Okanagan man injured in shootings
A Kelowna man in Las Vegas to celebrate his 50th birthday was among those wounded in the mass shooting at a country music concert.
Perry Ruhr, the owner of a strata management company, was hit in the arm, but managed with his wife Tammy to make it back to their hotel.
Ruhr was taken to hospital, treated and released by 6 a.m. Monday.
“He’s all bandaged up, but he’s as fine as anyone could possibly be after something like this,” said Terry Sorensen, a friend of Ruhr’s, who was also at the concert.
“Right now, I’m sure he’s just happy to be alive, given what happened,” Sorensen said.
Sorensen, owner of an investment and insurance firm, says he knows of several people from Kelowna who were at the concert. Ruhr was the only person among them who was hit, he said.
At 10:08 p.m. on Sunday, a gunman in a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel began firing into the packed concert ground, where Jason Aldean had just started to perform before an estimated 20,000 fans.
Fifty-nine people were killed, including two Canadians, in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. More than 500 were injured.
“We were right there in the mix, in the sightline of this lunatic,” Sorensen said.
“At first, we thought firecrackers were going off. Then it was rat-atat-tat, and people started falling or dropping to the ground.”
“You could tell they were being shot,” Sorensen said. “It was absolute chaos, something I never thought I’d see and never want to see again.”
Sorensen and his wife, Nichole, ran toward an exit, but saw a long line of people trying to force their way through a narrow gate. He and Nichole clambered up a 10-foot security fence.
“We got cut up pretty good getting over the fence, but we got out of there,” Sorensen said. He estimates he and his wife ran for close to a mile before feeling it was safe enough to hunker down behind a concrete barrier. They slept for a few hours at a hotel far from the Strip, then awoke to word that Ruhr had been shot in the arm and hospitalized.
“A SWAT team had actually come to his hotel room, then taken him downstairs to put him into the ambulance so he could get to the hospital,” Sorensen said.
Sorensen, who visited Ruhr in his hotel room Monday morning, said the bullet passed through his arm.
“Perry told me a guy right in front of him was shot in the head and killed, and so was a man behind him,” Sorensen said. “For Perry, the adrenalin must have kicked in, because he was able to make it back to hotel, even after being shot.”
Sorensen and Ruhr have been friends for more than 20 years. Both men turn 50 this year and they planned the trip to Las Vegas with their wives to celebrate the milestone.
Sorensen and his wife went to the Vegas Golden Knights NHL hockey game earlier Sunday evening before planning to join Ruhr and his wife at the concert. They were making their way toward the Ruhrs, and were about 20 feet from them, when the shooting started.
“If we hadn’t gone to that game, we probably would have been standing right beside Perry and Tammy,” Sorensen said. The two couples lost track of each other in the ensuing chaos.
Sorensen and his wife flew home to Kelowna on Monday. Ruhr and his wife will return today.