A Utah gun shop owner who sold a shotgun to Stephen Paddock, who killed 59 concert-goers Sunday in Las Vegas, described him Tuesday as "the neighbor next door."
"The guy that you would be seen mowing everybody else's lawn, going to church on Sunday and sitting in the congregation," Chris Michel, owner of the Dixie GunWorx in St. George, Utah, told CNN. "You would invite him to the family barbecues going on in the neighborhoods.
"Nothing really stood out."
Paddock, 64, who killed himself before as police stormed his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, bought a shotgun at Michel's shop in late spring or early summer.
Michel told reporters Monday he recognized Paddock from news coverage, realizing he had been in his shop before.
He had passed all required background checks, Michel said.
St. George is 41 miles northeast of Mesquite, Nevada, where Paddock lived.
The melee killed 59 people and injured 527 in what is considered the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Authorities said Paddock used a fully automatic weapon to fire on the 22,000 people attending a country music concert, which was about 1,000 feet from his hotel room.
That is beyond the range of a shotgun.
The shotgun was among 23 weapons found in Paddock's room, police said.
At Paddock's home, authorities found 19 more guns, explosives and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
Also, several pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be turned into explosives such as those used in the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, were in his car, police said.
Federal authorities also were investigating Paddock's wiring of $100,000 last week to the Philippines, the home country of his girlfriend, according to news reports.
Michel told CNN on Tuesday there "wasn't anything" unusual about Paddock when he came to buy his gun.
"I kept looking for red flags, but nothing was flagged for me or for anybody in my staff," he said. "He just kept coming back and asking the right questions and looking at everything.
"It wasn't like there was just this one little thing or a look in his eyes," Michel added. "That didn't happen with him.
"Literally, you would never have thought this could be something that this man could have done."
Michel told CNN "my heart ached for the victims.
"Not just for the people that were there as the victims, there are also friends and family that are beyond them that are going to be going through this.
"That was the first thing that hit me.
"One of the news articles I was looking through mentioned his name," Michel said. "And it triggered my memory.
"And I remembered him as a person. And that was horrific."
Material from the Associated Press contributed to this report.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.