Las Vegas shooter: Who is Stephen Paddock?
Stephen Paddock carried out the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. Here’s what authorities know so far about the 64-year-old Nevada man.
The high-rolling Las Vegas shooter gambled and came up short when he lost a slip-and-fall lawsuit against a casino on the strip years before Sunday night's rampage that killed 59 and injured at least 515 others.
Stephen Paddock reportedly asked for $100,000 from the Cosmopolitan Hotel stemming from an Oct. 30, 2011, incident in which he said he had slipped in a puddle of liquid while walking around in the facility.
"You wonder what a guy like this is doing at the Cosmo," Marty Kravitz, who represented the resort, told NBC News.
Kravitz described Paddock as “wearing crappy flip-flops with a beverage in a bag in his hand” when he fell. Kravitz added he met Paddock when he testified in a deposition for the case, but he thought the future Las Vegas shooter – who at the time never displayed anything that would “indicate someone who was unstable” – was a "slovenly and careless" and “bizarre” individual.
"This is not a guy that I would have looked at and thought, 'He's going to commit a crime one day,'” Kravitz said.
An arbitrator’s decision document reported Paddock as incurring more than $32,000 in medical bills and that he wanted additional sums of money for pain and suffering following the slip.
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“Mr. Paddock allegedly sustained a tear to his hamstring as well as a sprain/strain injury to his wrist" NBC News quoted the document as saying.
A woman at the office of Dr. Steven P. Winkler, who was named in court records as giving deposition in the case, would not speak to Fox News on Tuesday and said she had “no idea” when asked about the matter.
The arbitrator said surveillance footage showed Paddock slipping and falling, but added around 20 hotel customers and a custodian passed the area in the minutes leading up to it and none of them "appear to have noticed anything on the floor [or] tried to avoid a wet area."
The case was eventually tossed in 2014 – and Paddock still owed $270 in legal fees when he opened fire Sunday night.
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