Gunman moved from Brevard 2 years ago
Eric Paddock helped his brother, Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, move from Central Florida to Nevada two years ago to feed his video-poker habit and get away from the state’s humidity.
On Monday, he was trying to fathom how his brother could have opened fire from his 32nd-floor hotel room on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday night, killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500 others who were at an outdoor music festival.
“An asteroid just fell out of the sky,” said Eric Paddock, 57, who lives in east Orange County. “We have absolutely no [idea] why in the world he would do something like this.”
FBI agents showed up at Eric Paddock’s door Monday, wanting to know why his brother would commit the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Previously, Orlando held that dubious record for the June 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, which killed 49 people and hurt at least
68.
Stephen Paddock killed himself in his room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino as police closed in.
Eric Paddock, speaking outside his home, said his brother was never violent and had no history of mental illness. He also was not a veteran and, according to the FBI, had no ties to the extremist Islamic State group, which had claimed a connection. He was a gun owner, but Eric Paddock said he never knew his brother to have weapons powerful enough to do such damage.
“We are completely dumbfounded,” he said. “We can’t understand what happened.”
The Las Vegas sheriff said they found 18 weapons, explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition at Paddock's home.
He lived in a retirement community in Mesquite, near the Arizona border. Eric Paddock said his brother was a retiree and high-level poker player.
Eric Paddock said his brother sold his 2-year-old house in Viera, north of Melbourne, and moved away partly to escape Florida’s humidity.
The current resident of Stephen Paddock’s former Brevard County home on Sansome Circle, Mick Anderson, 68 — who bought the house for $235,000 — said he didn’t know Paddock.
"What drives someone to do what he did? I just don't get it," Anderson said.
Sharon Judy said she met Paddock when she and her husband moved into the neighborhood of manicured lawns about the same time as he did. Paddock told her he wasn’t going to live there full time and gave her a key to check on his house.
“He was just a regular senior citizen to us,” Judy said.
She said Paddock described himself as a world traveler and "professional gambler by trade" and said he once showed her a picture of himself winning a $20,000 slot-machine jackpot.
Judy said she was shocked when she heard the news on the radio and didn't know the neighborhood connection to the shooting until reporters knocked on her door.
“He was real friendly, very outgoing, very open about what he did for a living,” she said.
Two special agents with the FBI arrived at Eric Paddock’s house shortly after 10 a.m. Monday. They interviewed him for about an hour and talked to his 89-year-old mother, who lives nearby. He also received a call from the Las Vegas police, he said.
Paddock said the last time he communicated with his brother was to text about a power outage at their mother’s home after Hurricane Irma. Eric Paddock said his brother talked to his mom a couple of weeks ago to check up on her and “everything was fine.” Stephen Paddock had bought her a walker recently.
Stephen and Eric Paddock’s father also had ties to crime, gambling and Las Vegas.
Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, who sometimes went by Patrick Benjamin Paddock, was a bank robber who was put on the FBI’s most-wanted list in 1969. A former garbage-disposal salesman and serviceman, according to a 1960 article by the Arizona Republic, he was arrested in Las Vegas that year and tried to run an FBI agent over with his car before he was captured.
He made the list after escaping from a federal prison in La Tuna, Texas, on Dec. 31, 1968, having served eight years of a 20-year sentence. The FBI at the time described Hoskins Paddock as a frequent gambler and avid bridge player. He had a wife and four children in Arizona, officials said in 1969.
Hoskins Paddock was captured in Springfield, Ore., in 1978. He had opened a bingo parlor for a nonprofit organization in Eugene, Ore., during his time on the lam.
He died in 1998.