Las Vegas police name suspect in deadly attack
Stephen Paddock, 64, lived at retirement community north of Las Vegas
Police say Swat officers found Paddock dead, apparently from suicide
Police have named Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old from Mesquite, Nevada, as the suspect who opened fire from a high-rise hotel on a country music concert in Las Vegas and killed at least 59 people in the worst mass shooting in recent US history.
Las Vegas sheriff Joe Lombardo said Swat officers found Paddock dead, apparently having killed himself, on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Officers found him with at least 10 rifles.
On the street below, the Vegas strip was the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. More than 500 people were taken to nearby hospitals, authorities said.
“I don’t know how he could stoop to this low point, hurting someone else,” Bruce Paddock, who identified himself as the suspect’s brother, told NBC News.
Stephen Paddock was a resident of Mesquite, Nevada, a retirement and golf community of about 20,000 people about 80 miles north of Las Vegas near the Arizona state line, a police spokesman confirmed. He also had a home in Reno, in the east of the state, according to reports.
“We don’t have a lot on Mr Paddock,” said Mesquite police spokesman, Quinn Averett. Local police records showed no reports of any contact with the suspect, Averett said: no calls for service, no arrests, not even a record of a traffic stop.
In Las Vegas, police there said, the suspect’s only run-in with law enforcement was a traffic violation.
Authorities were struggling to understand the motives behind the mass killing. An FBI agent, Aaron Rouse, told reporters the agency has “determined at this point no connection to an international terrorist organization”.
“We have no idea what his belief system was,” said Lombardo. “Right now, we believe he was the sole aggressor, and the scene is static.”
Eric Paddock, a man identified by several news outlets as another brother of the suspect, told reporters the family was “dumbstruck” and compared hearing the news to being “crushed by an asteroid”.
Eric Paddock, who lives in Orlando, learned of his brother’s involvement when police called him early on Monday. He gave a statement to authorities, according to an interview he gave to a Florida affiliate of ABC, and said he didn’t know of any “affiliations” that would explain his brother’s actions.
“We are completely dumbfounded. We can’t understand what happened,” he told the Orlando Sentinel. Speaking to a CBS reporter, he described his brother as “not an avid gun guy at all”, although he added that Stephen may have owned several handguns.
“The fact that he had those kinds of weapons is just, where the hell did he get automatic weapons?” Eric Paddock continued. “He has no military background or anything like that. He’s a guy who lived in a house in Mesquite, drove down and gambled in Las Vegas.”
He added the family, including the suspect’s elderly mother, were “freaked out” by the news. “They’re fucked up,” he said. “I’ve got a 90-year-old mother whose son just killed 50-plus people and now he’s dead.”
The suspect’s father was at one time on the FBI’s most wanted list for his role in several bank robberies, both brothers have told reporters.
Eric Paddock said the brothers didn’t know their father, Benjamin Paddock, who was in and out of jail during the 1960s and escaped custody in 1968.
An FBI poster from then warned the elder Paddock was an “armed and dangerous” suspect convicted of bank robbery, automobile larceny and “confidence game”. He was captured in 1978.
Bruce Paddock, who said he has not spoken to his brother Stephen in many years, said the family grew up in Sun Valley, California.
In interviews with the Washington Post, neighbors in Reno described the suspect as extremely standoffish. “It was like living next to nothing,” said one. Paddock and his girlfriend would go often to Vegas on gambling trips or for concerts, neighbors said, but he was aggressively unsocial toward other members of the retirement community.
Heavily armed police were seen searching the suspect’s home in Mesquite early on Monday morning. Police chief Troy Tanner said officers surrounded and entered the one-story, three-bedroom home where he lived with 62-year-old Marilou Danley.
Police saw “no movement” inside before serving a search warrant at the ranch-style home in the Sun City Mesquite retirement community. Photos of the residence showed a metal garage door crumpled in the driveway. Mesquite police said they ripped the door off while executing the warrant and that detectives from Las Vegas and North Las Vegas were at the scene.
Las Vegas police said Danley was out of the country at the time of the shooting and they had cleared her of any involvement. “Marilou Danley is no longer being sought out as a person of interest,” the Las Vegas metropolitan police department said in a statement to CNN.
Eric Paddock told a CBS news reporter Danley was his brother’s girlfriend and the family were relieved to hear she was unhurt.
Public records listed previous addresses for Stephen Paddock in Texas and California, as well as a 2010 license to hunt and fish in Alaska. Paddock lived in central Florida as recently as 2015, according to media outlets there.
Florida Today spoke to residents of Heritage Isle retirement community in Viera, where records show the suspect owned a two-bedroom house from 2013 until 2015. Mick Anderson, who bought the house from Paddock, said he never met or spoke with him.
“It was all done through my realtor and his realtor,” Anderson told the newspaper. “The only thing I can tell you is that the documents were regularly late.”
Next-door neighbors Don and Sharon Judy said they saw Paddock and his girlfriend only rarely in the two years he owned the property.
