Vegas Gunman’s Brother Reportedly ‘Terrorized’ Auto Shop

Bruce Paddock (LAPD)

The brother of the Las Vegas shooter who killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more reportedly planted hidden cameras around an auto repair shop where he was squatting.

Bruce Paddock, the brother of gunman Stephen Paddock, was arrested earlier this week on charges of possession of 600 child abuse images that were found on a computer that he left at a garage.

He had squatted at a Sun Valley, California, garage’s attic since 2014 but was eventually evicted after he became “violent and aggressive” with customers and staff, The Sun reported.

The owner of the shop, Hector Cruz, handed over the computer to police. Bruce Paddock then disappeared and police started hunting him.

“He put cameras up around the shop and nobody knew about it,” garage employee Brian Cruz was quoted by The Sun as saying. “I think it was to control people or to watch people, I don’t know why really. It’s very weird.”

“They took the cameras down now but you can still see where they were. They were inside and outside. They were covered so you couldn’t tell they were there,” he said.

Hector Cruz told KTLA that Bruce Paddock threatened to kill him. Paddock also threatened to set the garage on fire.

“Yes, he was violent to workers and even to customers. He used to threaten people,” Brian Cruz said. “He had permission to stay here from my boss. He met him at a race event or something like that. He [Hector] is a good person and he just wanted to give him a chance.”

Bruce Paddock faces 19 counts of sexually exploiting a child and is now being held on $60,000 bail, the NY Post reported.

The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office will now investigate the matter further.

Bruce was homeless for some time and couldn’t be found, and, according to the LA Times, he was tracked to the North Hollywood building where he was arrested Wednesday, Oct. 25.

Police said the arrest was not related to the investigation into the mass shooting in Las Vegas that left 58 people dead and hundreds wounded on the night of Oct. 1.

“There’s no connection,” Josh Rubenstein, a spokesman for the LAPD, told the newspaper.

In an interview with NBC a day after the shooting, on Oct. 2, Bruce Paddock said that he hadn’t spoken with Stephen for 10 years and had no idea why his brother would shoot hundreds of people.

“I don’t know how he could stoop to this low point, hurting someone else. It wasn’t suicide by cop since he killed himself,” he told NBC several weeks ago. “He killed a bunch of people and then killed himself so he didn’t have to face whatever it was.”

Bruce Paddock revealed to the station that their father was a longtime bank robber and fugitive who once made the FBI’s most-wanted list.

Court records show that Bruce Paddock has a criminal history that goes back to the 1980s, including vandalism, criminal threats, theft, and driving with a suspended license.

“I’m not proud of it,” he said of the vandalism case. “But I never went to prison.”

He’s been visited twice since the shooting.

Bruce Paddock noted that he’s been trying to reconnect with his family, leaving messages for brother Eric and others. “I want to see if we could patch up what we destroyed so many years ago,” he told NBC. He said that he only reached his mother, “and she’s yelling at me all the time not to talk to anyone.”