From my notes: “In August the Las Vegas mass murder booked a room at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago overlooking the park where the Lollapalooza music festival was being held that weekend.”
The Las Vegas country music festival was supposed to be an annual mother-daughter trip for Malinda Baldridge and her daughter Brenna, “Staying at the Mandalay Bay. You know we did the pool, we did the concert, just kind of relaxed and hung out. We ran into two girls that we were with the night before and, like ‘Oh hi, how are you?’ So we stood with them, up against a barricade like we did before.”
And like many others, she thought fire crackers were going off during Jason Aldean’s performance, “Great somebody brought firecrackers, who does that?”
But soon she realized it was gun shots,“And the girl in front of my daughter fell down to the ground. And there was blood everywhere. You know my daughter was rendering aid to this girl and so was I. And at that point I started hearing more, [gun shots] then I got on [top of] my daughter and that’s when I was shot [in the thigh.]”
“I was just thinking I need to stay calm for my daughter, cause we hadn’t been separated, we were together. We will get through this. I was put into a pickup truck, taken to the emergency room where someone else rendered aid.
For right now, for me, I just feel lucky to be here, and I feel terrible for the people that didn’t survive. I feel for their families.”
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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