LAS VEGAS – The Las Vegas shooter’s father was a violent bank robber who was on the FBI’s most wanted list in the 1970s.
Stephen Paddock killed at least 59 people and injured more than 500 others when he opened fire on concert goers at a country music festival in Las Vegas on Sunday night.
In the hours since the horrific massacre, the shooter’s brother revealed that their father Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, who went by the alias Patrick Benjamin Paddock, also had a violent criminal history.
https://twitter.com/BrendanKeefe/status/914874924409540608
He was a bank robber in the 1960s and 70s and even made it onto the FBI’s 10 most wanted list in 1968 after escaping from a Texas prison. He had been serving a 20-year sentence in a federal correctional facility after robbing a bank in Phoenix, Arizona in 1960.
An FBI poster circulating online says Benjamin was “diagnosed as psychopathic, has carried firearms in commission of bank robberies” and “reportedly has suicidal tendencies and should be considered armed and very dangerous.”
According to the FBI’s website, Paddock senior was removed from the most wanted list in 1977 because “it was felt he no longer fit the ‘Top Ten’ criteria.”
The agent in charge of the FBI’s office in Phoenix had described Paddock as “a glib, smooth-talking man who is egotistical and arrogant,” according to an archived article from the Tucson Daily Citizen.
The mass murderer’s family have expressed shock and horror at his actions. “It’s like an asteroid fell out of the sky,” his brother Eric said to CNN.
“We didn’t know him,” Eric Paddock said of their father.
