The estranged brother of Las Vegas massacre gunman Stephen Paddock was taken into custody Wednesday in connection with a child-pornography investigation, law-enforcement sources said.
Bruce Paddock, 58, was detained at a Los Angeles assisted-living facility, where he was awaiting surgery for spinal stenosis. He had not yet been booked, and no other details were available.
An attorney who Paddock said had represented him in criminal matters in the past told NBC News he is no longer representing Paddock and declined comment.
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At the time of the mass shooting on Oct. 1 that left 58 dead, Bruce Paddock told NBC News that he had not been in touch with his brother Stephen for 10 years and had no idea why the professional gambler would have opened fire on music festival attendees from his room at the Mandalay Bay.
“I don’t know how he could stoop to this low point, hurting someone else. It wasn’t suicide by cop since he killed himself,” he said at the time. “He killed a bunch of people and then killed himself so he didn’t have to face whatever it was.”
It was Bruce Paddock who revealed that their father was a bank robber who once made the FBI’s most-wanted list and was judged by authorities to be “psychopathic” with “suicidal tendencies.”
But he insisted that his brother wasn’t “mentally deranged” and noted that Stephen had never been in trouble with the law like he had.
Court records show Bruce Paddock has a criminal record stretching back to the 1980s, with convictions for vandalism, criminal threats, theft and driving with a suspended vehicle and other arrests for which he was not convicted.
Paddock was annoyed that his brother’s monstrous crime had brought attention to his own misdeeds, which he described as “minor.” He had to scramble to pay a fine after it was reported that there was an active warrant for his arrest from a vandalism case in which he failed to perform community service.
“I’m not proud of it,” he said. “But I never went to prison.”
FBI agents visited him twice after the shooting, he said, and mostly were interested in his brother’s childhood.
In the days after the Vegas carnage, he frantically tried to reconnect with members of his fractured family, leaving messages for another brother, Eric, and reaching out to the attorney for Stephen’s girlfriend, Marilu Danley.
“I want to see if we could patch up what we destroyed so many years ago,” he said. He added that he had only succeeded in reaching his elderly mother, “and she’s yelling at me all the time not to talk to anyone.”
Earlier this week, Paddock said he was concerned about the fate of his brother’s remains and had reached out to the coroner’s office in Nevada to see if he could claim them.