Las Vegas mass shooting victim to leave hospital
PHOENIX — More than three months after she was shot in the head in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history and put on life support, an Arizona woman is smiling and talking, demonstrating a recovery that doctors at a Phoenix hospital are calling miraculous.
Jovanna Calzadillas will leave Barrow Neurological Institute and go home with her husband and two children.
Arriving at a news conference Wednesday in a wheelchair with her right side immobile, she smiled and said hello to reporters as she was lifted onto a seat in front of news cameras.
Declining to take questions, she instead slowly read from her own short, prepared statements.
“On Oct. 1, a part of me changed that night,” she said. “Even though I will not be the same Jovanna, I will come back strong.”
That night is when the 30-year-old mother and her husband, Frank, a police officer with the Salt River Police in metro Phoenix, were at the outdoor Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. They were celebrating his recent return from an Air Force deployment in Afghanistan.
They were cheering for country singer Jason Aldean when gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd from his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort. He killed 58 people and wounded 851 others before killing himself.
A critically wounded Calzadillas was taken to University Medical Center in Las Vegas. Three doctors told her husband there was nothing they could do and she had a “non-survivable injury.”
While considering whether to take her off life support, Frank Calzadillas dreamed that his wife came to him. “She hugged me and kissed me and she said everything’s going to be OK. She just walked away” he said.
So he made plans to fly her back to Phoenix for medical care closer to home.
“My kids and my family — I will not quit on them and I will not quit on myself,” she said Wednesday.