Brisbane tourist in line of fire
COURTNEY Cooper first thought the gunshots were fireworks going off above her.
She had been separated from her friend and standing near the main stage when the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest Festival began to panic.
She thought the people around her were just tripping over. Then only a metre away, a bullet exploded through a man’s knee and chaos set in.
“We just dropped behind this little wooden stand and the guy there, a complete stranger, literally jumped on top of me and was shielding me (from the bullets),” the 26year-old Brisbane woman said.
“There were bullets just going everywhere and there was a guy like a metre away from me who got his knee blown out.
“There had been helicopters flying around all day so I just thought the ‘bup-bup-bup’ was from a helicopter or fireworks or something ... then a whole surge of people just started screaming and running.
“It wasn’t until people were getting shot that we realised.”
Ms Cooper was among the 22,000+ terrified concertgoers in Las Vegas who were being peppered with bullets from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Resort with gunman Stephen Paddock pulling the trigger.
The revellers had no idea, though, where or how many gunman were firing upon them.
“He would just shoot, like hundreds of bullets were coming out,” Ms Cooper said.
“It was like fish in a barrel; there were so many people and nobody could get out and just didn’t know where to go or where to run because we didn’t know if there were shooters at all the other gates and we were just going to run into them.”
Sheer panic and screams had set in around the open-air Las Vegas Village as dozens of people lay dead – now confirmed to be 59 – and more than 500 others injured.
Ms Cooper said a break in the bursts of gunfire gave her and those around her a moment to make a run for the exit, but it wasn’t long before the hail of bullets rained down.
“There were people as we were running out and it looked like they were tripping over but they were just getting taken down and dropping everywhere and getting hit,” she said.
“There was blood everywhere. All down the street. “It was absolute chaos.” People were dragging the injured away from the area, cars helped drive people to safety and homes were opened up to shelter the fleeing concertgoers.
Ms Cooper found herself inside an apartment with about 20 other strangers.
THERE WERE BULLETS JUST GOING EVERYWHERE. COURTNEY COOPER
“Everyone was just coming together and giving each other first aid, people were handing out water and making everyone comfortable,” she said.
“Through all of this evil and everything, people were still helping everybody.”
Throughout her frantic escape, Ms Cooper had been trying to find friend Aimee-Rose Carter who she had become separated from moments before the shooting began.
“I was trying to contact Aimee because I didn’t know where she was,” she said.
“Apparently she got in a car to get away.”
Ms Cooper was expected to fly back in to Brisbane this morning, cutting her US holiday short following the Las Vegas shooting.