Motive a mystery in Las Vegas mass shooting

Mesquite, Nev. — Stephen Paddock lived in a tidy Nevada retirement community where the amenities include golf, tennis and bocce. He was a multimillionaire real-estate investor, recently shipped his 90-year-old mother a walker and liked to travel to Las Vegas to play high-stakes video poker.

Nothing in his background suggests why he would have been on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino with at least 17 guns on Sunday night, raining an unparalleled slaughter upon an outdoor country music festival below.

“I can’t even make something up,” his bewildered brother, Eric Paddock, told reporters Monday. “There’s just nothing.”

At least 59 people were killed and nearly 530 injured in Paddock’s attack on the Route 91 Harvest Festival, where country music star Jason Aldean was performing for more than 22,000 fans. It was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The 64-year-old gunman killed himself in the hotel room before authorities arrived.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility, without offering evidence, but Aaron Rouse, the FBI agent in charge in Las Vegas, said investigators saw no connection to international terrorism.

The shooting began at 10:07 p.m., and the gunman appeared to fire unhindered for more than 10 minutes, according to radio traffic. Paddock apparently used a hammer-like device to smash out windows in his room and open fire.

Police frantically tried to locate him and determine whether the gunfire was coming from Mandalay Bay or the neighboring Luxor hotel.

The rapid-fire popping sounded like firecrackers at first, and many in the crowd of 22,000 country music fans didn’t understand what was happening when the band stopped playing and singer Jason Aldean bolted off the stage.

“That’s gunshots,” a man could be heard saying emphatically on a cellphone video in the nearly half-minute of silence and confusion that followed. A woman pleaded with others: “Get down! Get down! Stay down!”

Then the pop-pop-pop noise resumed. And pure terror set in.

“People start screaming and yelling and we start running,” said Andrew Akiyoshi, who provided the cellphone video to the Associated Press. “You could feel the panic. You could feel like the bullets were flying above us. Everybody’s ducking down, running low to the ground.”

“People start screaming and yelling and we start running,” said Andrew Akiyoshi, who provided the cellphone video to the Associated Press. “You could feel the panic. You could feel like the bullets were flying above us. Everybody’s ducking down, running low to the ground.”

While some concertgoers hit the ground, others pushed for the crowded exits, shoving through narrow gates and climbing over fences as 40- to 50-round bursts of automatic weapons fire rained down on them from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino hotel.

The crowd, funneled tightly into a wide-open space, had little cover and no easy way to escape. Some hid behind concession stands. Others crawled under parked cars.

“You just didn’t know what to do,” Akiyoshi said. “Your heart is racing and you’re thinking, ‘I’m going to die.’”

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Asked about a potential motive, Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said he could not “get into the mind of a psychopath at this point.”

Public records offered no hint of financial distress or criminal history. Eric Paddock, who spoke with reporters outside his home near Orlando, Florida, said even if his brother had been in financial trouble, the family could have bailed him out.

“No affiliation, no religion, no politics. He never cared about any of that stuff,” Eric Paddock said as he alternately wept and shouted. “He was a guy who had money. He went on cruises and gambled.”

Stephen Paddock, who had worked previously as an accountant and never served in the military, was “not an avid gun guy at all,” though he had a couple of handguns and a long gun, he said.

Eric Paddock also told the Associated Press that he had not talked to his brother in six months and last heard from him when Stephen checked in briefly by text message after Hurricane Irma.

Their mother spoke with him about two weeks ago, and when he found out recently that she needed a walker, he sent her one, Eric Paddock said.

“She’s completely in shock,” he said.

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Hours after the shooting, Aldean posted on Instagram that he and his crew were safe and that the shooting was “beyond horrific.”

“It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night,” the country star said.

With hospitals jammed with victims, authorities put out a call for blood donations and set up a hotline to report missing people and speed the identification of the dead and wounded. They also opened a “family reunification center” for people to find loved ones.

In an address to the country, President Donald Trump called the bloodbath “an act of pure evil” and added: “In moments of tragedy and horror, America comes together as one. And it always has.” He ordered flags flown at half-staff.

Eric Paddock recalled receiving a recent text from his brother showing “a picture that he won $40,000 on a slot machine. But that’s the way he played.”

He described his brother as a multimillionaire and said they had business dealings and owned property together. He said he was not aware that his brother had gambling debts.

“He had substantial wealth. He’d tell me when he’d win. He’d grouse when he’d lost. He never said he’d lost four million dollars or something. I think he would have told me.”

Heavily armed police searched Paddock’s home Monday in Mesquite, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas near the Arizona border, looking for clues. Paddock lived there with his 62-year-old girlfriend, who authorities said was out of the country when the shooting happened. Eric Paddock described her as kindly and said she sometimes sent cookies to his mother.

Police also searched a two-bedroom home Paddock owned in a retirement community in Reno, 500 miles from Mesquite.

Paddock had 23 firearms — some of them with scopes — in his hotel room, Lombardo said. Two were modified to make them fully automatic, according to two U.S. officials briefed by law enforcement who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still unfolding.

At Paddock’s home, authorities found 19 more guns, explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Also, several pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be turned into explosives such as those used in the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, were in his car, the sheriff said.

The elder Paddock was on the lam for nearly a decade, living under an assumed name in Oregon. Investigators found him in 1978 after he attracted publicity for opening the state’s first licensed bingo parlor. He died in 1998.

Stephen Paddock has been divorced at least twice, including marriages that ended in 1980 and 1990. One of the ex-wives lives in Southern California, where a large gathering of reporters congregated in her neighborhood. Los Angeles police Sgt. Cort Bishop said she did not want to speak with journalists. He relayed that the two had not been in contact for a long time and did not have children.

Paddock kept a vacation home in Heritage Isle, a gated retirement community in Viera, Florida, from 2013 to 2015, said Don Judy, his neighbor there. Judy said gambling, online and in person, was how Paddock claimed to make his living. One time, he said, Paddock showed Judy’s wife his laptop as evidence that he had won $20,000 in an online game.

“He never gave me any indication that he was strapped for money or needing money,” Judy said. “He said he was a gambler by trade, a speculator.”

Judy described Paddock as “a real nice guy” who typically dressed in a polo shirt and shorts and didn’t stand out among other part-time residents.

“The second time I met him, he pulled out his keys and he gave me his house key,” Judy said.

When Paddock was away, Judy said, he would bring in his mail and the newspaper and walk through the house to make sure the air conditioning was working and that there wasn’t any flood damage after storms.

“He would call me every so often to ask if everything was OK with the house. Just so ordinary. … There’s nothing to profile this guy by.”

AP writers Sally Ho and Regina Garcia Cano contributed.