While Marilou Danley, the Filipina girlfriend of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock described the gunman as a “quiet” and “caring” man, the way the barista at the Starbucks he frequented remembered Paddock was anything but “quiet.”
“He would glare down at her and say — with a mean attitude — ‘You don’t need my casino card for this. I’m paying for your drink, just like I’m paying for you.’ Then she would softly say, ‘OK’ and step back behind him. He was so rude to her in front of us,” Esperanza Mendoza, the supervisor at the Starbucks in Mesquite, Nevada, told the Los Angeles Times.
She also said that publicly humiliating Danley wasn’t a rare occurrence but “happened a lot.”
Paddock killed himself in his hotel room before police reached him but through a statement read by her attorney, Danley still described him in more loving terms.
“I knew Stephen Paddock as a kind, caring, quiet man,” she said. “I loved him and hoped for a quiet future together with him,” she said.
“He never said anything to me or took any action that I was aware of that I understood in any way to be a warning that something horrible like this was going to happen.”
The couple had been to the Starbucks so frequently that Mendoza knows their orders.
She told the LA Times that Paddock would get a venti mocha cappuccino while Danley would always order a grande caramel macchiato.
“He looked like he never slept because of the large bags under his eyes,” Mendoza said.
After the shooting, Mendoza said she and the Starbucks staff were shocked because “we have been face-to-face with this man so many times.”
READ: Filipina partner of Vegas shooter arrives in Los Angeles from Manila
Danley told investigators that two weeks before the shooting, Paddock had told her he found a cheap plane ticket for her to visit family in the Philippines and had wired her money to purchase a house in the country.
She said she became concerned at that point, thinking he wanted to break up with her.
“It never occurred to me in any way whatsoever that he was planning violence against anyone,” said Danley, an Australian citizen who moved to the United States 20 years ago to work on the casino strip.
with reports from Agence France-Presse
