‘Bullets everywhere’: British Columbians recount the carnage
A vacation to Las Vegas turned into a nightmare for some British Columbians who witnessed the chaos, panic and grief in the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Michael Sampson was with friends at the Route 19 Harvest festival a few metres from the concert stage when the sound of rapid gunfire pierced the air over the din of the music and the cacophony of the neon-lit city.
After a few seconds of shock and confusion — he said they thought it was just firecrackers — realization set in. They dropped to their knees, then stood back up and started to run for their lives.
“(We heard) bullets everywhere. People down — there was a girl about five feet from us who was shot and motionless,” said Sampson, who arrived at Vancouver International Airport on Monday afternoon.
Sampson, along with Kyle Welsh and Cole Rennie, all from Campbell River, described seeing bodies littered on the ground and people getting trampled. They also witnessed people getting hit by cars as they ran across the street, and heard the sound of bullets ricocheting off the stage.
At one point, Welsh felt something nick him in the right arm. He later pulled out bits of metal. “It’s part of a bullet out of me,” he said.
Just steps behind them, a girl fell after being struck by a bullet. In the confusion, the friends were separated. Sampson hopped hotel fences, which scraped his arms, as he tried to get away. He got to his hotel and offered refuge to other people who had nowhere to go.
Rennie found himself with strangers going through an emergency exit door to the Hooters Casino Hotel. “Everyone was panicking, filing into the room, just turning off the lights and barricading the doors.”
Denise Handry counts herself as one of the lucky ones. She and her friends were at the concert and had just headed to the portable toilets before the shooting started.
“All of a sudden, we heard powpow-pow, pow-pow-pow, so we just ducked in and hid,” she said, her voice shaking as she recounted her story at the airport.
Handry said they were in the portable toilet for about 20 minutes until a firefighter came and guided them out of the festival grounds to the lobby of the Tropicana Hotel. She stayed there until 3 a.m., then was moved from hotel to hotel before arriving at her hotel, the Luxor, at 5 a.m., where she was reunited with her husband.
They flew out of Vegas and arrived Monday afternoon.
“I just want to be back in Canada,” Handry said. “I just want to be home. These large gatherings are such a dangerous place now. It’s sad it’s come to this.”
Luke Mochizuki and his wife Elaine — who are still in Las Vegas — were waiting for a shuttle outside the Tropicana Hotel when they saw a wave of screaming people running from the hotel to the parking lot.
“You can see the people were scared. Their faces — I’ve never seen anything like that,” said Mochizuki, who plans to return to Vancouver today.
They were swept along with the crowd to the parking lot and “then you can hear the machinegun. It felt like it was right above us,” he said. He heard at least two full bursts of rounds. “They were long rounds, not tat-tat-tat. These rounds seemed like forever.”
The Richmond couple first huddled in one of the restaurant kitchens at the MGM Grand with about a dozen other people, many of them covered in blood suffering from gunshot wounds, then were told it was safe to go to the lobby.
After 10 minutes, “we saw people running again,” Mochizuki said. “We heard someone say the shooter was in the hotel.”
In that moment, not knowing what was going on, how many shooters there were, or where they might be, “it messes with your psyche,” he said.
“You really think you’re going to die at that point. You really feel it’s over.”