Las Vegas shooting survivors from Vero Beach recall terror

VERO BEACH — A warzone. That’s the best word Linda and Donnie Proctor could find to describe the massacre they witnessed firsthand Sunday night at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas.

“They were dragging the bodies out, and not only were they dragging the bodies out, but the guy’s still firing into them,” Donnie Proctor recalled with a grimace. “The younger folks were just traumatized. You know, little kids and stuff? Frozen with fear and sitting down and crying their eyes out right in the middle, where they could be shot.”

The Vero Beach couple, who own Proctor Construction Company in Vero Beach, escaped without any injuries.

The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Clark County, Nev., officials said 59 people and the gunman were killed and 527 were wounded.

“I laid there, and I swear to God, I wondered what it’s going to feel like to get shot,” Linda Proctor said as tears formed in her eyes and her voice broke. “I just knew I was going to get shot.”

She went to Las Vegas with her husband, daughter and sonin-law to celebrate her daughter’s 50th birthday.

Country music star and Vero Beach native Jake Owen, a friend of the family who performed at the event, got them all backstage passes.

The four stood watching the packed, outdoor concert from an elevated VIP platform on the side of the stage opposite the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino where gunman Stephen Paddock, 64, fired repeatedly from his 32nd-floor room into the crowd.

Linda Proctor said the people on the platform were confused about the sounds — she still accidentally calls them fireworks — and didn’t realize what was happening until someone on the platform was shot.

“Then everybody just starts screaming, ‘Get down! Get down!’ So we all just fell down on the ground,” she said.