Stephen Paddock

American gunman and mass murderer who committed the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting. He fired with automatic weapons into a crowd of some 22,000 concertgoers at a country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip on 1 October 2017. The incident surpassed the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting as the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, with 58 fatalities (excluding Paddock) and 489 injuries. Paddock was found dead at 11:20 PM the same night in his short term accommodation at Mandalay Bay Hotel along Las Vegas Boulevard with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Police found 23 firearms (22 rifles, including AR-15, Kalashnikov, and AR-10 pattern rifles, and one handgun) inside the hotel room that he had occupied since 28 September. Paddock was the eldest of four sons of Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, a convicted bank robber who escaped prison in 1969 and subsequently had his name added to the FBI's most-wanted list until 1977. Stephen Paddock graduated from John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in 1971, and from California State University, Northridge in 1977, with a degree in business administration. He worked for the federal government in several jobs from about 1975 to 1985. Towards the end of the 1980s, he worked for three years as an internal auditor for a company that later merged to form Lockheed Martin. Paddock was a real estate owner, investor and speculator and his estate was worth at least $2 million. Link to Wikipedia biography Link to Astrodienst discussion forum