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Vegas shooter’s brother arrested for child porn

The estranged brother of Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock was arrested Wednesday on child pornography charges stemming from an investigation that predates the massacre.

Bruce Paddock, 58, was detained at a Los Angeles assisted-living facility, where he was awaiting surgery for spinal stenosis. A felony complaint said he had over 600 explicit images of minors in 2014 and had also swapped pornography.

He faces 19 counts of sexual exploitation of a child and one count of possession of child pornography, the complaint says.

The LAPD said the images were discovered inside a building where Paddock was squatting, but they could not find him at the time. After his brother’s crime, they learned where he was and obtained a warrant, police said.

An attorney who Paddock said had represented him in criminal matters in the past told NBC News he is no longer representing him and declined to comment.

Another brother, Eric Paddock, who lives in Florida, said he had no comment on the arrest.

At the time of the mass shooting on Oct. 1 that left 58 dead, Bruce Paddock told NBC News that he had not been in touch with his brother Stephen for 10 years and had no idea why the professional gambler would have opened fire on music festival attendees from his room at the Mandalay Bay.

“I don’t know how he could stoop to this low point, hurting someone else. It wasn’t suicide by cop since he killed himself,” he said at the time. “He killed a bunch of people and then killed himself so he didn’t have to face whatever it was.”

It was Bruce Paddock who revealed that their father was a bank robber who once made the FBI’s most-wanted list and was judged by authorities to be “psychopathic” with “suicidal tendencies.”