Portrait of a mass killer: The details don't add up

“My brother is not like you and me,” Eric Paddock told the Post. “He sends me a text that says he won $250,000 at the casino.”

Some neighbors in Reno, Nev., where Stephen Paddock owned yet another home, told the Post’s reporters that he was “reclusive” or “quiet” or “unfriendly.” But others, in Mesquite and Florida, where Paddock seemed to spend more time, said that he was “a good neighbor” and that “there was nothing strange about him.”

Either way, these conflicting accounts could accurately describe the same person; moods change. Neither, however, suggests a man on the verge of shooting hundreds of people.

By far the most unusual thing about Paddock isn’t really about Paddock at all. Paddock’s father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, it turns out, was a notorious criminal himself; he even appeared on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list from 1969 to 1977. Born in Wisconsin in 1926, the elder Paddock, whose nicknames included “Old Baldy” and “Chromedome,” robbed banks in Arizona, escaped prison in Texas and tried to start a new life in Oregon as “Bingo Bruce,” the manager of a bingo parlor — an effort that ended in 1987 when the state attorney general filed seven bingo-related racketeering charges against him. As an FBI wanted poster once put it, the elder Paddock was a man who had been “diagnosed as psychopathic,” seemed to have “suicidal tendencies” and “should be considered armed and very dangerous.”

Perhaps Stephen Paddock inherited some of those traits from his father; perhaps they lay dormant until the son hit his mid-60s and decided, suddenly, to commit mass murder. The rapid spread on social media of stories about “Bingo Bruce” suggests that we want to believe as much.

Or perhaps not. We simply don’t know. So far — and it’s early yet — all we know is what Paddock’s brother Eric has told us.

“There’s absolutely no sense, no reason he did this,” Eric Paddock told the Post. “He’s just a guy who played video poker and took cruises and ate burritos at Taco Bell. There’s no political affiliation that we know of. There’s no religious affiliation that we know of.”

“We know nothing,” Paddock concluded.

Eventually, more information will surface. But right now, in a moment when we’re used to explaining these shooters in familiar terms — religious, political, psychological, whatever — none of the usual explanations apply. Stephen Craig Paddock seems as if he could have been anyone. And that, ultimately, may be the most terrifying thing about him.