The shooter who killed 60 people in a Las Vegas massacre in October 2017 may have been angry at casinos after he lost a significant amount of money in the days before the incident, according to newly released FBI files.
Stephen Paddock was accused by law enforcement of shooting into a crowd of country music fans from his Mandalay Bay hotel suite after transporting dozens of rifles and thousands of rounds of ammunition into his hotel room. Officials said that he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound as responding officers attempted to access his room.
But few details have been provided about Paddock, and officials have never established a motive for why a 64-year-old high-stakes gambler would carry out the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.
But in the years leading up to the mass shooting in Las Vegas, the red carpet treatment for high rollers had faded, the gambler claimed. Casinos even began banning some high rollers “for playing well and winning large quantities of money,” the documents said.
Paddock had been banned from three Reno casinos, the gambler told FBI investigators. That individual also believed “the stress could easily be what caused” Paddock “to snap.”
The FBI documents did not provide any information for why Paddock targeted a country music concert instead of shooting up a casino if he was angry about the way he and other gamblers were being treated.
The gambler also said that Mandalay Bay “was not treating Paddock well because a player of his status should have been in a higher floor in a penthouse suite.” It’s not clear how the gambler knew Paddock.
A woman who worked at the Tropicana Las Vegas casino told the FBI that Paddock would often play 6 to 8 hours per day at casinos and was “a prolific video poker player.” During a three-day-long period in September 2017—just days before the shooting—he lost about $38,000, she told the FBI.
Paddock, who appears to have had virtually no social media or online presence, did not leave a note or a manifesto, as is common among mass shooters, officials said. He also did not give any indication that he would carry out the shooting to family members or his girlfriend, a Filipino national named Marilou Danley.
The revelation comes years after the FBI in Las Vegas and the local police department concluded their investigations without a definitive motive, although both agencies said Paddock burned through more than $1.5 million, became obsessed with guns, and distanced himself from his girlfriend and family in the months leading up to the shooting.
In a statement on Thursday, Las Vegas police defended their inconclusive findings and dismissed the importance of the documents released this week in response to an open-records request from The Journal.
“We were unable to determine a motive for the shooter,” the police statement said. “Speculating on a motive causes more harm to the hundreds of people who were victims that night.”
Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, who was the sheriff of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department at the time of the shooting, declined to comment on the FBI documents last week.
But Kelly McMahill, a former Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department official who headed the criminal investigation into the shooting, disputed the FBI’s claims that Paddock was motivated by an animus towards casinos. There were never any indicators that Paddock had an anti-casino motive, she said.
“There’s no way that LVMPD would have hidden any potential motive from our victims and survivors for five years,” McMahill told AP.
