Killer was ‘a multimillionaire’ and ‘not an avid gun guy’ says brother
THE man responsible for America’s worst mass shooting was a “multimillionaire” and a regular gambler in Las Vegas casinos, it was claimed last night.
Stephen C. Paddock, 64, killed himself before armed police blasted their way into his hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel.
Next to his body, police found an arsenal of weapons including up to 20 guns, but no immediate clue telling them what drove him to open fire from his window at concert goers below.
“We can’t understand what happened,” a distraught Eric Paddock, Stephen’s brother, told reporters outside his home in Orlando, Florida.
“He’s not an avid gun guy at all. The fact that he had those kind of weapons is just – where the hell did he get automatic weapons? He has no military background or anything like that,” he told MSNBC. “He’s just a guy who lived in a house in Mesquite, drove down and gambled in Las Vegas. He did... stuff. Eat burritos.”
His brother added that Paddock was a multimillionaire, who had made much of his money investing in real estate and spent several years working as an accountant.
He added that his brother had recently sent their mother, 90, a walking aid. The family grew up in Sun Valley, California. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, their father, was a bank robber who was on the FBI’S Top 10 Most Wanted list between 1969 and 1977.
Stephen Paddock had various jobs, including as an auditor at a company that later became Lockheed Martin between 1985 and 1988.
Family members told local media he made a living from renting and managing apartment buildings, and he appears to have owned a string of properties in Florida, Texas and Nevada. Don and Sharon Judy, who lived next door to Paddock and Marilou Danley, his girlfriend, when he owned a house in Florida between 2013 and 2015, said he was “very friendly” and “lived by gambling”.
“He was very open about that. He said he travelled all around to his different homes, that he gambled,” Mrs Judy told Florida Today. “He said ‘Marilou and I, that’s what we do for a living, we gamble and we speculate’.”
Citing law enforcement sources, NBC said records showed Paddock had racked up several gambling transactions in the “tens of thousands” of dollars in recent weeks. It was unclear if those were wins or losses.
Paddock moved into a three-bedroom house at the Sun City retirement community in Mesquite, a desert town of about 17,400 people 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, in 2015. Police were searching the home yesterday.
Joe Lombardo, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff, said local police had nothing more on him than a seven-year-old citation, which had been resolved as “a normal practice in the court system”.
Paddock held a pilot’s licence, owned two aircraft and had a permit to hunt in Alaska.
Police say Paddock checked into the Mandalay Bay hotel last Thursday, but it was unclear how he amassed his huge arsenal of weapons in the room unnoticed.
Sherriff Lombardo said police had located Ms Danley, who is believed to be an Australian citizen, “outside the country” and did not believe she was involved in the shooting. “She was not with him when he checked in. We have discovered he was utilising some of her identification,” he said.
The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil) claimed Paddock had acted on its instructions after converting to Islam several months ago but offered no evidence for the claim.