Vegas shooting survivors describe year of change, challenges
LAS VEGAS (AP) — The Las Vegas massacre claimed 58 lives , making it the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Hundreds more were shot, many of them surviving after a mad dash through a sea of chaos, flying bullets and bodies. Others had to be carried out and would be dead themselves had it not been for everyday heroes who risked their own lives to save someone else’s.
As the one-year mark of the senseless slaughter approaches, survivors and the families of those killed are working to make sense of their new realities and their newfound hopes and fears. Here are some of their stories:
Jason McMillan has spent a month in a hospital, more than a month in a rehabilitation facility and countless hours in physical therapy trying to regain the use of his legs while coping with stares from passers-by.
The 36-year-old Southern California sheriff’s deputy was shot at the Route 91 Harvest Festival while trying to shield his girlfriend from the gunfire raining from a nearby high-rise. He suffered liver and lung wounds and has a bullet in his spine.
Seemingly simple things can be onerous, like finding a parking spot and a table with enough space for a wheelchair so they can go out to dinner. But McMillan hasn’t let these hurdles stop him from living.
Since the shooting, the father of two got engaged to his girlfriend, bought a home, got a puppy, traveled to Hawaii and learned to scuba dive off the California coast through a program for wounded veterans and law enforcement.
“I’m not going to push the pause button,” McMillan said. “It could have been so much worse — I could even be dead, or I could be completely paralyzed from my neck down. It could be a lot worse, and that’s what I tell myself all the time.”
McMillan was working as a deputy at the Riverside County courthouse last year when his girlfriend, Fiorella Gaete, now 23, got tickets to attend the festival. Fans of singer Jason Aldean, they made their way toward the front of the packed crowd as he took the stage.
When the popping sounds started, McMillan thought it was gunfire but couldn’t tell where it was coming from in the chaos.
Seconds later, the speakers shut off and concertgoers began falling to the ground. He made sure Gaete was tucked behind him, and then he was hit, and his body crumpled.
He couldn’t feel his legs. Blood poured from his chest. Gaete dragged him to a fence, where others helped lift him to the other side. She jumped over and pulled him by the legs until he was loaded into the back of a pickup truck, which roared toward a hospital.
McMillan’s days then passed in a drug-infused blur. He remembers seeing shadows on the other side of the hospital room curtain that reminded him of a silhouette with a gun. When he looked at the floor, he pictured dead bodies.
He had feeling in his toes — a sign that he could recover. But if, or when, no one could say.
After more than two months in the hospital and rehabilitation, he returned to California. Gaete, who broke her arm, is getting used to being his caretaker and leaving her job while coping with her own memories of that night.
Some days have been difficult. McMillan’s can still get down on the floor and play with his two young daughters, but sometimes he’s in too much pain.
“My younger one has told me, ‘I liked it better, Daddy, when you were walking,’” he said from his home in Menifee, California. “It hurts a little bit just having them have to experience it. It’s not something I wanted for them, but maybe it will make them stronger people.”
McMillan said he’s long been a homebody, but that’s changed a bit, too. He recently took a trip to Hawaii and learned how to scuba dive. Gaete is now trying to persuade him to go skydiving with her, and he’s thinking about it.
“Now, when an opportunity comes up, I’ll jump on it, whatever it is,” he said. “I just want to get out and experience life more.”
Less than half a year after the shooting, McMillan and Gaete got engaged. They’re planning to get married next year.
McMillan said he’d like to return to work but is focusing on therapy to try to get back on his feet. There are desk jobs he could do, but his heart is in manning the courthouse or heading out on patrol.
“I want to do what I was doing before,” he said, his clear eyes sparkling. “Drive fast and chase bad guys.”
After losing her left eye and getting shot in the other, Chelsea Romo was told it could take more than a year until she could see.
But as the anniversary of the attack approaches, she can insert a lens to have nearly perfect vision in one eye, enabling her to read, drive and care for her young son and daughter. In the other, she is getting a hand-painted prosthetic and will soon undergo what could be the last of about half a dozen surgeries to help her heal.
It hasn’t been easy for the now-29-yearold. She hasn’t resumed her computer-intensive hospital job, can’t dunk in a swimming pool, and must use the heel of her foot to feel where one stair ends and the next one begins to avoid falling. But, she said, her doctors have called her recovery miraculous.