Karessa Royce

A UNLV student and former member of the Rebel Girls dance team was shot in the shoulder and suffered a gunshot wound that pierced her lung and caused it to collapse, according to a Gofundme page.

Karessa Royce, 22, is a junior at UNLV. Her friend Pamela Rios said she had brought Royce to the concert as a birthday gift, even though she isn’t a country music fan.

Concertgoer Chelsea Sullivan, 27, said she heard one shot but initially wasn’t sure what it was. “At first no one really moved or did anything and then all of the sudden there was a couple more pops,” Sullivan said. “I looked at my friend and said, ‘We got to get out of here.’”

She and others jumped an exterior fence leading to the street because they couldn’t findanexit.

“As we’re jumping the fence, we could still hear shots firing,” she said.

She said she and at least

100 others, one with a gunshot wound to his leg, continued running toward a private airport hangar at Atlantic Aviation LAS. She said they broke into a private hanger and tarmac. They ran as far north as they could on the tarmac until they reached the airport office near Tropicana Avenue.

Sullivansaidamanwitha pickup was driving through fences so people could keep running.

“He was jamming through the fences so that by the time we got there, they were open and we could get through,” she said.

Geoffrey Williams was alone inside his room on the 27th floor of Mandalay Bay when he heard gunshots from above him and saw people running from the concert grounds from his window.

Like many others, he said the gunshots initially sounded like fireworks. “I saw no explosion, I saw no lights, I saw nothing lighting up and I was like, ‘That’s weird. That’s not fireworks,’” Williams said.

He said the concert stopped, and he heard screaming. Then “a massive amount of people” ran.

“It was like rapid fire,” said Williams, imitating the sound of a machine gun.

Chip and Lisa Schau of Sacramento stood at the corner of Sunset Road and Las Vegas Boulevard and embraced.

This was their 30th concert this year, give or take, Lisa Schau said.

When the shooting began, she estimated she heard gunshots for 15 to 20 minutes.

“You never think it’s going to happen to you,” she said.

First they took cover. Then theyran.

“We were running over people that were injured, and itwas,itwasterrifying,”lisa Schau said.

The two hid behind cars, waiting for pauses in gunfire to run to another hiding spot. The pauses didn’t come.

“I just kept thinking to myself, ‘This isn’t real. This is not happening. This is not real,’” Lisa Schau said. “I just kept thinking that over and over. Anditwas.”

Tracy Miller leaned over and held her husband, Brant Miller, as they waited near the Southwest Airlines ticketing counter. The couple was eager to fly home to Reno after a harrowing night at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.

The Millers were seated near the back of the concert when they heard rapid gunfire, believing it was fireworks.

“When there was a pause weranfortheexit,butthere were so many people,” Brant Miller, 45, said. “The cops just kept saying there was an active shooter and everyone kept running.”

The couple ran through the Tropicana and on to The Signature at MGM Grand condominiums, where they hunkered down for several hours with hotel staff and others concertgoers seeking refuge. From there, they were shuttled around 3 a.m. to UNLV’S Thomas & Mack Center to wait some more.

By 6 a.m., they were allowed to return to their room, one floor below the shooter’s 32ndfloor suite at the Mandalay Bay.

“We come to Las Vegas all the time,” Tracy Miller, 46, said, “but I think it’s going to be a long time before we ever come back.”