Talking with reporters on his driveway in Orlando, Florida, while being accompanied by the FBI to interview their mother, Eric Paddock said his brother was, "just a guy who played video poker and took cruises, ate burritos at Taco Bell, listened to country music and went to concerts at Vegas hotels."
He also revealed, "Our father was once on the FBI ten most wanted list. He was an escaped bank robber. Because of that, our father was rarely around for us. I was born on the run," said Eric.
Former neighbor Diane McKay in Reno painted a darker picture of country-western terrorist Stephen Paddock and his girlfriend Danley telling reporters she only ran into Danley occasionally when both women happened to be pulling weeds from their front yards.
"Danley wasn't forthcoming about her life, and Stephen Paddock was aggressively unfriendly," said McKay.
"I only saw him in the mornings, when he went to the clubhouse to work out. Occasionally, he would open the garage door, revealing a large safe the size of a refrigerator. Other than that, the couple kept their blinds closed. He was weird. Kept to himself," said McKay, 79, who described Paddock as small but in pretty good shape.
"It was like living next to nothing .?.?. You can at least be grumpy, or something. He was just nothing, quiet. He never went out in back and enjoyed the backyard, nature. They had a little backyard, 17 feet to the fence and hill. But the blinds were always closed."
Paddock had moved to Reno, then Mesquite Nevada from Melbourne, Florida. And he had previously lived in Texas and California, where he had married once and later divorced.
At a 55-and-over community in Florida, where Paddock had lived for many years, neighbors recalled strange details about his lifestyle.
Don Judy, his next-door neighbor until two years ago, recalled that shortly Stephen Paddock turned 60 he saw the inside of his home and was shocked by its appearance. He said it "looked like a college freshmen lived there."
There was no art on the walls, not even a car in the driveway, Judy said, just a dining chair, a bed, and two recliners. "It looked like he'd be ready to move at a moment's notice."
Paddock, however, always seemed on the move, carrying a suitcase and driving a rental car on monthly trips from Vegas to the master-planned community near Cocoa Beach.
"One of the first times we met him, he told me he lived there, in Vegas," said Don Judy. "He explained that he was a gambler, and a prospector. He said he was buying this house to check it out for his mother…and that if she liked it, he planned to buy another next door with a floor-plan like ours."
Then, as quickly as he had appeared, Paddock put up a for-sale sign, Judy said. "He never said much about it, just said they were moving back to Vegas."
We've run out of other people's Social Security taxes needed to subsidize our low income tax rates.
