A little more than a year after a gunman opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest Festival crowds from a Las Vegas hotel, the FBI is sharing new details regarding possible motive in their investigation.
On Oct. 1, 2017, gunman, Stephen Paddock, opened fire from the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas onto the Route 91 Harvest Festival, an outdoor, country music festival, taking place across the street. A total of 58 people were killed and hundreds more injured. But while investigators struggled to find a motive for the shooting in the days after the deadliest mass shooting committed by one individual in the United States, a new report released Tuesday reveals the FBI’s recent findings.
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According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the FBI announced that a group of experts with access to the evidence from the shooting were unable to determine Paddock’s motive, a question that had eluded authorities since the 64-year-old went on his deadly rampage in Vegas. The panel was assembled by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and consisted of experts in fields including threat assessment, cyber behavioral analysis, child sexual exploitation, psychology, psychiatry and law.
However, the report goes on to detail how Paddock, who fatally shot himself after carrying out the attack, was not driven to act against one specific person or institution, but rather to achieve maximum destruction. The panel also concluded that Paddock desired to die by suicide, which “was compounded by his desire to attain a certain degree of infamy” through an attack of this size.
“Throughout his life, Paddock went to great lengths to keep his thoughts private, and that extended to his final thinking about this mass murder,” the report stated. “Active shooters rarely have a singular motive or reason for engaging in a mass homicide.”
Findings suspect he selected Mandalay Bay because it was tactically “advantageous” and targeted the festival because the crowd contained “unsuspecting and vulnerable people.”
“Paddock’s decision to murder people while they were being entertained was consistent with his personality,” the report continued. “He had a history of exploiting others through manipulation and duplicity, sometimes resulting in a cruel deprivation of their expectations without warning.”
The report highlighted 10 key findings about Paddock, including the fact that he was influenced by his father, who was a convicted bank robber and diagnosed psychopath. Paddock’s father escaped from federal prison in 1968 and was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list, with authorities arresting him again nearly 10 years later. He was mostly absent from his son’s life and passed away in 1998.
“Paddock’s father created a facade to mask his true criminal identity and hide his diagnosed psychopathic history, and in so doing ultimately achieved significant criminal notoriety,” the report states.
Las Vegas FBI agent Aaron Rouse said that Paddock’s actions were likely about being remembered.
“It wasn’t about MGM, Mandalay Bay or a specific casino or venue,” he said, via the Tennessean. “It was all about doing the maximum amount of damage and him obtaining some form of infamy.”
Photo Credit: Getty / Drew Angerer
