UNINJURED SURVIVOR IS FILLED WITH GUILT

anguished parents and children, and the injustice of being forced into a new identity: victim.

And this time, with 58 people dead, at least 161 pierced by bullets, and more than 20,000 concertgoers from around the country left to soak in the memories of that night, the web of trauma spans from coast to coast, linking the casualties of this attack with those of all the others. San Bernardino. Aurora. Orlando. Newtown. And on and on.

Some people left Las Vegas with a few trample wounds and the vision of a night gone horribly wrong. Others face radically altered lives.

Gervais went to the concert with two friends, Dana Smith and Pati Mestas. For years they had attended country shows together, giddy when they planned each adventure. On Oct. 1, they were just three California grandmothers joining the rest of crowd in singing “God Bless America.”

Then came the crack of gunfire, and they were three panicked women trapped in a killing field.

Pati died.

A bullet hit Kim in the back. Only Dana emerged unharmed.

So much of the attention in the aftermath of mass shootings has been focused on the gunman and the number left dead in his wake. But the injured who survive carry a special burden. “We all kind of forget that these people have to live with it for the rest of their lives,” said Dr. Bryan Tsao, chair of the neurology department at Loma Linda University Health.

Tsao is still treating three patients from the 2015 San Bernardino attack. Battered physically and emotionally, none have been able to return to work, he said.

He described the post-shooting process as one of deconstructing old lives and reconstructing new ones.

“Those that I’ve seen that cannot — that cannot stop dwelling on the tragedy of it, on the injustice of it, on their permanent disability — they don’t do well,” he said. “They take the struggle and kind of go down a different road.”

‘He took a part of me’

Gervais is being treated at Loma Linda, not far from her house, and just 4 miles from the scene of the San Bernardino attack.

On Day 19 of her recovery, she was in her hospital room, in the wheelchair, wearing a neck brace and thick compression socks. A humidifier puffed mist above her head. Her daughter Amber Manka, 30, stood by with her own two children.

Gervais, 56, runs a business servicing trash compactors. She spends — or spent — her weekends riding ATVS in the desert, wearing leather gloves and a fullface helmet. When her husband, a sprint car racer, died after a crash, she raised her two girls on her own.

She had lived a difficult life, she said, which steeled her for challenges. But even for her, this was a lot. “I’m disgusted,” she said of the gunman. “I’m angered, I have all kinds of emotions toward him. Because he took a part of me that I can’t get back.”

At the hospital, a man entered with a clipboard and said he was there to discuss the equipment Gervais will need when she goes home, which could be weeks or months from now. Among her needs are an expensive wheelchair, a remodeled bathroom, a new car, a nurse, and a way to run her business and pay her mortgage.

“You know,” he said, looking at the women, “your insurance will probably not cover any of this.”

Many families caught in mass attacks have found it difficult to pay for or get the care they need. Insurance companies put up fights. Donations run out.

After the San Bernardino shooting, the county repeatedly denied or delayed coverage to survivors, leaving people without the medicines, therapy and health aides their doctors said they needed.

Overwhelming guilt

That night, a friend of Gervais had arranged a bingo fundraiser to help pay for some of the costs. Collections from a Gofundme page the family had started would barely cover the wheelchair.

“O-72!” said the bingo announcer.

At a lunch table in the back sat Dana Smith, the only one of the three women to make it out unscathed. Smith, 52, had known both Kim and Pati for more than 20 years, and was the one who had brought them all together.

In the weeks since the shooting, she had left the house three times, she said. She does not sleep or eat much, and spends time watching videos of that night, as if to remind herself it was real.

Some days she gets out of bed. “Wednesday I didn’t,” she said. “It was like I didn’t care.”

Melissa Strassner can relate. She was 14 in 1999, when two of her classmates went on a killing spree at Columbine High School. She watched them shoot her friend Anne Marie Hochhalter, and six months after the shooting, Anne Marie’s mother killed herself.

“I felt like it had been my fault,” Strassner said. “If I had not run away from her, maybe she would not have been paralyzed, maybe her mother wouldn’t have made the decision she made.”

“You’re never going to be the person you were the day before the shooting,” she added. “You have to mourn the loss of that person.”

Smith had visited Gervais a few days before the fundraiser. That was difficult, she said, because she feels guilty for being able to walk, for being alive. And she feels guilty for feeling guilty, wishing she could bury her own anguish to help her friends.

She is seeing a therapist, but is still haunted by the facts. “Three of us went,” she said. “And I left one in the morgue and one in the hospital.”

‘I forgive you, sir’

The night of the concert, Pati Mestas, 67, had moved to the front row, where she danced while her friends hung back.

She died wearing cowgirl boots and a star-spangled T-shirt.

She had spent most of the past 15 years living with her son Jeremy Schmidt, his wife and their four children.

After the shooting, Schmidt raced to Las Vegas, unsure if his mother was alive. His youngest daughter, age 8, kept asking her mother: “Did Dad find Nana?”

When Schmidt returned, he wrote in a Facebook post what he had told his daughter:

What I won’t do is harbor hate in my heart for the man who did this senseless act of violence.

I will not allow my kids to let hate grow in their hearts for this man.

He was so troubled that he thought ruining other people’s lives was the answer.

Well Mr. Stephen Paddock: I forgive you, sir.

Mestas’ three children, eight grandchildren, one great-grandchild, two brothers and many cousins set her funeral for Saturday at a memorial home guarded by a statue of Jesus leading his flock.