Vegas survivors caught in second mass shooting
California country bar was their ‘safe space’ — until shooter arrived
THOUSAND OAKS, CALIF.— Country music was blaring and beer was flowing. The Lakers game was on the television, and if revellers weren’t line dancing they were playing pool. Then all of a sudden, into “College Country Night!” at the Borderline Bar & Grill stepped a man with a gun.
Wearing dark clothing and a dark baseball cap, he set off smoke bombs to create confusion. He shot a security guard at the entrance and then opened fire into the crowd. Patrons dropped to the ground, dashed under tables, hid in the bathroom and ran for exits, stepping over bodies sprawled across the floor.
“I remember looking back at one point to make sure he wasn’t behind me,” said Sarah DeSon, a 19-year-old college student.
And as they raced for safety, many of them thought, not again.
Just last year, they had fled the same chaos — gunshots, bodies falling — in Las Vegas, at a country music festival where 58 people were killed in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The Borderline, a popular hangout for country music fans, had become a place of solace for dozens of survivors of the Vegas massacre to come together for music, for healing and for remembering — “to celebrate life,” in the words of one.
And now, at least some of them, belong to a group that seems uniquely American: survivors of two mass shootings.
“This is the second time in about a year and a month that this has happened,” Nicholas Champion, a fitness trainer from Southern California who posted a group photo on Facebook of Vegas survivors gathering at the Borderline in April, said in a TV interview.
“I was at the Las Vegas Route 91 mass shooting as well as probably 50 or 60 others who were in the building at the same time as me tonight.” When a gunman opened fire at the Route 91 Festival in Las Vegas last year, Telemachus Orfanos somehow survived.
On Wednesday night, though, he didn’t.
“He was killed last night at Borderline,” his mother, Susan Orfanos, said, speaking rapidly into the telephone.
“He made it through Las Vegas, he came home. And he didn’t come home last night, and the two words I want you to write are: Gun control. Right now — so that no one else goes through this. Can you do that? Can you do that for me? Gun control.” Orfanos then hung up the telephone.
Authorities said the gunman, Ian Long, 28, of Newbury Park, Calif., was found dead at the scene after killing 12 people including a sheriff’s deputy, and being confronted by officers who stormed the bar. Investigators said there was no clear motive.
Long, a Marine Corps veteran who had served in Afghanistan, had apparently been wrestling with his own demons: Officers responded to a disturbance at his home in April, and mental health specialists spoke to him about his military service after suspecting that he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
But they decided he was not a danger to himself or others, and determined they could not force him to seek treatment.
The shooting inside the bar began around 11 p.m. Witnesses described sudden chaos. Among the estimated130 to180 people at the bar were five offduty police officers, enjoying the night like the other partiers.
As patrons dove for cover, the sounds of glass shattering and gunshots rang out in the cavernous bar. The gunman prowled the emptying dance floor, shooting the wounded as they lie on the ground.
Teylor Whittler, a young woman inside the bar, saw the gunman quickly reload and fire again. “He knew what he was doing,” she said. “He had perfect form.”
The attack is only the latest in a wave of mass shootings that have plagued the country this year. A man opened fire at a Pittsburgh synagogue late last month, killing 11 people in an attack that officials said was motivated by anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant rage.
This week, the nation paused for one day to vote, and then, more violence. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Twitter that he had been “fully briefed on the terrible shooting.”
As the day wore on, a handful of victims were identified. Among them were Sgt. Ron Helus, a sheriff’s deputy only a year or so from retirement; Alaina Housely, an 18-year-old freshman at Pepperdine who loved soccer and planned to major in English literature; and Cody Coffman, 22, a baseball umpire who planned to join the Army.
Coffman’s father’s saw his son just before he left for the bar Wednesday evening. “The first thing I said to him was please don’t drink and drive,” he told reporters. “The last thing I said was, son, I love you.”
With mass shootings a fixture of life in this nation, Americans in large gatherings — at churches, concerts, public squares — have become accustomed to thinking through the possibilities, eyeing exit routes and weighing escape options, should the horrific happen.
“Unfortunately, our young people or people at nightclubs have learned this may happen and they think about that,” said Geoff Dean, the Ventura County sheriff, whose last day on the job before retirement was scheduled for Friday. “Fortunately it probably saved a lot of lives that they fled the scene so rapidly.”
Authorities said as many as 22 people had been injured and taken to the hospital.
Brendan Kelly, 22, was among those who survived both the Vegas massacre and the shooting at the Borderline. “It’s your worst nightmare,” he said. “It’s terrible.”
Some of the survivors of both mass shootings posted about the Las Vegas shooting on social media, including the memorial event this year at the Borderline.
Kelly, who has posted photographs of himself on Facebook wearing a “Vegas Strong” Tshirt and at a Borderline event, said in an interview with ABC 7, a local affiliate:
“It’s too close to home. Borderline was our safe space, for lack of a better term; it was our home for the probably 30 or 45 of us who are from the greater Ventura County area who were in Vegas.
“That was our place where we went to the following week, three nights in a row just so we could be with each other.”
The community of Las Vegas shooting survivors have come to call themselves the Route 91 Family, posting constantly on private Facebook groups and getting together for what they call “meet-greets.”
Borderline is one of several places that the survivors use for these gatherings, which are meant to heal the trauma of the October 2017 shooting.
Janie Scott, 42, a Las Vegas survivor who runs a Facebook page for others, said that 47 people who made it out of that shooting had posted on her page that they were at Borderline last night.
“They’re just broken,” she said.