Harrowing interviews of Vegas attack victims
LAS VEGAS — At first, they thought it was part of the show. Some looked up for the fireworks. But within moments, a horrible feeling began to sink in as the screams filled the air.
They wondered whether they were going to die.
Las Vegas police released more than 1,200 pages of witness interviews and officer reports Wednesday that detail the harrowing moments after a mass shooting that killed 58 people in October.
The documents were the second wave of items released after the Nevada Supreme Court ordered the police to provide the materials after media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, sued for them.
In statements and interviews days after Oct. 1, when Stephen Paddock opened fire from his 32nd-floor Mandalay Bay hotel suite onto 22,000 people at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival, victims tell police about their wounds and fears.
A 33-year-old woman with a gunshot wound to the thigh and a broken pelvis told Las Vegas Police Det. T. Townley in a recorded interview that she couldn’t understand why the shooting kept up for so long.
“And, um, I kept praying, please let them leave already. Why aren’t they walking and leaving? Why aren’t they, you know, shooting and then escaping? Like why are they just standing? And just sinking in ... they’re shooting to kill us all. They’re shooting — we’re gonna die.”
In a hospital interview with a pair of Las Vegas police detectives two days after the shooting, another victim, whose name was redacted in a police report, described a chaotic, disorienting scene.
A detective identified as D. Jappe asks the victim to detail what happened after hearing the gunfire.
“And then I would say, a couple of seconds later, um, I fell to the ground and I couldn’t feel my arm,” the victim said. “So I just kept yelling, ‘I can’t feel my arm. I can’t feel my arm. I can’t feel my arm.’ Um, and then my aunt was with me and she was just like — You’re fine. Get up. [Country singer Jason Aldean is] performing. What are you doing on the ground? ... Then she saw blood coming from my arm.”
The victim said after a second round of bullets, everyone hit the ground. “There was like a bunch of people on top of us — on top of me specifically ... then when it stopped we knew we had to get up to get going,” the victim said. “And I remember not being able to get up. I just remember telling [name redacted] like, ‘Get off me.’ ”
Hundreds were wounded during Paddock’s rampage. With his arsenal of ammunition and cache of weapons — including at least one AR-15 rifle equipped with a “bump stock” to simulate automatic fire — he killed 58 people in about 15 minutes before shooting himself in the head. He was dead when police entered his suite.
A victim told detectives that getting to a hospital was a frenetic and sometimes dispiriting journey.
A taxi driver drove off when the victim asked for a ride to the hospital. A limousine driver, after directing the victim to a row of ambulances, changed his mind and drove the victim to Desert Springs Hospital and Medical Center.
“The hospital was on lockdown and people were arriving in pickup trucks,” said the victim, who later was transferred to Sunrise Hospital. “It was just, like, chaos,” the victim said. Later the victim told a detective, “People were just in hallways in stretchers.”
The victim said the volume of patients was so great that “they couldn’t get the names of everybody … so they just had a paper and they just wrote, like, ‘She had morphine.’ They had an X-ray. But because they took the X-rays before my registration, they couldn’t tie it to me, so they couldn’t diagnose what was the issue.”
Police said they plan to release more documents, video and 911 calls over the coming months.