Reliving the horror

Valencia High grad shares her experience at ill-fated Las Vegas concert

Valencia High graduate Rachelle Roach, who was at the ill-fated Las Vegas country concert, held a woman who had been shot.

“There are no words to describe it,” Roach told The Signal.

Roach recalls holding the dying woman, she said: “I don’t know, she was taken away from me.”

Roach attended the Route 91 Harvest Music Country Festival in Las Vegas where a gunman opened fire on the crowd.

She went to the concert with eight SCV friends, Roach said: “We took cover right away because they were saying there were possibly other shooters.

“It’s not something you think can happen to you,” she said. “This is going to take some time to come to terms with.”

When Rachelle Roach’s mother heard from her daughter she called her friend, a former Santa Clarita Valley resident Jane BettencourtSoto who now lives in Las Vegas.

“I received a frantic call,” Bettencourt said. “From the mother of a daughter who was there.”

The Valencia High grad was reportedly with eight of her friends when at least one of them and others around them were shot, Bettencourt-Soto said.

Bettencourt-Soto recalled the phone call she received: “She (Valencia High grad) called her mother and she said ‘Mom, there’s dead people all around me.’

“She said ‘I have a dying woman in my arms. She wants to call her husband on my phone so I’ve got to hang up,’” she said.

“All night I was on the phone with her mother, trying to calm her down,” Bettencourt-Soto said. “She (the daughter) is traumatized.

“She told her mother she ran to the Hooters Hotel and stayed in a room with 10 people she didn’t know, sheltered,” Bettencourt-Soto said.

Bettencourt-Soto also received a call from her niece who apparently was at a bar at the concert when the people beside her were shot in the head.

“My niece and her husband ran (from the concert) for two miles,” she said.

Local deputies

Other local people at the illfated concert included at least five employees of the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Stationfour sworn deputies and one civilian, Shirley Miller, Sheriff’s spokeswoman said.

“There were some station personnel at the concert,” Miller told The Signal, noting she received no reports of any of those sheriff’s personnel being injured.

“Everything so far is checking out,” she said, noting the station took a roll call of all the local personnel Monday.

As well, several off-duty members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department were also at the concert when the gunman opened fire, Fire Department spokeswoman Vanessa Lozano said.

“Preliminary information indicates that three LACFD members were struck by gunfire and sustained non-life threatening injuries,” she wrote in a news release issued Monday.

It was not immediately known if any of the injured fire station personnel were from the SCV.

“Due to privacy concerns, the names of these members will not be released,” Lozano said in the release.

“The LACOFD will continue to monitor the situation and provide support to our members and their families,” she said.