‘He gave me the (shirt) off his back’
Acts of heroism emerge in wake of Vegas massacre, as survivors recount strangers’ good Samaritan acts
LAS VEGAS — Rob Ledbetter’s battlefield instincts kicked in quickly as bullets rained overhead Sunday.
The 42-year-old U.S. army veteran, who served as a sniper in Iraq, immediately began tending to the wounded, as one of several heroes to emerge from the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Amid the massacre in Las Vegas that left 59 dead and more than 500 injured, there were acts of compassion and countless heroics that officials say saved many lives.
There was a man who one survivor knows only as Zach, who herded people to a safe place. There was a registered nurse from Tennessee who died shielding his wife.
Like many in the crowd of some 22,000 country music fans, Ledbetter heard the poppop-popping noise and figured it was fireworks. Then he saw people dropping. When more booms echoed in the night air, he recognized the sound of automatic weapons fire.
“The echo, it sounded like it was coming from everywhere and you didn’t know which way to run,” said Ledbetter, who was at the concert with seven people, including his brother, who was shot and injured, and his wife. They found cover in a VIP area.
Once out of harm’s way, he turned to injured strangers.
Thanks to a man who took the flannel shirt off his back, Ledbetter says, he put a makeshift tourniquet on a wounded teenage girl, whose face was covered with blood.
“Some random guy, I said, ‘I need your shirt,’” said Ledbetter, who is now a mortgage broker and a resident of Las Vegas. “He just gave me the flannel off his back.”
Ledbetter said he compressed someone else’s shoulder wound, and he fashioned a bandage for a man whose leg was shot through by a bullet.
Ledbetter and others grabbed the man, carried him out to Las Vegas Boulevard, put him in the back of a utility truck with five to 10 others that was headed to the hospital.
He would have helped more people, but he couldn’t clear the barrage of gunfire.
“I’m saving people, or trying to do my best. But it got to the point, I saw people all over, laying where we used to be standing ... just laying there and nobody getting to them and I couldn’t get out there. The shots just kept coming in and bouncing. I would have been in harm’s way,” he said.
He worries those unfamiliar with battlefields will suffer from what they have survived.
“Everybody there is going to have emotional problems.”
Anna Kupchyan, 27, credits a man she knows only as Zach for saving her life and about nine others when he herded them into an outdoor trailer serving as a restroom. The law student from L.A. said bullets were raining down as she and a crowd of others began running in search of a way out of the outdoor venue. Zach opened a door and ordered people inside and then joined them and shut the door, Kupchyan said. They stayed inside as the shooting continued, everyone paralyzed with fear.
“Then security came and they shouted for us to get out, to run,” she recalled.
Outside the trailer, dead bodies were sprawled on the ground, including a man shot in the head, she said.
She and best friend, Leslie Aguilar, 26, a therapist, eventually jumped in a cab that was driving by and befriended two other women survivors who let them stay in their hotel room until the danger subsided.