I heard pop, pop, pop – and then people began to drop
SOME thought they could hear fireworks; others reckoned a speaker system had gone on the blink. It wasn’t until the music stopped and screams began to pierce the night sky that panic really set in.
The time was shortly after 10pm, and Jason Aldean had just taken to the stage of the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, a 15-acre outdoor concert venue between the Mandalay Bay Resort and Sin City’s vast airport.
Cheered by a sellout crowd of 22,000, on a balmy desert night, Aldean was the headline act on the final night of the three-night Route 91 Harvest festival. He was just a few lines into one of his best-known hits, When She Says Baby, when the shooting began.
Near the front, Derek Bernard, 53, visiting from Los Angeles with his wife Karen, realised that a woman standing almost next to them had just been shot.
‘There was a woman bleeding – that’s when we realised it was real shots. She just fell,’ he said.
‘She was shot. There was a lot of blood. It was so many shots – it sounded like 4th of July – just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. So many. I didn’t think it was real because I couldn’t see or feel anything.’
The initial burst of gunfire lasted just under ten seconds, and Aldean carried on playing. But, as he noticed more victims fall to the floor, he fell quiet.
‘We heard a succession of pops. Unbelievably it sounded like fireworks,’ concertgoer Joe Pitzel recalled. ‘But they kept rattling off. Then Jason Aldean actually turned around and ran off the stage. That’s when we realised something really bad was going on.’
A video from the venue shows an eerie quiet fall over the crowd. It is broken by a man saying: ‘Uh oh. That’s gunshot.’ Then you hear screams. ‘It sounded at first like something was wrong with the speakers,’ said William Walker of Ontario, California.
Following that first burst of gunfire, the peace would last around 35 seconds, presumably enough time for the gunman to reload his weapons in his suite on the 32nd floor of the 43-storey, 4,300-room Mandalay Bay hotel. From his window, the 64-year-old attacker, Stephen Paddock, had sweeping views over the festival site, on the opposite side of Sin City’s neon- covered strip, roughly 400 yards away.
He fired a second, ten- second volley of shots.
Revellers again fell to the ground, cowering behind concession stands or equipment vans, or diving on top of loved ones.
‘It was crazy – I laid on top of the kids. They’re 20. I’m 53. I lived a good life,’ Mike McGarry, a financial adviser from Philadelphia, recalled, showing off footmarks on the back of his shirt from people who ran over him in the chaos.
Yellow flashes became visible from the upper floors of Mandalay Bay. Kodiak Yazzie, 36, said: ‘You could hear that the noise was coming from west of us, from Mandalay Bay. You could see a flash, flash, flash, flash.’
‘I first thought it was like bottle rockets going off,’ Seth Bayles of West Hollywood told the LA Times. ‘Then we saw people dropping. We saw someone get hit and then we started running.’
The gunshots stopped a second time and, in that 17-second pause, crowds began to run.
Footage of the panic in the drinks tent shows some crawling along the floor, and others running.
A third bust of gunfire begins, lasting nine seconds, forcing people to cower behind anything they could find.
Outside, when it ends, a woman can be heard on a video screaming: ‘My God! Let’s go!’ Another shouts: ‘Save yourself!’
‘We’re going to get trampled if we don’t go,’ a bystander can be heard saying in another video. But confusion still reigned. ‘Guys it’s fireworks,’ says a man. ‘Stop! What’s the matter with you?’
Soon the attack fell into a grisly pattern: ten-second bursts of fire followed by 15 to 30 seconds of silence, while Paddock either swapped weapons or reloaded.
‘People were just dropping to the ground. It just kept going on,’ said Steve Smith, a 45-year- old from Phoenix, Arizona.
‘Probably 100 shots at a time. It would sound like it was reloading and then it would go again.’
In the silences, those who escaped injury jumped over walls and climbed under cars.
Professional poker player Dan Bilzerian filmed himself fleeing, saying: ‘Holy f***, this girl just got shot in the f***ing head.’
Concertgoer Mike Cronk told ABC News he realised a friend next to him had been hit three times in the chest. ‘It was pretty much
chaotic,’ he said. ‘Lots of people got hit… It took a while to get him out. We had to get him over the fence and hide under the stage for a while, you know, to be safe. And, finally, we had to move him.’
Cronk tracked down an ambulance, but another man he had been helping died in his arms. ‘My buddy got in there,’ he added. ‘We got three more people in the ambulance… But I just got a message from my buddy – and he’s going to be okay.’
A woman told CNN: ‘There was a man that was shot right there. He was all bloody, he was unconscious.
‘Everybody was hiding everywhere, hiding under the stands and anywhere they could… and everyone is telling us to run, run as fast as you can. My husband and I ran out towards our car and there were people hiding underneath my car for cover. There was a gentleman who was shot, he said “Can you help me” so I put him in my car and I had like six people in my car, people without shoes, running just to get away.’
Once they had escaped the stage area, where most of the fatalities occurred, many festival-goers attempted to hide. Michael Seiden locked himself in a container filled with beer cans, later tweeting pictures of it riddled with bullet holes. ‘I was fortunate enough to get away,’ he said.
Desiree Price, from San Diego, hid behind a car with two strangers. ‘We huddled together. That’s why I have their blood on me,’ she said. ‘One girl was shot in her leg, the other had it in her shoulder. It didn’t stop so we all ran – we kept going.’
Concertgoer Ivetta Saldana ducked into a sewer. ‘It was a horror show,’ she told the Las Vegas Review Journal. ‘People were standing around, then they hit the floor.’
William Walker cowered behind lighting apparatus. ‘We were under a big spotlight and someone said, “Turn off the light,”’ he said. ‘They shut it off and you could see and hear bullets hitting the ground.’
No one yet knows exactly how long the assault lasted, but witnesses put it at five to 15 minutes. A guest who believes he was staying next door to the suspect told CNN that, after it stopped, ‘you could smell the
‘Shooting fish in a barrel’
gun powder.’ Country singer Jake Owen, on stage with Aldean, told CNN the attack was like ‘shooting fish in a barrel’.
The city’s roads and airports were closed and major resorts put under lockdown, while hospital emergency rooms were soon jammed with victims, many brought by others attending the festival. ‘I saw a lot of ex-military jump into gear and start plugging bullet-holes with their fingers,’ said concertgoer Russell Beck. ‘While everyone else was crouching I saw police officers standing up as targets, just trying to direct people and tell them where to go.’
Las Vegas Police began trying to neutralise the attacker. The City’s under-sheriff Kevin McHaill said officers at the concert were able to pinpoint roughly where the gunfire was coming from.
‘They could see that the rounds were coming from that particular location as heavy fire, automatic fire at times. And so they were corralling all of the people that were actually at the concert behind a block wall,’ he said.
A number of officers went to Mandalay Bay’s 32nd floor. Guests said they were woken by SWAT teams bursting into their rooms. Brad Baker, 38, of Austin, Texas, was in Las Vegas for a conference. ‘[The police] came into my room, I was totally out – I thought I was in trouble! They yelled at me like, “Get some clothes on.” I got my shirt on but I left my phone, my wallet. When I came out of my room, they were telling us to run. I saw all the cops with guns. It was crazy,’ he said.
On a recording of the moment a SWAT team blew Paddock’s door off its hinges, an officer can be heard saying: ‘We have sight of the suspect’s door. We need to pop this and see if we get any kind of response from this guy, see if he’s in here or if he’s actually moved out somewhere else.’
Soon afterwards, the words ‘Breach! Breach! Breach!’ were shouted, followed by a large bang.
The gunman died at the scene. He was found alongside an arsenal of weapons including at least ten rifles, and appeared to have shot himself. At 11.58pm Las Vegas Police tweeted ‘suspect down’, bringing the terror to an end.