![]() He doubts the man had much influence on his brother beyond his absence. Their mother, now in her 90s, told her sons their father was dead, Eric Paddock has said. He was captured the following year, served out his sentence and returned to Oregon, where he died a few years ago.īenjamin Hoskins Paddock was a bank robber who went to prison when his son Stephen was 7. The elder Paddock twice escaped from prison, earning a spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted list from June 1969 until May 1977. ![]() His father was considered by law enforcement to be a dangerous psychopath with suicidal tendencies and used several aliases and nicknames, the most colorful of which was “Chromedome.” Stephen was the oldest of four Paddock boys raised by a single mother after their father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was hauled off to prison for “robbing banks with a machine gun,” as Eric Paddock put it. He got the high-roller treatment – not bad for a bank robber’s kid from suburban Los Angeles. He recalled a visit during which Paddock took him out to eat “thousands of dollars of sushi,” all comped by a casino hotel where he gambled. “If you were Steve’s friend, he would spend money on you,” his brother said. He never said anything to me or took any action that I was aware of, that I understood in any way to be a warning that something horrible like this was going to happen.” “I loved him and hoped for a quiet future together with him. “I knew Stephen Paddock as a kind, caring, quiet man,” Danley said in her statement. One thing Marilou Danley and Eric Paddock apparently can agree on, though: Steve Paddock was a private man who spent money – lots of it – on the people he loved. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department via AP Marilou Danley said through her lawyer she thought Paddock sent her to the Philippines to break up with her. He gave away so little of himself personally that initially the two people closest to him had opposite interpretations of why Paddock had sent his girlfriend off on a trip. ![]() It never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that he was planning violence against anyone.”Īnd that, in itself, says plenty about the cipher that was Stephen Paddock. “I was worried that first, the unexpected trip home, and then the money was a way of breaking up with me. “As Steve was cratering into this hell, he wanted to take care of Marilou.”ĭanley, for her part, thought Paddock was through with her, she said through her lawyer. “The clue that reveals Steve,” he said, “is that he transferred $100,000 to the Philippines to take care of Marilou.” He said that was the brother he knew. He took comfort in news a reporter had texted him that day – that Paddock wired $100,000 to his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, in the Philippines before the massacre. “Something horrible happened to my brother and whatever happened to him in his head, it made him go over the edge like this,” he said. Paddock's brother Eric said, "There are no types of clues" to his brother's actions. “Steve was a private guy – that’s why you can’t find any motive,” said his younger brother, Eric, who spoke for half an hour with reporters Tuesday in the driveway of his home in Florida.Įric Paddock’s anguish was there for all to see as he struggled to wrap his head around the cold, hard fact that the affluent, successful big brother who was “fun to hang out with” rigged a sniper’s nest in a hotel suite and shot 58 strangers to death and wounded hundreds more. The previous evening, Sheriff Joe Lombardo summed up the mystery man this way: Paddock “spent decades acquiring weapons and ammo and living a secret life, much of which will never be fully understood.”Įven the people closest to the shooter are struggling to understand why, on a Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip, Paddock perched in a posh hotel suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino and fired round after round at a crowd of 22,000 country music fans 32 stories below. Chasing down all those leads “helped create a better profile into the madness of this suspect,” McMahill said, but “we still do not have a clear motive or reason why.” McMahill seemed almost apologetic Friday afternoon when he told reporters that despite running down some 1,000 leads, investigators still haven’t come up with “credible information” concerning Paddock’s motive.
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