Stephen Paddock

• 1. Introduction

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  Stephen Paddock spent the night of the 1st of October 2017 in a hotel room above a crowd of about 22,000 people. They had gathered for a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. By the end of that night, 60 of them were dead and roughly 867 were injured, at least 413 of them by gunfire. It remains the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in United States history. The man responsible was an accountant, real-estate investor, private pilot and video poker gambler who lived in Mesquite, Nevada. Who was Stephen Paddock, and what kind of life produces a person like this? How did he prepare, and how did the night unfold minute by minute? And why, years later, does no official explanation exist?

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• 2. A Father's Shadow

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  Benjamin Paddock was arrested in Arizona in 1960, when his eldest son Stephen was seven years old. The charge was bank robbery. Stephen had been born on the 9th of April 1953 in Clinton, Iowa, the oldest of four brothers, and the family had moved to Tucson shortly afterward. Benjamin was later convicted. In 1969 he escaped from prison and landed on the FBI's most-wanted list.

  Dolores Hudson, the boys' mother, told her sons that their father had died in a car accident. She hid the truth about his crimes from the family. Stephen's brother Eric later said that the brothers did not grow up under their father's influence. Dolores moved the boys to the Sun Valley neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she supported them on a secretary's wages in a low-income household.

  One of Stephen's ex-wives told police what he had said about those years. Growing up with a single mother and unstable money, he told her, had made him determined to be self-reliant. Another brother, Patrick Paddock II, said all the brothers grew up with anger, but that Stephen seemed the least affected. "My brother was the most boring one in the family," Patrick said. "He was the least violent one."

  Former classmates remembered a "math genius" who was "quiet and withdrawn." Paddock attended Richard E. Byrd Middle School and Sun Valley High School, then graduated from John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in 1971. In 1977 he finished a business administration degree at California State University, Northridge. His brother Eric would later become his partner in a real-estate business.

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• 3. Numbers and Cards

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  A postal job occupied Paddock from 1975 to 1978, and then he moved to the Internal Revenue Service, where he stayed until 1984. In 1985 he worked as an auditor for the Defense Contract Audit Agency. From 1985 to 1988 he also served as an internal auditor at a company that later merged into Lockheed Martin. His career, in other words, was spent checking other people's figures.

  Video poker was his game, and he had played it for more than 25 years. He sometimes appeared in the high-limit rooms of Las Vegas casinos. Even so, he was not well known among high-stakes gamblers, and casinos did not treat him as a "whale," their term for a top-tier high roller. He gambled after dark, slept through the day, and disliked being out in the sun. How much he actually won is unclear, although his reported winnings may have been substantial.

  Real estate made him wealthier than cards did. He owned property in Panorama City, Cerritos and North Hollywood from the 1970s into the early 2000s, plus two apartment buildings in Hawthorne, California. He also held an apartment complex in Mesquite, Texas, which he sold in 2012. A complex he bought in 2004 was paying him more than $500,000 a year by 2011. IRS records show that its sale in 2015 brought him $6 million in profit.

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• 4. A Quiet Life

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  Paddock was married twice, from 1977 to 1979 and again from 1985 to 1990, both times in Los Angeles County. He had no children. Relatives say he remained on good terms with both ex-wives.

  His later addresses trace a path toward quiet places. He lived in Texas and California, then in a retirement community in Melbourne, Florida, from 2013 to 2015. In 2016 he moved to another retirement home, in Mesquite, Nevada. There he lived with a girlfriend he had met years earlier in Reno, where neighbors said the couple had also shared a home. Mesquite residents mostly recalled seeing him around town, a man who said little and kept a low profile. Local gun owners never saw him at the clubs, the ranges, or the makeshift shooting spots in the nearby desert.

  An Australian acquaintance, who met Paddock in the United States and in the Philippines, remembered someone intelligent and methodical. According to this man, Paddock claimed to have won money by applying algorithms to gambling machines. He could talk fluently about gun laws and defend his reading of the Second Amendment. The acquaintance also found him generous whenever Paddock and his girlfriend came to visit.

  In 2010 Paddock applied for a United States passport and received it. He took 20 cruise voyages, calling at ports in Spain, Italy, Greece, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, with his girlfriend aboard for nine of them. The couple visited the Philippines together in 2013 and 2014. In the last year of his life they sailed on a cruise to the Middle East. He had held a pilot's license since at least 2004 and owned two small planes, one of them a Cirrus SR20 with the registration N5343M.

  His only recorded contact with law enforcement was a minor traffic citation, which he settled in court. In September 2012 he sued the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, claiming he had "slipped and fell on an obstruction on the floor." The suit settled and was dismissed with prejudice in October 2014.

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• 5. Months of Preparation

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  Between October 2016 and the 28th of September 2017, Paddock bought more than 55 firearms, most of them rifles, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He bought a number of accessories as well. Over the thirty-four years before that, from 1982 to September 2016, he had acquired roughly 29 guns, mainly handguns and shotguns. His girlfriend saw the new purchases pile up and assumed it was a hobby.

  Two weeks before the attack, at his suggestion, she flew to her native country, the Philippines. He bought her a surprise airline ticket. Soon afterward he wired her $100,000 to buy a house there. Nearly all their contact from then on happened by email and text message. Investigators also learned that Paddock had been seen in Las Vegas with another woman, reported to be a sex worker. She was later confirmed to be neither an accomplice nor a suspect, and her name has not been released.

  On the 25th of September, six days before the shooting, he checked into the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino carrying 10 shooting-range bags and a computer. On the 29th he moved into a second suite, 32-134, connected to his first. Both rooms overlooked the festival grounds. Two days before the shooting, a home surveillance system recorded him driving alone to a target-practice area near his house.

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• 6. Ten Minutes of Fire

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  At 9:59 pm on the 1st of October, hotel security guard Jesus Campos tried to enter the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay on an unrelated matter. He found the hallway door screwed shut. Paddock had also set a webcam on a service cart outside his room. At some point during the attack, Paddock fired about 35 rounds through his own door, and one of them wounded the unarmed Campos.

  The shooting at the crowd began at 10:05 pm from Room 32-135, aimed at the Route 91 Harvest festival below. Paddock opened with a few single shots, then moved to prolonged bursts. He stopped at 10:15 pm, after firing more than 1,000 rounds. Authorities speculate that he shot himself through the mouth at that point.

  The police response unfolded more slowly. The first two officers reached the 32nd floor at 10:17 pm, and a minute later someone showed them the door to Paddock's suite. Between 10:26 and 10:30 pm eight more Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers arrived and began clearing the other suites along the hallway. At 10:55 pm, eight SWAT members entered through the second stairwell, the one nearest to Paddock's rooms.

  Only at 11:20 pm did police blow open his door with an explosive charge. That was 65 minutes after he stopped firing and more than an hour after the first officers arrived. They found Paddock dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. What lay inside the two connected suites became the first evidence investigators studied.

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• 7. Inside the Suites

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  Police counted 23 rifles and one handgun in Paddock's rooms. Fourteen were AR-15 type rifles in .223 caliber, and eight were AR-10 type rifles in .308 caliber. There was also one .308 Ruger American bolt-action rifle and one .38 Smith & Wesson model 342 revolver. A law enforcement source called every weapon "very expensive." Some rifles stood on bipods and carried high-tech telescopic sights. The magazines held up to 100 cartridges each.

  All fourteen AR-15 type rifles had been fitted with bump stocks, devices that use recoil to help pull the trigger again faster and raise the rate of fire. Audio recordings of the attack indicated that Paddock used them to fire at the crowd in rapid succession.

  Among the papers was a note of handwritten calculations about where to aim. It listed the true distance to the target, his own elevation, and the bullet's trajectory relative to the line of fire. Investigators also found several laptops, one of them missing its hard drive. Forensic examination turned up hundreds of illegal images of children on them. His brother Bruce Paddock, called "Daniel Paddock" in some sources, was arrested in Los Angeles that October in an unrelated child pornography investigation.

  The trunk of Paddock's car held ammonium nitrate, 1,600 rounds of ammunition and 50 pounds of Tannerite, a binary explosive used for exploding targets at gun ranges. Investigators said he had "nefarious intent" with the material but did not appear to have assembled a bomb. Another 19 firearms were found at his home. Over the weekend after the shooting, someone broke into his Reno house through the front door. Authorities said nothing was known to be missing, and the FBI revisited his homes.

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• 8. A Motive Unknown

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  Police concluded that Paddock acted alone, and they have never identified a reason. His girlfriend said he rarely talked at length about politics and belonged to no political groups. She also said he complained more and more of feeling sick and was sensitive to chemical smells. In his last months he reportedly smelled of alcohol in the early morning and seemed despondent.

  Prescription records show Valium fills in 2013, in 2016, and in June 2017, four months before the shooting. The chief medical officer of the Las Vegas Recovery Center said alcohol can magnify the drug's effects, a point Michael First, a Columbia University clinical psychiatry professor, confirmed. Yet the autopsy found no alcohol or psychoactive drugs in Paddock's system, although his urine did contain benzodiazepines.

  Speaking to the local CBS affiliate KLAS-TV, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said Paddock had reportedly been losing "a significant amount of wealth" since September 2015, with "bouts of depression." His girlfriend noticed that the affection and intimacy he showed early in the relationship had faded, and he blamed his declining health. In March 2023, FBI documents speculated that he had been angry about the alleged poor treatment of high rollers at Las Vegas casinos. The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department dismissed that report and repeated that the motive was inconclusive.

  Doctors looked inside his head too. His remains went to Stanford University for a closer analysis of the brain, after an earlier finding of pathology that was first thought to be benign. The Stanford pathologists found no abnormalities. Investigators believe he was obsessed with cleanliness and may have had bipolar disorder. A doctor offered him antidepressants, but he accepted only anxiety medication and was fearful of taking pills at all. That doctor called him "odd" and said he showed "little emotion." After the fact, psychologists noted a resemblance between his demeanor and alexithymia, a difficulty in recognizing and expressing feelings.

  The Islamic State claimed responsibility, saying Paddock had converted to Islam six months earlier and taken the name Abu Abdul Barr al-Amriki. United States law enforcement officials gave no evidence of any link. His Catholic girlfriend said he called himself an atheist and often said, "your God doesn't love me."

  The shooting has since entered popular culture. An episode of Lies, Crime & Videos, titled "One October: Massacre on the Strip," says in an opening title card that some of its more than 22,000 hours of video are being shown for the first time. Eminem's song "Darkness," on his January 2020 album Music to Be Murdered By, portrays Paddock's thought process before the shooting while doubling as a metaphor for pre-concert nerves. A four-part, Emmy-nominated documentary miniseries, 11 Minutes, reached Paramount+ in September 2022.

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