‘MAKE NEW MEMORIES’
Santa Fe officers who survived shooting return but not for memorial events
One year after the mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev., left 58 people dead and more than 800 injured, two Santa Fe police officers who were present returned to Nevada.
“We wanted to make new memories,” Adam Gallegos, 47, who retired as a police captain earlier this year, said in a telephone interview Monday.
In a separate interview, his friend, current Officer Billy Perdue, 34, another survivor of the ill-fated Route 91 Harvest Festival, used identical words to describe their current Las Vegas trip.
Making new memories. Memories that don’t involve bloodshed and terror.
The two have gathered with a group of friends and loved ones from around the country. “Some of the same people who were here with us last year are here,” Gallegos said.
“We haven’t participated in any of the memorial services or anything,” Gallegos said. “I’ve seen a lot of people wearing T-shirts [related to the shootings], but that’s not why we’re here.”
Instead, Gallegos, who arrived on Friday, said he and his group just wanted to enjoy a long weekend in Las Vegas and have a good time. “We’ve been to a lot of restaurants and bars,” he said. “It’s been great.”
Perdue said the group planned to visit the festival site near the Mandalay Bay
resort and casino on the Las Vegas Strip. “We’re just going to walk around, try to retrace our steps,” he said.
In interviews with The New Mexican shortly after the shootings, Gallegos and Perdue had discussed in detail what they saw and how they got themselves and their friends — including Perdue’s wife and Gallegos’ girlfriend — to safety while the well-armed gunman kept firing high-powered rifles from his 32nd-floor suite at the crowd of 22,000.
The lawmen spoke of walking methodically along walls and fences to avoid a panicking, stampeding crowd; seeking cover behind vehicles and trash bins; dealing with false rumors of multiple gunmen; and, when taking refuge in a mechanic’s shop, arming themselves with pipes and wrenches in case there were hostile pursuers.
Gallegos last year said he and Perdue had “kept telling the people we were with, ‘We’re not running, we’re walking. … Everybody lock arms, we’re going to walk out.’ We didn’t want anyone to trip. We were going along the way, and people were running and falling. We were picking people up.”
And while leaving the festival grounds, they saw a security guard fall to the ground, apparently struck by a bullet.
Their small group eventually grew to about 40 people by the time Gallegos and Perdue led them to safety in a hangar at nearby McCarran International Airport.
Both men say their law enforcement training and police experience helped them navigate the bloodshed and bedlam that night. So how have they fared since? Gallegos said witnessing such a tragedy hasn’t affected him. He’s not haunted by the memories.
“I don’t really think about it,” Gallegos said. “I think that’s probably because of what I did for a living, seeing the worst side of people for 27 years.”
Perdue, however, tells a different story. “It’s been a hard year,” he said. “I wish I’d have taken a little more time off right after that,” he said Monday.
Like Gallegos, Perdue was back on the job just days after the massacre.
“At first everything seemed OK. Everything was normal,” he said. “The holidays masked everything we were going through.”
But in the months following the holidays, Perdue said, the normalcy seemed unreal. “It took awhile for everything not to seem fake.”
A year ago, Perdue expressed concern about what he would tell his young son about that terrible experience.
The officer said he and his wife have talked to their son about the massacre. “We’ve talked about things a 9-year-old can understand,” he said. “He told me, ‘Dad, I’m glad you’re going back there.’ I told him some day when he’s older I’ll take him to Las Vegas and show him where it all happened.”
One way Perdue dealt with the aftermath was to become an instructor for active-shooter trainings at local schools. He said he has led classes for staff members at St. Michael’s High School and the Santa Fe Higher Education Center on what to do in case of a shooter on campus.
And even though he’s leaving the police department this week for a new job as an investigator for the District Attorney’s Office, Perdue said he’ll still teach such classes.
“I think we’ve learned how to deal with,” he said, referring to him and his wife. “We’re getting better every day. But it will always be part of our lives.”