Vegas gunman was ‘set for a quiet life’

At first glance, it seemed Stephen Paddock, 64, was set for a quiet lifein a retirement community in Mesquite, Nevada, where he had bought anew home in 2015 near his beloved casinos.From there, it was only an hour’s drive to Las Vegas, where he embarkedon the worst mass shooting in recent US history before killing himself.His brother, Eric Paddock, said he was a peaceful man who moved back tothe red desert hills of Nevada partly because gambling is legal in thestate and he loathed Central Florida’s humidity.“He was a wealthy guy and he liked to play video poker and he liked togo on cruises,” Paddock said from his doorstep in Orlando, Florida.“He’s never drawn his gun, it makes no sense.”His brother had a couple of handguns he kept in a safe, perhaps a long rifle, “but no automatic weapons”.The two were last in touch last month, texting about power outages after Hurricane Irma slammed into Florida.“He had nothing to do with any political organisation and religious organisations” as far as he was aware, Eric Paddock said.Their father was Patrick Benjamin Paddock, a violent bank robber who wason the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)’s Most Wanted list in the1960s.The shooter himself had no criminal record beyond a traffic violation, police in Las Vegas said.“We didn’t know him,” Eric Paddock said of their father.In recent weeks, Paddock made gambling transactions worth tens ofthousands of dollars, though it was unclear whether they were wins orlosses, NBC News reported, citing unnamed law enforcement officials.Public records point to an itinerant existence across the American Westand Southeast: A few years in California, a few years in other parts ofNevada.Paddock had a hunting licence in Texas, where he lived for a while.He got his pilot licence, and had at least one single-engine aircraft registered in his name.In early 2015, he bought a two-storey home in a new housing developmentfor retirees on the dusty edge of Mesquite, a small desert town popularwith golfers and gamblers that straddles Nevada’s border with Arizona.“It’s a nice, clean home, and nothing out of the ordinary,” QuinnAverett, a Mesquite police department spokesman, told reportersyesterday.Some guns and ammunition were found inside, though nothing remarkable in a region where gun ownership is high.Roughly an hour’s drive southwest is Las Vegas, where Paddock checkedinto a 32nd-floor room at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino lastThursday with at least 10 rifles for a shooting spree that would killleast 58 people and hurt more than 500.The FBI said he had no connection with international militant groups.Before moving to Mesquite, Nevada, he lived in another town calledMesquite in Texas, where he worked as the manager of an apartmentcomplex called Central Park.Records as recent as 2015 list Paddock as single, though it appears he may have married while living in California in the 1980s.Police and public records said he lived with Marilou Danley in the Nevada community.Police said she had no connection with the attack, CNN reported.