SURVIVOR FROM OHIO TRYING TO PROCESS SUNDAY’S EVENTS
Las Vegas Boulevard from the hotel. He had arrived last week with several friends, including 32-year-old Dave Knerem, a high school teacher from Columbus. They had split up at the concert earlier Sunday night and were not together when the violence erupted. They all texted and called one another to mark themselves safe as soon as they could.
Monday, Robertson had delayed his flight home so that he could wait at the hospital until word came about Vo; Knerem continued on.
Not long after dawn broke, Knerem was among those packed into Gate 23 of Mccarran International Airport awaiting their flight to Columbus. Most were still in shock. People comforted one another. Strangers offered to buy others food and drinks. Knerem sat and awaited his boarding call, the gunshots and three days of country music still ringing in his ears.
Like so many others, he initially thought firecrackers made the flashes and the noise. Then he heard someone yelling what he thought was, “There’s a shooter, there’s a shooter.”
The 6-foot-3, 205-pound Knerem was knocked to the ground by other concertgoers, and a woman pulled him all the way down onto his stomach. He got up and never stopped running until he made it to the MGM Grand.
“It was as scary as you think it would be,” he said. “Everyone was running and yelling and no one was sure what to do.”
He had been among the lucky, able to leave the normally packed Strip and catch his flight. Others were not so fortunate. .
Adriana Sandoval, 32, of Los Angeles, was with a friend at the concert in the middle of the crowd, near the stage. She heard the shots and noticed flashes from the window of the Mandalay Bay. Sandoval and her friends were knocked to the ground three times by others who were fleeing. Time after time, Sandoval said, she scrambled to her feet and ran until she reached a hot dog stand where the friends took cover.
“The shots never stopped; they just kept coming,” she said.
Giselle Kurianski and Liz Gonzalez, two 20-year-old friends from Whittier, Calif., were among the masses. Early Monday, they held onto one another as they walked the Strip.
Kurianski said that when the shots rang out she and her friend threw themselves on the ground. “It was like a video game where you would hear shots and they would stop and then they would start again. We then got up and ran. Everyone was pushing and shoving.”
The two women hid in nearby bushes for nearly an hour, responding to loved ones who were reaching out through social media and text messages on their phones. Other witnesses described forcing their way into nearby hotels and cowering under tables or cramming together in underground storage areas until the madness had settled and people crept back out to see what was left.
Robertson, though, had a life to try to save. He and others carried Vo from the chaos, all performing CPR to try to save a stranger. The bodies, Robertson said, were everywhere. Five here, 15 there.
“You can’t even process it,” he said. “Husbands and wives on top of one another just screaming, people crying and trying too hard to get someone to wake up.”
In the throngs of the dead, the fleeing, the injured left behind, a man in a pickup stopped, and Robertson and the others (they identified themselves to him as a paramedic and several military veterans) put Vo in the truck bed with others. The driver sped away toward a hospital.
That’s the last Robertson saw of her.
Before finding out that Vo had likely been taken to Sunrise Hospital, he had walked to get her phone from the people who had found it and answered when he called it.
Then he walked back to his hotel — about an hour in the dark, alone. It was along that route that he had his first few minutes to breathe, to think.
“Your mind, you can’t even know ... “he said, his voice trailing off. “There was anger, sadness, crying. It’s an up-and-down roller coaster. You just don’t even know.”
He was only beginning to try to make some sense of the senseless. He ran it all over and over again in his mind, a movie scene that wouldn’t stop.
He said the gunfire went on maybe three or four minutes, but that it seemed a lifetime. At one point, he took cover in a nearby bar. But people couldn’t stay inside for long. Too many needed help.
He was among those in the crowd who ripped apart metal perimeter fencing and turned sections into makeshift stretchers. After Vo had been sent off in that truck, he grabbed men shot in the leg, women shot all over. He said he and so many others just grabbed whomever they could and applied pressure to their wounds.
“We checked people, tried to see if they were breathing,” he said. “And then we’d put a person on what we could and run for help.”
“The cries of these people, I’ll never forget,” Robertson said of those waiting in the hospital for word about their loved ones. He had planned to catch a late flight home Monday night but at the last minute, changed it again.
He stayed one more night because Vo’s family was coming to meet him. Maybe, he figured, they could lean on each other.