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Vegas gunman's brother: 'Completely dumbfounded' it happened

By Ed Adamczyk and Allen Cone
The brother of the man identified by police as the gunman in a Las Vegas shooting Sunday said he is unaware of the motivation for the incident. Eric Paddock of Orlando gave a statement Monday to local police regarding his brother Stephen who shot himself to death as police entered his Las Vegas hotel room. Photo by James Atoa/UPI
The brother of the man identified by police as the gunman in a Las Vegas shooting Sunday said he is unaware of the motivation for the incident. Eric Paddock of Orlando gave a statement Monday to local police regarding his brother Stephen who shot himself to death as police entered his Las Vegas hotel room. Photo by James Atoa/UPI | License Photo

Oct. 2 (UPI) -- The brother of Stephen Paddock, the suspected gunman in the shooting deaths of at least 58 people at a Las Vegas concert, said Monday he was "completely dumbfounded" it happened.

Paddock, 64, of nearby Mesquite, Nev., fired shots at concertgoers from a hotel room in the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on Sunday night, police said. He was found in his hotel room, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

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"There is no reason we can imagine why Stephen would do something like this," his brother Eric Paddock, 55, of Orlando, Fla., said. "All we can do is send our condolences to the people who died. Just no reason, no warning."

He said "it's like an asteroid just fell on top of our family."

Paddock lived in a retirement community in Mesquite with his girlfriend Marylou Danley. Although he was known to local police, he had no conflicts with law enforcement, the Desert Valley Times reported Monday.

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The older Paddock bought a home in Mesquite -- 80 miles from Las Vegas -- for $369,000 in January 2015, according to court records obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Nineteen were found in the home and 23 in shooter's 32nd-floor hotel room, including two rifles on tripods.

"He might have had a gun or two, but he didn't have a huge stock of guns," Eric Paddock said.

The two brothers last talked a few weeks ago after Hurricane Irma struck Florida, he said.

Their father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list from 1969-77 for bank robberies. He was bumped from the most-wanted list because he longer longer fit the "Top 10" criteria, according to the agency's website.

The suspect's father, who was diagnosed as psychopathic, was convicted of bank robberies in Phoenix and San Francisco in the 1960s. He died a few years ago.

Another brother, Bruce Paddock, said Stephen wasn't like his father and had no radical views.

"He never got into fights. He never did anything violent. He's kinda laidback, never in a hurry," another brother, Bruce Paddock, of Calfornia, told NBC News. "I don't know how he could stoop to this low point, hurting someone else ... He killed a bunch of people and then killed himself so he didn't have to face whatever it was."

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In September 2012, Stephen Paddock filed a negligence lawsuit in Clark County District Court against The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas over a fall at the Strip resort. The lawsuit was dismissed in October 2014 after both sides agreed to drop it. The Cosmopolitan is on the strip like Mandalay Bay but they are not owned by the same company.

NBC news reported Paddock gambled more than $10,000 per day -- sometimes greater than $20,000 and $30,000 -- at Las Vegas casinos, according to an NBC News source. Casinos are required by the Treasury and IRS to file when "each transaction in currency involving cash-in and cash-out of more than $10,000 in a gaming day."

Bruce Paddock, who said he hadn't spoken to his brother in 10 years, said Stephen owned and managed apartment buildings with his mother, who lives in Florida.

Federal Aviation Authority records show that Paddock became a certified private pilot on Nov. 17, 2003.

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