According to new FBI documents the Las Vegas mass shooter may have been angry at the casinos for not treating high rollers like they once did.
Interstingly enough, Steve Paddock lost $38,000 a few weeks before he killed 59 people and injured more than 500.
Here’s more from Fox News:
The 2017 alleged Las Vegas gunman – in what was considered the deadliest shooting in modern American history – was angry at casinos, according to FBI documents recently made public.
Oct. 1, 2017, the FBI contends that Stephen Paddock began opening fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Casino and Resort in Las Vegas, Nevada, onto patrons attending a nearby Route 91 Country Music Festival. In all, 59 people were killed and more than 500 others were injured.
Authorities said Paddock soon turned the gun on himself. His brain matter was sent to Stanford for testing, and his body was reportedly cremated.
In hundreds of pages of documents made public online this week, the FBI notes how Paddock was a prolific video poker player who visited the Tropicana Las Vegas once every three months on average. He would usually visit during the week because he thought tourists fed the machines on weekends. During one stay between Sept. 12-14, 2017, he lost $38,000.
A fellow gambler told the FBI that Paddock “was very upset at the way casinos were treating him and other high rollers,” according to the released documents. The interviewee expressed that he was “personally upset and stressed out about the treatment he and other high rollers received in recent years and believed the stress could have easily caused Paddock to ‘snap.’”
The fellow gambler, whose name was redacted from the documents, also told investigators he believed the Mandalay Bay Hotel was not treating Paddock well “because a player of his status should have been on a higher floor in a penthouse suite.”
The FBI documents note Paddock had a bankroll of between $2 million and $3 million, and frequented the Atlantis, Peppermill and Tamaric Junction casinos in Reno, Nevada, before being banned from all three, as were other high rollers for winning large quantities of money.
In previous years, casinos would frequently treat high rollers to free cruises, airline flights, penthouse suites, tours in wine country and nice cars, the FBI documents note, but casinos changed their approach about three years ago and started banning high rollers from certain events, hotels and sometimes certain casinos
The fellow gambler told investigators that Paddock had “never showed any signs of radicalized behavior and never expressed interested in firearms.” Paddock “was very intelligent and like all professional gamblers, frequently kept to himself” and played for hours straight, the FBI noted.
Why in the heck would it take six years to get this information from the FBI? They may not have found a singular motive, but it sounds like he was angry at Las Vegas and decided to see if he couldn’t put a dent in their tourism by killing a bunch of people.
Or maybe he was so unhappy with the location of his room that he took it out on the country music festival.
Either way, this information should have come out a long time ago.