Why? After 10 months it’s still the one unanswered question that has eluded the police.
And it seems that is going to be the one remaining question to never be resolved as Sheriff Joe Lombardo announced the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Force Investigation Team’s report last Friday and that they are closing the case that rocked the nation that left 58 dead and injured nearly 500 others with no clear motive found.
An NPR report explains that at the news conference Sheriff Lombardo said they’ve answered “the who, what, when, where, and how,” but it’s the “why” that still remains unclear.
“The goal of our investigation all along was to provide the public with the clearest picture possible of the events leading up to Oct. 1, as well as motive,” Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo told reporters at the news conference. “What we have not been able to definitively answer is the ‘Why Stephen Paddock committed this act?” he said.
NPR said the investigative team describes Stephen Paddock as “an unremarkable man” and that others, including one brother, say, had issues with mental health.
In the report an interview with Stephen Paddock’s other brother, Eric Paddock, said he “believed Paddock may have conducted the attack because he had done everything in the world he wanted to do and was bored with everything.”
In a Yahoo! post first carried by Huffington Post, it says according to the report Paddock was “self-funded” and “not indebted to anyone,” adding that “Paddock had $2,100,000 spread across 14 bank accounts in 2015; by 2017, that amount had decreased to $530,000…”
It describes a man who evidently like to play and had the money to do it, someone who “heavily invested, monetarily and emotionally, in any activity he began.” That when something would interest him he would splurge, like buying a plane when he decided he was interested in flying, but that he would always soon lose interest just as quickly and then, sell everything after just buying it.
Sheriff Lombardo and the investigative team said they are left only with their “best educated guess” for a motive “based on available evidence.” Left to rely on interviews with family or friends who painted a picture of a narcissist with no religious or political connections, and that because “unlike other mass shooters, Paddock left behind no political or social manifesto … nor did he have any ties to any known extremist groups.”
The Sheriff told reporters while he considered his town a “safe tourist community” he didn’t rule out something like this could happen again. The FBI doesn’t call it a “terrorist” incident, but Sheriff Lomardo thinks it is.
The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) is working a on separate report which should be ready to be released later this year.