‘Lone-wolf ’ gunman was accountant, poker player
MESQUITE, NEV. The man who carried out the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history was a 64-year-old retired accountant with a taste for high-stakes poker who had moved to Nevada just a couple of years earlier.
While investigators were still piecing together the attack by Stephen Paddock at a country music concert that left at least 59 dead and 527 wounded, the gunman’s younger brother said the gunman had shown no signs of volatility and was “dumbfounded” as he searched for an explanation for why his brother would carry out such a brutal assault.
“There’s absolutely no way I can even conceive that my brother would shoot a bunch of people he didn’t even know,” Eric Paddock told the USA TODAY Network in an interview. “There’s no rationale. There’s nothing anywhere that said why he did this.”
Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said officers determined the gunshots were coming from a room on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay complex
on the Las Vegas Strip. Authorities said it appeared Paddock killed himself.
At least 10 rifles were found in the room; it appeared he had hammered out the windows of the room before shooting.
“Right now, we believe it’s a sole actor, a lone-wolf-type actor,” Lombardo said.
Lombardo added that investigators have yet to determine a possible motive for the rampage. “I can’t get into the mind of a psychopath at this point.”
Investigators believe Paddock used the vantage point to fire on the 22,000 country music fans who gathered for the Route 91 Harvest Festival. He opened fire as artist Jason Aldean performed.
Lombardo said law enforcement authorities had located a “person of interest” who he named as Marilou Danley, believed to be the suspect’s companion. He said Danley was located outside the country. Authorities were already gathering information from her about Paddock, and the sheriff said investigators expected to continue to speak with her once she returned to the U.S.
The Islamic State claimed after the attack that Paddock was one of the terror group’s “soldiers.” But Aaron Rouse, chief of the FBI’s Las Vegas office, told reporters that investigators have found no links with the gunman to international terror groups.
Eric Paddock said he last heard from his brother via text message to inquire about how their mother was doing after Eric Paddock’s Florida neighborhood lost electricity for several days after Hurricane Irma last month.
He said his brother was previously married but had no children.
Paddock added that his brother, who had worked as an accountant before retiring, had “no machine guns” when he helped move him from Florida to Nevada a few years ago.
“It’s like an asteroid just fell on top of our family,” he said.
Christopher Sullivan, manager of Guns & Guitars in Mesquite, confirmed that Paddock had purchased guns from the shop in the past. Sullivan declined to offer details about the types of weapons or the dates they were purchased.
Paddock told the USA TODAY Network that their late father, Benjamin Paddock, was a convicted bank robber, and they were raised without him for most of their childhood.
Benjamin, a garbage disposal salesman who was known as “Chromedome,” “Big Daddy” and “Old Baldy,” committed an armed robbery of a Phoenix bank in 1960 that netted him more than $4,600, the Tuscon
Daily Citizen reported in 1971. He later escaped from a Texas prison and for a time was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. He was captured in 1978 in Oregon, where he was running a bingo parlor.
The most-wanted poster that was first issued by the FBI in 1969 indicated that the father was “psychopathic” and “very dangerous” after escaping from a Texas prison.
Paddock’s house in Mesquite is in a retirement community, Sun City Mesquite, an upscale development of about 1,400 homes.
He owned a home in a 55 and older community from 2013 to 2015 in Viera, Fla., but he rarely stayed there, according to neighbors.
“He seemed normal, other than that he lived by gambling. He was very open about that,” former neighbor Sharon Judy said. Peter reported from Nevada, Glenn from Orlando, Johnson from Washington and Madhani from Chicago. Contributing: Tess Sheetz, Wayne T. Price, Sarah Litz, Kevin McCoy, John Bacon, A.J. Perez.