Las Vegas, Jan 20 (AP) After three months ofinvestigation, police have learned more about Las Vegas gunmanStephen Paddock: He was a high-stakes gambler on a losingstreak, obsessed with cleanliness, possibly bipolar and washaving difficulties with his live-in girlfriend.
But hundreds of interviews and thousands of pieces ofevidence have not answered the key question: Why did Paddockopen fire from his high-rise hotel suite, killing 58 peopleand injuring more than 800 others in the deadliest shooting inmodern US history?Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo released a preliminaryreport yesterday on the October 1 attack on an outdoor concertstaged from a room at the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel and saidhe did not expect criminal charges to be filed againstPaddock's girlfriend, Marilou Danley, who had been named asthe only person of interest in the case.
Investigators believe Paddock acted alone and did notleave a suicide note or manifesto before he was found dead inthe room.
Weeks before the shooting, the couple stayed at MandalayBay together but Paddock was acting strangely, Danley toldinvestigators.
She remembered him constantly looking out the windowsoverlooking an area where the concert would be held the nextmonth. He moved from window to window to see the site fromdifferent angles, the report said.
Paddock had become "distant" in the year before theshooting and their relationship was no longer intimate, Danleysaid during an interview with investigators. She described himas germophobic and said he had strong reactions to smells.
Paddock, who fatally shot himself in his hotel room, hadtold friends and relatives that he always felt ill, in painand fatigued.
His doctor thought he may have had bipolar disorder buttold police that Paddock refused to discuss the possibility,the report said. The doctor offered him antidepressants, butPaddock accepted only a prescription for anxiety medication.
Paddock was fearful of medication and often refused totake it, the doctor told investigators.
The 64-year-old retired accountant and real estateinvestor had lost a "significant amount of wealth" sinceSeptember 2015, which led to "bouts of depression," thesheriff has said. Paddock had paid off his gambling debtsbefore the shooting, according to the report.
Danley was in the Philippines at the time of theshooting. In the days before the attack, Paddock sent her aUSD 100,000 wire transfer. She has said she found that odd andthought he might have been breaking up with her when he senther the money and told her to use it to buy a home for herfamily there.
During an interview with the FBI after she returned fromthe Philippines, Danley volunteered that investigators wouldfind her fingerprints on bullets used during the attackbecause she would sometimes help Paddock load high-volumeammunition magazines, according to FBI warrant documents.
Investigators found 23 rifles and a handgun in his hotelsuite and more than a dozen of the rifles were fitted with"bump stock" devices that allowed rapid-fire shooting similarto fully automatic weapons. Dozens of guns were strewn aroundthe room, some left inside a bassinet.
In their report, police released never-before-seen photosfrom inside the hotel suite, including one shot through abroken window, showing the concert venue still littered withpersonal belongings left when thousands ran to escape the hailof bullets raining from above.
Paddock fired more than 1,100 bullets, mostly from twowindows on the 32nd floor of the hotel, into a crowd of 22,000people attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival music below,Lombardo has said.
That includes about 200 shots fired through his hotelroom door into a hallway where an unarmed hotel security guardwas wounded in the leg and a maintenance engineer took cover.
Prior to the attack, Paddock had researched SWAT tacticsand searched online for other potential public targets,including in Chicago, Boston and Santa Monica, California, thesheriff said. His research also sought the number of attendeesat other concerts in Las Vegas and the size of the crowds atSanta Monica's beach. Among his searches was "do police useexplosives," the report said.
Four laptops and three cellphones were found inside hishotel suite. On one of the computers, investigators foundhundreds of photos of child pornography.
The same computer was used to search for the height ofthe Mandalay Bay, how to remove hard drives from laptops, thelocation of gun shows in Nevada and information about severalother Las Vegas casinos.
A federal grand jury is hearing evidence in a case thatspun off from the shooting investigation, the sheriff said.
The FBI has "an ongoing case against an individual offederal interest," Lombardo said, declining to elaborate.
Spokeswomen for the FBI and federal prosecutors in Las Vegasdeclined to comment. (AP)MRJ.
This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.