When employees at the Virgin River Casino Starbucks in Mesquite, Nevada, saw images of the man who shot and killed at least 58 people at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday, Oct. 1, they were shocked. The man, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, was one of their regular customers.
They remembered him as the one who would admonish his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, in public.
They said she would ask to use his casino card, which gamblers at online gambling machines can use to pay for food at the casino, to buy their drinks—always a venti mocha cappuccino for him and a medium caramel macchiato for her.
“It happened a lot,” she added.
Danley, who Mendoza described as being as tall as Paddock’s elbow, was out of the country at the time of the shooting, in which Paddock rained bullets down on a crowd of about 22,000 attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival from a 32nd-floor hotel room in the Mandalay Bay Resort next door.
Danley arrived at the Los Angeles Airport from a trip to the Philippines on Tuesday, Oct. 3, and was greeted at the airport by police who wanted to talk to her as a “person of interest.”
A motive for the shooting has not yet been established, police said.
“She was probably one of the only people I’ve ever seen that he’d go out of his way to do a little thing for,” he said. “He went out of his way to be nice to her. This is not something Steve does—go out of his way,” he said.
“Steve expected people to wait on him for the most part. But he waited on her sometimes. He would do what she wanted to do. He would defer to her in the way that he wouldn’t to the rest of humanity. Even me.”
Newsweek said that it had come to that conclusion based on “many public records,” but the initial report “included an error that came to light after publication when a family member came forward.”
“I know that she don’t know anything as well, like us. She was sent away. She was away so that she will be not there to interfere with what he’s planning,” a sister, who asked to remain anonymous, told the network. “In that sense, I thank him for sparing my sister’s life.”
The sisters said Danley was very much in love with Paddock.
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