Car dealer says Las Vegas shooter called life 'miserable'
LAS VEGAS - Stephen Paddock usually kept a cigar at hand, even though he didn't smoke. But he was quick to notice when somebody sat down beside him and lit up.
Then Paddock, a denizen of hazy casinos, would take out his cigar, light it and carefully aim its smoke back into the faces of those whose puffing annoyed him.
"He was the king of microaggression," said his brother, Eric.
Last week, Stephen Paddock returned to the Las Vegas Strip, where he spent many hours and thousands of dollars at high-limit video poker machines, and eyed the fun-seekers crowding his oasis. But this time he did so from a 32nd floor casino hotel suite. Then he smashed open a pair of windows with a hammer and opened fire with a carefully assembled arsenal, killing 58 fans gathered at an outdoor country music concert and injuring 500 more before killing himself.
Investigators and those who knew the 64-year-old former accountant and real estate investor say they cannot fathom what drove him to slaughter. Authorities, who have been trying to track Paddock's movements before the massacre, say there is evidence he also scoped out recent music festivals in Chicago and Boston. So far, though, they say there is no indication that any one incident or grievance turned the sometimes prickly high-stakes gambler into an executioner.
Paddock remains a cipher. But details that have surfaced so far about this murderer - a one-time IRS agent, a boyfriend recalled as both caring and caustic, son of a notorious bank robber - are clues, at least, to his mindset. Unlike most mass shooters, who are usually younger, he was the product of decades of experience and rumination.
Paddock made his living playing machines that reward those who set aside emotion in favor of calculus. He was a methodical planner who paid close attention to other people's behavior, according to those who knew him. And those traits, assets to a gambler, may well have made him more deadly, criminologists said.
Paddock moved from coast to coast over the years, but his story began and ended in the desert Southwest.
The oldest of four brothers, he was raised in Tucson, Arizona. When he was 7, his father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, tried to run down an FBI agent during a pursuit in Las Vegas. After the elder Paddock was caught and charged with a string of Phoenix bank robberies, agents came to the family's house to search for evidence.
A neighbor, Eva Price, took little Stephen swimming while agents combed through the home.
"We're trying to keep Steve from knowing his father is held as a bank robber," she told the Tucson Citizen at the time. "Steve is a nice boy. It's a terrible thing."
Benjamin Paddock was sentenced to 20 years in a Texas federal prison. But he escaped and spent a decade on the run, landing him on the FBI's Most Wanted List.
A wanted posting from 1969 described the older Paddock as an avid bridge player who went by numerous aliases and had been diagnosed as psychopathic. The FBI described him as egotistical, arrogant and a frequent gambler, according to an article that year in the Arizona Republic.
"He reportedly has suicidal tendencies and should be considered armed and dangerous," the agency warned.
Paddock's mother moved with her sons to Southern California. Paddock's brothers said they had little interaction with their father after his arrest. They recall that their mother, who worked as a secretary, did her best to raise the boys on her own, even when times were tight.
At John H. Francis Polytechnic High School, Paddock was a brainy kid, but defied the geek stereotype by dressing more like a hippie, said Richard Alarcon, a former classmate who went on to serve on the Los Angeles City Council. The other thing that set Paddock apart was his "irreverence toward authority," Alarcon said.
For a school contest, Paddock and other students were assigned to design bridges using no more than a specified amount of wood and no glue, in a bid to build the strongest structure.
Paddock's bridge "was like a brick, he put so much glue in it and he used so much more wood than he was supposed to," Alarcon said. "But he didn't care ... It was like he just wanted to build the best bridge ever, regardless of what the rules were."
Paddock earned a degree in business administration from California State University, Northridge, in 1977, a school official said. He then spent a decade working for the federal government, first as a mail carrier, then an IRS agent for six years and, finally, as a defense auditor, according to the government's Office of Personnel Management.
He married and divorced twice, remaining on good terms with both former wives, family member say, and left government work to become an accountant for a defense contractor.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: