On November 2, 2017, a known publisher of fake news, Neon Nettle, reported seven “key witnesses” to the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, NV, had died in what the website described as “very suspicious circumstances”. The supposed motivation for these apparent murders was a “sinister” plot to silence individuals who had made statements, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, asserting that there were multiple shooters at the site of the tragedy. Although there were some disconcerting details around all of these deaths, the notion that they are connected to some larger crime or cover up is thoroughly debunked and not supported by the facts.
Investigators into the shooting, which occurred on October 1, 2017, concluded that Stephen Paddock, 64, was a lone gunman when he opened fire on the crowd assembled below his 32nd floor Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino window. Conspiracy theorists, not surprisingly, see more to it than that, and argue that the Harvest Festival was another in a string of “false flag” attacks—government-engineered catastrophes meant to pave the way for a nationwide gun-grab, presumably in service of some nefarious global cabal bent, of course, on world domination.
The Neon Nettle report named seven witnesses they believed to have died under suspicious circumstances. Two died in an apparent car accident. A third, Chad Nishimura, was reported murdered in a case of mistaken identity. One wasn’t even dead, and another didn’t even have any connection to the Las Vegas shooting!
Jesus Campos, one of the witnesses to feature in Neon Nettle’s fever dream, was reported as missing. In fact, the rumor only appeared after he decided not make a scheduled television appearance.
Kymberley Suchomel passed away from complications arising from seizures. She was a patient in treatment for a tumor at the time.
John Beilman was the tragic perpetrator of a murder-suicide, but he was not connected to the Las Vegas shooting in the first place.
All in all, the deaths for people present at the Harvest Festival are entirely consistent with mortality rates for the US as a whole. The most recent statistics put the mortality rate at 728 per 100,000—meaning we ought to have expected approximately 160 people of the 22,000 who attended the festival to have passed away in within a year of the event.
These deaths are tragic, but they are not evidence of any conspiracy.