Bruce Paddock: Child Porn Bust For Brother Of Las Vegas Mass Shooter Stephen Paddock, Arrested At Nursing Home
Bruce Paddock, the 59-year-old brother of Las Vegas mass shooter Stephen Paddock, is behind bars Wednesday after he was arrested at about 8 a.m. in Los Angeles, California, on charges that he possessed a massive collection of child pornography. The Los Angeles Police also hit the younger brother of Stephen Paddock with multiple accusations of sexual exploitation of a child — 19 counts of the charge, according to a report by CBS News on Wednesday.
Los Angeles police released the above photo of Bruce Paddock “in case there may be victims of unreported incidents” involving children. Paddock possessed more than 600 pornographic images of children under 18, including 10 such images of children under 12, the Los Angeles Times reported.
On October 1, Paddock’s older brother Stephen, 64, killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 others, firing from a 32nd floor hotel window into a concert-going crowd of 22,000 below. Stephen Paddock committed suicide before police could apprehend him at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, after he carried out the worst mass shooting by a single person in American history.
Bruce Paddock was taken into custody at the Four Seasons Health Care and Wellness Center, a nursing facility in the North Hollywood district of Los Angeles. According to a report by KCAL TV News in Los Angeles, Paddock had been heard by other patients in the nursing facility boasting about the horrific mass shooting — even declaring that he was “glad” that his older brother Stephen Paddock had “killed those people.”
But the day after the mass shooting, Bruce Paddock gave an interview to NBC News in which he expressed dismay over his brother’s crimes. “I don’t know how he could stoop to this low point, hurting someone else,” Bruce Paddock said, adding that he had not spoken to his older brother in about a decade.
Police told the Los Angeles Times newspaper that they believe there to be “no connection” between Bruce Paddock’s alleged crimes and the mass shooting carried out by his brother. The motive that drove Stephen Paddock to carry out the mass murder remains unknown.
In fact, police said, the investigation into Bruce Paddock’s alleged sex crimes against children began prior to the Las Vegas mass shooting, when the owner of a Sun Valley, California, auto shop — where the homeless Paddock was living rent-free at the time — found a stash of child pornography after Paddock had departed, according to a report by KTLA TV in Los Angeles.
Paddock was friends with the auto shop’s owner, Hector Cruz, and in 2014 he approached Cruz and asked to use his shop to repair his own vehicle. Cruz consented because Paddock was severely down on his luck at the time. But the friendship went sour when Bruce Paddock refused to leave the shop, moving into the attic and living there, often harassing customers who came in to the business.
Finally, according to the KTLA account, Paddock threatened to burn down the shop and kill Cruz, even climbing to the roof of the business with a canister full of gasoline. But employees of the auto shop were finally able to drive Paddock out. Even though Cruz reported his findings of the child porn collection to police, Paddock was then a transient and his whereabouts could not be traced.
Watch the KCAL news report on the arrest of Bruce Paddock in the video below.
Unike his older brother, who had no known run-ins with law enforcement before he committed the Las Vegas mass shooting, Bruce Paddock has a lengthy criminal record dating back to at least 1989. In 1993, Paddock was charged with “annoying” a child under 18, but was not convicted, the Los Angeles Times reported.
[Featured Image by Los Angeles Police Department/AP Images]
