Three months into the investigation on the man who carried out the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting, investigators have revealed domestic terrorist Stephen Paddock was a high-stakes gambler on a losing streak, obsessed with cleanliness, possibly bipolar and having trouble with his live-in girlfriend.
Even with this extraneous information, authorities still have not answered the question weighing on America’s collective mind: Why did he open fire on a crowd of over 20,000, killing 58 and injuring hundreds more?
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Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo released a preliminary report on Friday, Jan. 19 about the Oct. 1 attack saying that Marilou Danley, Paddock’s longtime girlfriend, would not be charged in relation to the attack.
Lombardo also reported that Danley told investigators the couple had stayed together at Mandalay Bay, where Paddock later carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, weeks before the attack — but that he had become “distant.”
She remembered him constantly looking out the windows overlooking an area where the concert would be held the next month. He moved from window to window to see the site from different angles, the report said.
Danley also described Paddock as germophobic and said he had strong reactions to smells.
Paddock had told friends and relatives that he always felt ill, in pain and fatigued. His doctor thought he may have had bipolar disorder but told police that Paddock refused to discuss the possibility, the report said. The doctor offered him antidepressants, but Paddock accepted only a prescription for anxiety medication. Paddock was fearful of medication and often refused to take it, the doctor told investigators.
Additionally, the 64-year-old had lost a “significant amount of wealth” since September 2015, which led to “bouts of depression,” the sheriff has said. Paddock had paid off his gambling debts before the shooting, according to the report.
Danley was in the Philippines visiting family at the time of the attack. As previously reported, she had warned investigators that they might find her fingerprints on ammunition Paddock used in the shooting — which they did.
She said she would sometimes help Paddock load high-volume ammunition magazines, according to FBI warrant documents.
Paddock fired more than 1,100 bullets, mostly from two windows on the 32nd floor of the hotel, into a crowd of 22,000 people attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival below, Lombardo has said. That includes about 200 shots fired through his hotel room door into a hallway where an unarmed hotel security guard was wounded in the leg and a maintenance engineer took cover.
Paddock’s body was cremated, his brother told the Las Vegas Review-Journal last week. The coroner confirmed that his next of kin, brother Eric Paddock, had received the remains.
“I’m putting the ashes in a safe deposit box in a bank in order to make sure that there’s no hoopla around Steve’s remains,” he told the Review-Journal. “I don’t want someone to do something stupid.”
Apart from his body, Fudenberg sent Stephen Paddock’s brain tissue to Stanford University School of Medicine to undergo neuropathological examination, which could look for possible disorders that may explain his erratic actions. Eric Paddock said the family did not object to the examination of his brother’s brain.
