A cowardly Las Vegas cop who admitted that he froze in a hallway while responding to the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history has been fired, department officials said.
Officer Cordell Hendrex — who was caught on body camera footage waiting in a hallway one floor below a mass shooter at the Mandalay Bay hotel for nearly five minutes on Oct. 1, 2017 – was fired March 20, a Metropolitan Police Department spokesman told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Department officials declined further comment on Hendrex’s employment, but a police union president confirmed to the newspaper that the nearly 10-year veteran had been terminated due to his actions while responding to the attack that killed 58 people.
Video shows that Hendrex, along with a police trainee on his first day, stayed on the 31st floor for roughly four and a half minutes, despite reports that gunman Stephen Paddock was just one floor above him.
“I’m inside the Mandalay Bay on the 31st floor,” Hendrex said. ”I can hear the automatic fire coming from one floor ahead, one floor above us.”
Hendrex later acknowledged in his official report that he was overcome by fear.
“I know I hesitated and I remember being terrified with fear and I think that I froze right there in the middle of the hall for how I can’t say,” the officer wrote.
Hendrex was fired nearly 18 months after chilling footage of the 10-minute attack was released. It remains unclear whether any other officers were disciplined as a result of their response to the mass shooting, the Review-Journal reported.
The bodycam video also showed Hendrex, his police trainee and three Mandalay security officers taking up a position in a stairway leading to the 32nd floor, where they remained for at least 15 minutes.
The officer was terminated only after footage of his reluctance to respond was shared with the media, the police union spokesman said.
“After they knew, he continued to work for the department,” the police union president, Steve Grammas, told the newspaper. “In our opinion, until it came up in the news and they started getting some heat is when they made this decision.”