Newfound friendship cut short by Las Vegas sniper’s bullets

He’d met her just a few hours before, the woman from California who had come to the country concert on the Vegas Strip alone. And Kody Robertson liked her. They hung out for a few hours, danced together, laughed.

They stood together just about in the middle of some 22,000 packed-in and partying country music fans at the Route 91 Harvest Festival late Sunday night when Robertson, a 32-year-old salesman from Hilliard, Ohio, heard the first pop-pop-pop-pop-pops echo across the Las Vegas Strip. He thought they were fireworks, just a part of the show.

But as people started to scramble and push and tried to figure out just what was really going on, his newfound friend fell. Two shots. Standing next to Robertson, the woman — her name is Michelle Vo, a family friend confirmed to The Dispatch — was one of the dozens shot and killed by 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, the man police say sprayed the concertgoers with gunfire from out of a window on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

“She just went down,” Robertson said by phone this week from Las Vegas.

He learned Monday that Vo was among the 58 who died in in the deadliest mass shooting in this country’s modern history. Authorities said 489 others were injured.

Robertson, the brother of Dispatch photographer Kyle Robertson, said as soon as he realized the direction from which the gunfire was coming, he looked up and saw flashes from the Mandalay Bay hotel window. He threw himself on top of the injured Vo in an effort to shield her. The gunfire continued raining down on the now-panicking crowd. People ran. People screamed. They hid under bleachers and anything they could find. There would be a second of pause, then more gunfire.

“We’d run and duck and run and duck and run and duck,” Robertson said. “Your instinct is to run, to get away from that, but there were so many people, too many people down all over who needed help.”

This was Robertson’s second year at the outdoor concert, staged in essentially a fenced-off venue in a lot across

JOHN LOCHER / AP Debris is strewn through the scene of the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. From the chaos and tragedy that resulted in the shootings, many stories of heroism have emerged.