Las Vegas Shooter’s Father Born In Wisconsin

While investigators in Las Vegas work to find out what motivated a one-time accountant with no known criminal history to inflict so much pain in a mass shooting, others digging into his past know his father was a notorious bank robber with ties to Wisconsin.

Stephen Paddock’s father, Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, was born in Sheboygan in 1925. The family eventually moved to Superior and then to Chicago. The elder Paddock tried to run down an FBI agent in Las Vegas in 1960 and wound up on the agency’s most wanted list after escaping from a federal prison in Texas in 1968. He was captured 10 years later in Oregon.

An FBI poster at the time said Paddock had been “diagnosed as psychopathic” and should be considered “armed and very dangerous.”