A friend of the gunman who unleashed the deadliest mass shooting in US history begged him not to kill people, according to letters made public for the first time.
Stephen Paddock, 64, opened fire from a Las Vegas hotel room into a crowd at a music festival on 1 October, 2017. Some 58 people were killed and more than 500 people injured. Two people died as a result of their injuries in the years following.
Excerpts of the letters were first published by the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Friday after being released under a public records request.
The letters were discovered in a vacant office in Mesquite, Texas by the building owners in November 2017, weeks after the mass shooting.
It is unclear how letters sent to Paddock, who lived in Nevada, ended up in the building. The Independent has reached out to the FBI and Las Vegas Police Department for comment.
The letters were signed by Jim Nixon, an ex-convict from Texas. Paddock and Nixon knew each other through prior business dealings and had been corresponding since 2013.
The letters were sent in May and June 2017, just months before the massacre.
“My friend it sound[s] like you are going to kill or murder someone or some people,” Nixon wrote in the letter. “Please don’t go on any shooting rampage like some fool.”
“I am concern[ed] about the way you are talking and believe you are going to do something very bad,” another letter read.
“Please don’t go out shooting or hurting people who did nothing to you,” Nixon wrote in a May 2017 letter.
“Steve, please please don’t do what I think you are going to do.”
Nixon offered to put Paddock in contact with somebody who could help him. However, Nixon didn’t alert law enforcement of his concerns about Paddock’s mental health and the content of their correspondence, according to The Journal.
In a phone interview with The Journal, Nixon said that authorities had never reached out to him regarding the shooting.
“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.”
Nixon, a 75-year-old disabled Vietnam War veteran, served time in a Texas prison for tax fraud.
The letters were previously referenced in a trove of heavily-redacted documents released by the FBI in response to a records request from the Wall Street Journal.
The documents revealed that one source told the FBI that Paddock, a heavy gambler who had lost more than $1.5million, was “very upset at the way casinos were treating him and other high rollers”.
That FBI report revealed that Paddock sold a property in Mesquite in 2012, The Associated Press reported.
The gunman used money from that property sale to purchase the high-powered weapons he used to carry out the shooting from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel on the Vegas Strip, according to the AP. Paddock killed himself as police moved in to apprehend him.
