LAS VEGAS — Handwritten letters sent to Stephen Paddock before the Las Vegas massacre suggest that he had discussed his plans with an ex-convict, who implored him not to “shoot or kill innocent people.”
“I can get someone for you who can help you,” the ex-convict, Jim Nixon, wrote in a letter dated May 27, 2017. “Please don’t go out shooting or hurting people who did nothing to you. I am concern about the way you are talking and believe you are going to do something very bad. Steve please please don’t do what I think you are going to do.”
The letter was one of 10 released by the Metropolitan Police Department late Thursday in response to a records request from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The letters were found in late November 2017 by the new owners of an abandoned office building in Mesquite, Texas, according to FBI records. The owners mailed the letters to Metro, who forwarded them to the FBI.
Paddock carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history on Oct. 1, 2017, when he opened fire on the Route 91 Harvest festival on the Las Vegas Strip and fatally shot 60 concertgoers. Paddock, 64, took his own life after the massacre.
Nine of the newly released letters were sent to Paddock from Nixon between 2013 and June 2017. In the letters, Nixon referred to Paddock as his friend.
In a telephone interview Thursday night from Texas, Nixon said no one in law enforcement ever contacted him after the mass shooting.
Nixon, a disabled Vietnam War veteran who is now 75, said he remembered talking to Paddock.
“He did what he did and I feel bad I couldn’t have stopped him,” Nixon said. “I didn’t know he was going to do what he did.”
The letters mentioned that Nixon had been to prison. He told the Review-Journal he served time for tax fraud.
Several of the letters indicated that Nixon was worried about Paddock’s mental health and seemed to foreshadow the killings he would commit.
Last week the FBI released documents that provided new insight into Paddock’s final days. Among them were summaries of the letters found in Texas, but the FBI redacted most of the information in the summaries, citing confidential sources and an invasion of privacy.
In a statement Friday, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Las Vegas office said the agency “does not comment on individual interviews conducted during an investigation.”
“There is no new information that the FBI was not aware of or that the FBI has not shared with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department in this case. We stand by the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) key findings summary report,” spokeswoman Sandra Breault wrote.
The FBI released the three-page summary report in January 2019.
“Throughout his life, Paddock went to great lengths to keep his thoughts private, and that extended to his final thinking about this mass murder,” the report stated. “Active shooters rarely have a singular motive or reason for engaging in a mass homicide.”
Metro released the letters Thursday with no redactions but could not be reached for comment. In August 2018, Metro released a 187-page investigative report, which found no clear motivation for the attack.
The first of Nixon’s letters released by Metro, from 2013, detailed his plans to start a company with Paddock as the chairman of the board.
In a letter from August 2014, Nixon asked for clarification on statements Paddock had made about executing an upcoming plan.
“You said in (3) years you would be ready and that your plan would show up in Nevada, California, Illinois, Texas, New York and other cities,” Nixon wrote. “What do you mean?”
In a letter dated March 2, 2017, Nixon wrote: “You must going on a hunting trip with all those guns you are stockpiling.”
Nixon, who told the Review-Journal he never contacted authorities about his concerns, encouraged Paddock to seek medical help and not to believe what his bad dreams were telling him to do.
“You are a good person and I want you to know that I am concern about you and your wellbeing,” Nixon wrote in the letter dated May 27, 2017. “I believe you are lying to me and you are going to hurt someone or kill someone. You sound like a real mad man on the phone tonight.”
The last of Nixon’s letters released by Metro indicated it was written the day before he was to go back to prison for 15 months in June 2017 for violating his probation.
He urged Paddock not to hurt anyone and to write to him in Arkansas, where he would be in custody.
———
