Five Years Since October 1 and Motive Remains Mystery

Scene of the October 1 shooting in 2017. (FEMA.gov)

Five years have passed since ten minutes of gunfire poured from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay onto concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival, claiming the lives of sixty people and leaving hundreds more wounded.

But in those five years, a clear motive as to what drove 64-year-old Stephen Paddock to carry out what still remains the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history remains unknown.

While the best guess is that a combination of factors likely molded the shooter’s ultimate decision to carry out the attack, one thing that many believe was a strong contributor in Paddock’s motive was his loss of a substantial portion of his wealth due to gambling.

Paddock testified during a deposition held four years before the October 1 shooting that he gambled “14 hours a day, 365 days a year.”  While this may have been an exaggeration, it is true that Paddock was a frequent patron of Vegas casinos and gambled away millions of dollars in the years leading up to the shooting.

No gambling debts were owed by Paddock at the time he committed the October 1 attack, and he still had hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank.  But Paddock was a man that spent the later years of his life in Vegas casinos, who had wrapped up the persona of a professional gambler into a core aspect of his identity.

Multiple news outlets have covered Stephen Paddock’s issues with gambling leading up to the October 1 shooting. (NBC News/CBS News/CS Monitor/news.com.au)

And while Paddock may not have owed any debts and had what any average person would consider substantial assets, he must have come to the conclusion that he would no longer be able to spend from sundown to sunrise playing video poker at $1,300 a pop.  This realization may have triggered a spiral that prompted Paddock to start planning the massacre about a year before the actual shooting occurred. 

Paddock scouted locations in southern California and Chicago during this planning stage as potential locations for his evil scheme.But in the end, he chose the upper floors of a casino on the Strip.