Gunman remains an enigma to police
Shooter defies patterns and didn’t show signs of instability
Investigators dug deeper Tuesday into the seemingly mundane past of a retired accountant whose rain of gunfire from a luxury Las Vegas high rise turned an evening concert into the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Two days after the attack, police and federal agents gleaned more evidence — but shooter Stephen Paddock remained very much an enigma to them. Paddock killed himself as police began breaking into his 32nd-floor room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
At 64, the gray-haired Paddock was older than the typical mass killer. Researchers have found that except for school shooters, such killers are most often in their 30s and 40s. Investigators said Paddock, who lived in a Nevada retirement community, did not show any tell-tale signs of embarking on his murderous rampage.
The gunman’s younger brother, Eric, said the Paddock family was in a state of shock. His brother, he said, lived an affluent, comfortable life, enjoying frequent trips to Vegas where he played slot machines and $100-ahand poker. Stephen Paddock had no known mental health problems, his brother said.
“We are completely dumbfounded,” Eric Paddock said. “We can’t understand what happened.”
The gunman had been licensed as an aircraft pilot, had a girlfriend, owned multiple properties and recently went on a cruise, according to family and public records.
Investigators examined a number of transfers involving thousands of dollars related to Paddock’s gambling activities in Las Vegas.
President Trump called Stephen Paddock “a sick man, a demented man with a lot of problems, I guess, and we are looking into him very, very seriously.”
Though neither authorities nor family members had determined a motive for the attack by Paddock — whom authorities described as a “lone wolf” — a portrait of the gunman’s methods and background began to take shape.
Some of the shooter’s arsenal was modified with a device known as a “bump-stock” that allows for rapid firing, similar to a machine gun.
The modification, which uses the weapon’s natural recoil to fire in rapid succession, is legal, though controversial because it allows gun owners to bypass machine gun restrictions that require special permits and fingerprinting.
Paddock brought at least 23
Stephen Paddock was “a sick man, a demented man with a lot of problems.” President Trump
guns to his 32nd-floor hotel suite. Investigators found 10 suitcases in the room that were probably used to bring the arsenal of weapons into the hotel, said Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo.
Investigators found 19 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition at Paddock’s home in Mesquite, Nev.
Police planned to review several days of surveillance footage in hopes of detailing Paddock’s movements leading up to the massacre. He checked into the Mandalay Bay on Sept. 28.
Several gun show owners in Nevada and elsewhere said they sold weapons to the gunman.
The owners of Guns & Guitars, a dealer not far from Paddock’s home, confirmed selling guns to him more than once. Janis and Mike Sullivan, the co-owners of the shop, noted they do not sell automatic weapons and are not licensed to do so.
“He passed every federal background check, every time he bought a gun,” Janis Sullivan, 67, told USA TODAY.
Chris Michel, the owner of Dixie GunWorx in St. George, Utah, said he sold Paddock a shotgun this year.
Michel said he noticed nothing unusual about the man.
“He was a normal, average ‘Joe Blow’ kind of guy,” Michel said. “There was nothing special that happened. He came in a couple of different times; we dealt with him as a normal customer.”
Investigators hoped to gain insight from the gunman’s companion, Marilou Danley, who Lombardo said was traveling in Japan at the time of the incident. Police called Danley “a person of interest” and said she provided information to authorities. It was unclear when she was expected to return to the USA.
Investigators found an undisclosed amount of ammonium nitrate, a type of fertilizer that has been used as a bomb component, in Paddock’s vehicle parked at the hotel, Lombardo said.
A powerful ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb was used in an attack in Oklahoma City that left 168 dead in 1995.
The material found in Paddock’s vehicle had not been converted into an explosive component.
Paddock’s late father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was a convicted bank robber who spent years on the lam in the late 1960s and 1970s and took a spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. The father was captured after gaining notoriety for operating Oregon’s first legal bingo parlor.
Though the FBI described the elder Paddock as “psychopathic,” federal law enforcement officials downplayed the notion that the father’s notorious past may have had an impact on the gunman’s actions. Eric Paddock, the gunman’s brother, noted that his father wasn’t very involved with the family and that the brothers grew up without him in their life.
Neighbors of the gunman said there wasn’t much about him that stood out beyond his passion for high-stakes gambling.
Federal investigators confirmed that they are looking into the gunman’s gambling habits. Authorities reviewed recent transfers of thousands of dollars involving Paddock and links to gambling activities that would have tripped mandatory government notification requirements, a federal law enforcement official told USA TODAY.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, noted that the review was only one part of a wide-ranging search for a motive in the attack.
In Viera, Fla., where Paddock owned a home in a 55-and-older community from 2013 to 2015, neighbors recalled how he won $20,000 gambling on his cellphone. “He seemed normal, other than that he lived by gambling. He was very open about that,” said his former neighbor Sharon Judy.