Bruce Paddock, the brother of the Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, reportedly spoke to the FBI at length to try and help them determine a motive for the grizzly mass shooting.
Bruce Paddock told reporters from KNBC that that he had called the FBI just a few days after the Route 91 Harvest Festival Shooting, hoping to help them puzzle out how his brother had become a mass murderer. However, he admitted that he hadn’t spoken to Stephen Paddock in about 10 years.
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Bruce said he wished he had done a better job of staying in touch with his brother. He felt that he could have done a small part to prevent the shooting if he’d been there for Stephen.
“It was always Steve. He didn’t care about anybody else,” Bruce said in an interview on the Hidden Truth Show podcast. He further explained how he was estranged from his family, so he didn’t see or speak to his brother for a decade. Their last conversation, he said, was brief and tense. He said that he called his mother, who called Stephen, who then called him.
“She called him and he called me and we talked for about 10 minutes,” said Bruce. “I’ve had just as much of his [expletive] as I could listen to him and that was it. Talking about flying his airplanes to Vegas and gallivanting.”
He said that he never heard from his brother again, and didn’t think about him until he turned on the news during the shooting.
“I called my mom and my mom answered the phone and I asked ‘is that Steve?’ And she said, ‘I guess so.’ I don’t know how to say I’m sorry enough for what’s happened.”
Bruce agreed with some of the investigators who said that Stephen Paddock’s shifting personal finances may have played a role.
“He had lost a significant amount of his monetary wealth in close proximity to 1 October and that may have been a driving factor associated with it,” said Sheriff Joe Lombardo in a press conference in January.
However, Bruce said it went deeper than that. He claimed that his brother was obsessive and controlling, and money was just one of the ways he maintained a tight controlling grip on his life.
“His dream to have everything,” said Bruce. ” The loss of the ability to control everything because he was always the controlling brother.”
Bruce Paddock is in quite a bit of legal trouble himself. He was charged with possession of child pornography, and is expected to stand trial in Los Angeles soon.
