“The vacation I had looked so forward to was finally here. Going to Las Vegas, where I grew up, for a three day country music festival. It was my first Route 91 Harvest Festival. The first day was simply amazing and everything I expected and more. Saturday night, I received the text while dancing and singing to Country Music that my nephew was just born. Tears of joy streaming down my face. Not knowing that exactly 24 hours later, in that same spot, tears of pure terror and fear would consume me.
First thing I did Sunday morning was rush to the hospital to meet my nephew and hold him for the first time. I left the hospital to meet my best friend to head over to the festival the same way we did the prior two days. At the concert we met up with our friends, drank beer and swapped stories as we tried to maintain our hangovers. We were in a VIP suite. It was our own little makeshift metal building with a small balcony. It gave us more freedom to dance and be crazy off to the side of the stage. The suite was directly facing Mandalay Bay. At 10:04, we were singing, laughing, dancing, without a care in the world. 60 seconds later, our lives would never be the same again.
At 10:05, a gunman on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay opened fire on the crowd. It was very confusing at first, no one really moved or did anything. I could hear people saying, ‘What the hell was that?’ and ‘get down!’ You could hear the crowd start getting very loud. When the second burst went off, we hit the ground, as a massive part of the crowd started to flee for cover. As I ran into our makeshift little room, I texted my partner and said, ‘There’s a shooter, we are all on the ground.’ I was with one of my best friends just before Jason Aldean went on stage and her last words to me were, ‘We are going to get closer to the stage.’ I called her and I will never be able to get the sound of the pure terror in her voice out of my head. But at least I knew she was safe.
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