People with Bay Area connections among those dead, injured or missing.
A few seconds and a few inches separated those who survived from those who didn’t.
Among the 59 dead and 527 wounded on the Las Vegas Strip were a still-unknown number of Bay Area residents who found themselves in the line of fire and who — in an instant — acted with heroism, raw instinct and grace.
One man used his precious seconds to shield his wife, a surgeon who came from Sebastopol. A bullet that might have killed her instead killed him.
Another man, a policeman who came from Novato, instinctively stayed behind in the sea of dead and wounded to do what he could to help. He told his wife to run. She ran, and she remains among the missing.
And a Rohnert Park woman with two bullets in her back helped friends try to flee. Then she reached for her cell phone, to call her parents and — with the sound of the gunshots still ringing out — tell them not to worry.
What they all did in an instant on an autumn evening at a desert amphitheater will live forever.
The last thing Sonny Melton ever did may have also been the greatest. He grabbed his wife, Heather Melton, and shielded her body with his.
Seconds later, one of the bullets fired from the hotel room across the street in the worse mass shooting in modern U.S. history found the couple as they huddled together. The bullet struck Sonny Melton in the back, killing him. Heather lived.
Heather was the soul mate that Sonny once said he never should have met. The couple worked together at the Henry County Medical Center in Paris, Tenn. He was a registered nurse. She is an orthopedic surgeon.
Heather Gulish Melton grew up in Sebastopol and attended Analy High School. They married in June 2016. The Meltons, who loved country music, were attending the concert to celebrate their oneyear anniversary, a friend said.
On their profile on the wedding website the Knot, the couple had thanked God for bringing them together.
“We have shared amazing times together and nearly unbearable heartaches but through it all we have grown stronger in our love for each other and our families,” they wrote.
In one Facebook photo, the couple wore matching T-shirts of country singer Eric Church. The picture shows them embracing and smiling.
Two months ago, Sonny re-posted a George Strait video. It was Strait singing his hit tune “Marina del Rey,” a song about a love affair on a beach. And the Meltons, who loved the song, went to Marina del Rey, a boat harbor in Los Angeles, to pay tribute.
“Can now say I’ve been to Marina Del Rey with the love of my life,” Sonny wrote, followed by a string of exclamation points.
In a television interview, Heather Melton said her husband saved her life.
“I want everyone to know what a kindhearted, loving man he was, but, at this point, I can barely breathe,” she said.
The Meltons were not far away from Vinnie and Stacee Etcheber of Novato. Vinnie, a San Francisco police officer, was attending the show with his wife of 13 years, Stacee, a Marin county hairdresser for two decades.
Vinnie Etcheber did, by instinct, what cops do. He stayed to help. Run, he told Stacee.
She ran. She did not have her phone or ID with her, her brother-in-law said. She had not been found or identified as of Monday evening.
Etcheber began aiding the wounded, said Martin Halloran, president of the San Francisco Police Officers’ Association. Fellow officers are driving to Las Vegas to help search for Stacee.
Among the bullets shot from the 32nd-floor hotel window, two struck 20-year-old Rohnert Park native Savanna Chasco in the back.
Moments before, she’d been singing along with country singer Jason Aldean. Then she was on the ground.
In Rohnert Park, her family was just settling into bed when they got the phone call.
“She called us at 11:45, telling us not to worry,” her father, Edward Chasco, said. “You could hear the rapid gunfire in the background while we were talking to her.”
Immediately after her phone call, Chasco and his family jumped in the car and rushed to Las Vegas. They broke the speed limit and didn’t care.
Savanna Chasco, a junior at the University of Nevada, Reno, was shot as she and her friends ran to safety. One of them was fatally wounded. Chasco refused pain medication so she could be more alert for one of her friends who was also hurt, her father said.
She was released from the hospital on Monday and was eager to get back on her feet and back to school. She plans to become a teacher and, her father said, she has a calculus test she needs to study for.
“She is a very strong girl,” Edward Chasco said. “Right now she doesn’t want to be in big crowds, but I don’t think that will last.”
With bullets striking hundreds of people, countless remain unidentified. Of those that are known, many came from Southern California, a few hours drive away on Interstate 15, which links Las Vegas with its largest customer base.
The dead included a special education teacher and a police department records technician, both from Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County; a recent high school graduate and actress from Riverside; a kindergarten teacher from Lancaster, also in Los Angeles County.
In their social media pictures, they are all smiling.