Those rotten apples seldom fall far from the tree.
The father of Las Vegas madman Stephen Paddock was a “psychopath” himself — a bank robber who escaped federal prison in the late 1960s and landed on the FBI’s most-wanted list, according to reports.
Paddock’s dad was serial felon Benjamin Hoskins Paddock, according to the Daily Mail and a tweet from NBC.
Benjamin Paddock had been locked up in 1960 for robbing an Arizona bank, escaped in 1968 and spent nearly three years on the run before the FBI caught up to him in Las Vegas in 1971, at which point he tried to run down an agent with his car, according to archival editions of the Tuscon Daily Citizen.
“Since he has utilized firearms in previous crimes, has employed violence in attempting to evade arrest and has been diagnosed as being psychopathic, [Benjamin] Paddock should be considered extremely dangerous,” Palmer M. Baken Jr., agent in charge of the Phoenix FBI office, said at the time, according to the Citizen.