Docs reveal possible motive for Las Vegas shooter who killed 60, based on FBI interview

It took six years, but it appears federal authorities may have possibly begun to genuinely crack the case of the Las Vegas mass shooter, Stephen Paddock.

As previously reported, Paddock was a high-stakes gambler who opened fire on a crowd attending a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 1st, 2017, killing 60 people.

Following the mass shooting, the authorities struggled to discern a motive for the crime, while the media meanwhile linked it to white supremacy without any evidence.

Now fast-forward to late last month, when the FBI released “a trove of documents” related to the case. While the documents didn’t explicitly lay out a motive, they did offer clues and hints as to what it might possibly be.

Case in point: “A fellow gambler told the FBI that Paddock had said he was ‘very upset at the way casinos were treating him and other high rollers,’ noting that casinos had reduced the number of perks they gave to VIP customers in the years leading up to the shooting,” The Wall Street Journal reported following the documents’ release.

The gambler friend said that the stress over the reduction in perks could “easily be what caused Paddock to snap.”

Keep in mind this is just speculation. Still, it’s more than investigators had prior to their interview with the gambler friend. That said, it does contradict with what a panel convened by the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit found after a yearlong investigation.

“In its 2019 report, the panel said there was no indication that he was motivated by a grievance against ‘any specific casino, hotel, or institution in Las Vegas.’ The aging Paddock wanted to kill himself and sought infamy by killing as many people as he could, the report said,” according to the Journal.

Plus, members of the public remain very skeptical about the fellow gambler’s claim, given as the mass shooting hadn’t involved shooting up, you know, a casino:

The documents released last month also included statements from a guy who reportedly worked with Paddock at some point in the past and stayed in touch with him afterward. The man said that Paddock had been “mad at the system” and fascinated with the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. And so there’s another possible motive. That said, the man hadn’t expected him to “go out like that.”

Another possible motive is money loss.

“Sheriff Joseph Lombardo, the former head of the Las Vegas police, said … in 2018 that Paddock’s gambling losses may have been a factor; his bank accounts dwindled from $2.1 million to $530,000 in the two years before the attack. But the sheriff said investigators weren’t able to ‘definitively answer the why,'” according to the Journal.

Notice how there are so many possible motives? That’s the problem. Thus far is that the feds have been unable to pinpoint one precise motive. Instead they’ve found leads pointing to multiple motives, none of which have been corroborated yet.

Indeed, according to the Journal, “A 10-month probe by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department previously turned up no evidence of Paddock’s motives after interviews with his relatives, girlfriend, ex-wife, doctor and casino hosts, as well as searches of his computers, phones and internet history. He left no statement or suicide note, wasn’t affiliated with a terrorist group and had no mental-health diagnosis that might explain his actions.”

Vivek Saxena

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