From my notes: “LVMPD officers ordered to shut off body cam’s while reponding to shooting.”
Miss Las Vegas 2016 got the chance to thank the retired firefighter who saved her, her mother, her sister and two girlfriends during the Las Vegas shooting Sunday night. She also describes how everthing unfolded for her.
“My mother is alive because of you,” Paige Melanson, who was Miss Las Vegas 2016, said to retired Los Angeles firefighter, Don Matthews as she explained what happened.
“I don’t know if I was pushed to the floor or everybody just started falling over, but everybody got down and I was facing away from my mom. So by the time I turned around to gather and see who was around me, I had realized my mom wasn’t just laying there like we were.
She was still and her face was face down in the grass, and so we had known something was wrong. [Matthews] told us that we have to go if we wanted to live, that we needed to go and save ourselves.
And the fact that he was a retired firefighter, he was trained to help people, and he promised us that if we left that he would stay with my mom. I looked into his eyes and he said, ‘You need to go.’
[After getting to safety,] “I saw that I was covered in blood. So my first reaction was, ‘Where’s it coming from?’ And I looked over and I saw the flap over my skin and I kind of had just exploded.
There was blood all over my legs, dripping all the way down my arms that was everywhere, and I didn’t care because the second I saw my mom…I didn’t feel my arm at all.
[Matthews] put his own life at risk. He didn’t have to this.”
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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