The girlfriend of the man who shot and killed at least 58 people at a country music festival on Sunday, Oct. 1 arrived back in the United States on Tuesday, and was taken out of an airport side exit.
Footage obtained by NBC purportedly of Marilou Danley, 62, shows a woman in a wheelchair with a dark visor covering her face and police escorting her through the airport. It is not immediately clear why Danley was in a wheelchair.
Danley was named as a “person of interest” by police after her 64-year-old boyfriend, Stephen Paddock, shot into a crowd of some 22,000 concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest festival on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday.
Paddock barricaded himself in a 32nd-floor hotel room in the Mandalay Bay Resort and shot at the crowd from his suite window.
Police found at least 23 firearms in his room, many of them rifles. Some had been been outfitted with bump-stock, a device that allows the gun to fire hundreds of round of ammunition in a minute, similar to an automatic.
Danley, who is originally from the Philippines, was on a trip to the Asia during the shooting.
She arrived in Manila on Sept. 15, flew to Hong Kong on Sept. 22, and then returned to Manila on Sept. 25. She was there until she flew to Los Angeles on Tuesday night, according to a Philippine immigration official, Reuters reported.
The FBI said it hoped she would voluntarily submit to questioning. She has not been named a suspect in the case, but authorities said they hoped she would help them uncover a motive for the shooting.
According to Danley’s brother in the Philippines, she said she had a “clear conscience.”
Danley’s sisters, who live in Australia, told Seven News Australia that she took a surprise trip to the Philippines two weeks before the massacre after Paddock bought her a ticket.
“She didn’t even know that she was going to the Philippines, until Steve said, ‘Marilou, I found you a cheap ticket to the Philippines,’” one of the sisters, who asked to remain anonymous, told the network.
“She was sent away. She was away so that she will not be there to interfere with what he’s planning.”
They said she had no prior knowledge of the attack, but said she was the only one who could help authorities piece together what could have been going through Paddock’s mind to lead him to do such a thing.
