegas attack, Paddock, 64, modified an AR-15 to loose a stream of constant bullets like an automatic weapon.

Review-Journal staff writers Blake Apgar, Mike Shoro and The Associated Press contributed to this story.