Brother of multimillionaire investor and highstakes gambler bewildered.
MESQUITE, Nev. — Stephen Paddock lived in a tidy Nevada retirement community where the amenities include golf, tennis and bocce. He was a multimillionaire realestate investor, recently shipped his 90-year-old mother a walker and liked to travel to Las Vegas to play highstakes video poker.
Nothing in his background suggests why he would have been on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino with at least 23 guns on Sunday night, raining an unparalleled slaughter upon an outdoor country music festival below.
“I can’t even make something up,” his bewildered brother, Eric Paddock, told reporters Monday. “There’s just nothing.”
Two rifles with scopes were mounted on tripods and positioned in front of the two windows in the hotel room, roughly 500 yards from the concert grounds.
Stephen Paddock’s attack on the Route 91 Harvest Festival was one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. The 64-year-old gunman killed himself in the hotel room before authorities arrived.
Public records offered no hint of financial distress or criminal history. Eric Paddock, who spoke with reporters outside his home near Orlando, said even if his brother had been in financial trouble, the family could have bailed him out.
“No affiliation, no religion, no politics. He never cared about any of that stuff,” Eric Paddock said as he alternately wept and shouted. “He was a guy who had money. He went on cruises and gambled.”
Stephen Paddock, who had worked previously as an accountant, was “not an avid gun guy at all,” though he had a couple of handguns and a long gun, his brother said.
Eric Paddock said he had not talked to his brother in six months and last heard from him when Stephen checked in briefly by text message after Hurricane Irma.
Their mother spoke with him about two weeks ago, and when he found out recently that she needed a walker, he sent her one, Eric Paddock said. “She’s completely in shock,” he said.
Eric Paddock recalled receiving a recent text from his brother showing “a picture that he won $40,000 on a slot machine. But that’s the way he played.”
He described his brother as a multimillionaire and said they had business dealings and owned property together. He said he was not aware if his brother had gambling debts.
“He had substantial wealth. He’d tell me when he’d win. He’d grouse when he’d lost. He never said he’d lost $4 million or something. I think he would have told me.”
Heavily armed police searched Stephen Paddock’s home Monday in Mesquite, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas near the Arizona border, looking for clues. Paddock lived there with his 62-year-old girlfriend, who authorities said was out of the country when the shooting happened. Eric Paddock described her as kindly and said she sometimes sent cookies to his mother.
Police also searched a twobedroom home Paddock owned in a retirement community in Reno, 500 miles from Mesquite.
While Stephen Paddock appeared to have no criminal history, his father was a notorious bank robber, Eric Paddock confirmed to the Orlando Sentinel. Benjamin Hoskins Paddock tried to run down an FBI agent with his car in Las Vegas in 1960 and wound up on the agency’s most wanted list after escaping from a federal prison in Texas in 1968, when Stephen Paddock was a teen.
The elder Paddock remained a fugitive for nearly a decade, living under an assumed name in Oregon. Investigators found him in 1978 after he attracted publicity for opening the state’s first licensed bingo parlor. He died in 1998.
Stephen Paddock previously lived in another Mesquite — the Dallas suburb of Mesquite, Texas — from 2004 to 2012, according to Mesquite, Texas, police Lt. Brian Parrish. Paddock owned at least three separate rental properties, and there was no indication the Police Department had any contact with him over that time, Parrish said.
He has been divorced at least twice, including marriages that ended in 1980 and 1990. One of the ex-wives lives in Southern California, where a large gathering of reporters congregated in her neighborhood. Los Angeles police Sgt. Cort Bishop said the ex-wife did not want to speak with journalists.
According to federal aviation records, Paddock was issued a private pilot’s license in November 2003.
Paddock kept a vacation home in Heritage Isle, a gated retirement community in Viera, Fla., from 2013 to 2015, said Don Judy, his neighbor there. Judy said gambling, online and in person, was how Paddock claimed to make his living.
“He never gave me any indication that he was strapped for money or needing money,” Judy said. “He said he was a gambler by trade, a speculator.”