Canadians recall Las Vegas attack
Couple return home after mass shooting; ‘sleepless night’ for Cirque du Soleil
Dave Tidbury said it wasn’t the initial crowd of people fleeing the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday night that scared him the most. It was what came after — fears of multiple shooters and the panic that caused.
“That’s when we started hiding behind flower pots,” he said.
Tidbury, a resident of Maitland, Ont., near Brockville, was in the lobby of the MGM Grand, about two kilometres away from the Mandalay Bay hotel where the shooting left 59 dead and more than 500 wounded, when the fleeing crowd arrived.
“It was like a wave of people coming and they sort of just picked you up and moved you on outside the hotel and then we started to run everywhere,” Tidbury said. “I wasn’t scared for my life at that time, because
It was like a wave of people coming and they sort of just picked you up and moved you on outside the hotel.
although there were people who had been shot, we knew that it was a fair distance away.”
Tidbury, who landed in Montreal on Monday evening, found shelter in a lockdown space in the basement of a hotel. “You knew you were safe then,” he said.
His wife, Doreen Tidbury, was back at their hotel room, unaware of the carnage and unreachable — cellphone service had become unreliable after the attack.
She’d been expecting her husband to return in half an hour and as more than two hours passed, she began growing worried, she said.
“Around a quarter to four he walks in and says ‘Doreen, oh you’re OK,’ ” she said. “It really was scary.”
Montreal’s Cirque du Soleil put its theatres on lockdown during the shooting.
“For the time being, none of our employees have been identified among the victims,” it said in a statement hours after the attack. “We are in the process of checking in with each of them and organizing on-the-ground support for all our teams.”
But the hours following that statement, as the body count climbed and the process of checking into the well-being of the 1,500 persons employed by the Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas continued, had clearly taken their toll by Monday morning.
“It’s been a sleepless night,” Cirque spokesperson MarieHélène Lagacé told the Montreal Gazette. “So far so good, we’re touching wood that none of our employees or their loved ones have been affected. But we have yet to get full confirmation.”
All of the Cirque’s eight productions in Las Vegas scheduled for Monday night were cancelled and subsequent performances will be considered on a “one day at a time” basis.
“Our priority is to make sure all of our employees are safe and then to provide them and the community with support,” she said. “Las Vegas is our second home after Montreal. We want to provide all the support we can to the community and that’s where our focus is.”
Social media was given a reminder of Quebec’s presence in Las Vegas when Céline Dion, who was scheduled to perform at Caesars Palace on Tuesday night, tweeted: “Praying for all the innocent victims and their families in Las Vegas - Céline xx... #LasVegas”
Meanwhile, Air Canada announced on Monday that because its flights could be affected by security measures, it has revised its ticketing policy for people on affected flights. Customers who want to make alternate arrangements can do so without penalty, space permitting, at Air Canada’s website, the company said.
Among the dead were two Canadians, Jessica Klymchuk, of Valleyview, Alta., and Jordan McIldoon, 23, of Maple Ridge, B.C.