After attending a 2012 rally in Reno, Nevada for Mitt Romney, I promised myself that I’d never attend or even photograph a political event ever again. That’s how disgusted I was with Romney after he’d tossed the last debated to then-President Obama.
Well, I broke that promise to myself today. This is my favorite picture of the President from the event.
From my notes: “A source has let me know that law enforcement has a video of the Vegas murderer shooting from the hotel room. Apparently he set up a system to tape himself in the act. What a disconnect.”
It was a few minutes after 10, Sunday night when Brian Rogers’ cellphone went off. It was his daughter, Kaitlyn, who left her shift helping out at the ambulance’s medic tent to enjoy a bit of the country music.
“I expected she was calling to say good night. And she said, ‘Daddy, they’re shooting at me.’ That’s a big statement to make for somebody to get when they’re half asleep, so I don’t know that I reacted.”
A feeling of helplessness hit Rogers as he sped to the scene not even knowing if his youngest daughter was still alive.
“When I first arrived, there were people lying in the street, deceased. There were people running out of the venue covered in blood, and it was very hard to tell which ones were the patients versus which ones were the people helping them. It was chaotic.”
Meanwhile, Kaitlyn was in the medic tent, spiking IV bags as the space filled with the injured, “We didn’t know what was going on, really, outside of that tent. Just to have people that could look at me and say ‘We’re OK,’ and me to kind of return, that was just something that could kind of keep us going and keep our focus on a patient and not us.”
Days later, Rogers is still fighting with his feelings, “I’m going through a lot of the different emotions that you go through. I was, and I still am, very angry. I don’t know how something so evil could happen to so many people.
“I’m just trying to understand how and why, and I may never know. That’s the hardest part, never knowing, right?”
A friend is complaining that he’s been ‘catfished.’ I’m commiserating the best I can…
She pretended to be a she.
Had him hooked and on the line.
No tuna for him.
From my notes: “Investigators are now trying to identify the mystery woman seen with the murderer in the days before the Las Vegas massacre.”
For Glen Simpson, Sunday night hadn’t been particularly eventful. An emergency medical technician, he was hired to provide medical services at the event.
“I got a radio call to go over to Gate 2A, specifically [to help a man who had to much to drink.] [At first] it sounded like power lines that were just hitting each other. It was longer, a little bit louder.”
The five Metropolitan Police Department officers walking alongside Simpson drew their weapons. He ducked.
“I just thought to myself, ‘What is this? Is this happening?’‘Is this the real thing?’”
Simspon never once saw where the bullet’s wer coming from,, “I could just hear it, and it echoed. I’d even say you could hear it hitting people, just listening to the way people were moaning and screaming and crying.”
Simpson, now in the field amid the carnage, called his mom and dad. Waking them from sleep, he said, “I love you,” then hung up.
He immediately went to work treating the wounded.
From my notes: “Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Officer Charleston Hartfield was shot and killed during the Las Vegas mass-shooting. Hartfield was a military veteran, a youth football coach and recently published author.”
Off duty, Las Vegas firefighter Ben Kole was enjoying the Sunday evening concert. He knew his daughter Rachel was working as an EMT in the arena.
Then a gunman opened fire on concertgoers and he raced through the chaos to find her.
“It was absolutely the worst feeling. My gut just dropped. We embraced, shed a few tears, [then] she said, ‘People need help,’ I said, ‘Okay,’ and we said, ‘Let’s get to work.’ I said, ‘You are on my hip, let’s go.’”
The father-daughter team started treating everyone they could. Kole remembers how helpless he felt at the time.
“People were screaming, there were some head shots over there, and unfortunately, there’s not much you can do for that. It’s horrible for me. One hundred times worse for them.”
Rachel recalls,”There was a woman laying on the floor and there was a man crouched by her and I asked if they needed medical attention. He just waved me off. The fact that he could be so selfless and know that there are others in need as well.”
She also speaks of her father’s leadership, “When you close your eyes at night, and you see all the lights and all the people, that’s something you can’t run from. I don’t see him shaking to the core. I see him when everything was in chaos pulling together, giving instructions, not breaking down.”
“I’m glad my daughter says it didn’t strike me to my core,” Kole interrupted. “It did. This hit me hard.”
Rachel admits that they’re both seeking help, “Our counselor told us something really amazing. She said, ‘If you let this fear change your life, then he’s taking another victim.’”
From my notes: “Authorities have recovered over 40 firearms from the Las Vegas murders hotel room and his home.”
Linda and Donnie Proctor went to Las Vegas with their daughter and son-in-law to see country music artist Jake Owen, a family friend perform. He gave them backstage passes.
At first she was confused about the sounds and didn’t realize what was happening. Linda describes what happened next.
“Then everybody just starts screaming, ‘Get down! Get down!’ So we all just fell down on the ground. I laid there, and I swear to God, I wondered what it’s going to feel like to get shot. I just knew I was going to get shot.”
Finally mustering the courage to run for cover, she ducked beneath a food truck where she heard a woman ask, “Can I put my baby in your cooler?” to shield him.
When she saw an opening in the fence, she tried to shimmy under, but she got stuck.
“I knew no one. I was alone, But, I thought, ‘I can do this.’ [Then] some young girl that I don’t know came back for me. She helped pull the fence off me and pull me under.”
Linda found herself in a parking lot full of buses and trucks.
“I stood there by myself and I just didn’t know what to do.”
Hiding behind bus, she glanced around. She found herself next to Jake Owen’s crew’s bus.
“I ran around the bus, and I banged on the door and it was locked, but they opened it up and pulled me in. Nobody knew anything for a long time. I was trying to be so brave, but I have to admit, I thought my husband or daughter could be laying out there on that field.”
But her husband, daughter and son-in-law made their own escape.
“After Linda had gone, we stayed down, because the bullets were coming all into us. We knew to stay low and stay behind things. “We were behind some 50-gallon drums with bullets still coming in. We waited for them to finally stop, and took off again.”
In between taking cover and running for safety, Donnie described looking back over the concert field: “The younger folks were just traumatized. You know, little kids and stuff? Frozen with fear and sitting down and crying their eyes out right in the middle, where they could be shot.”
The trio eventually made it to the MGM, got a ride as far as the police barricades before walking the rest of the way to the Mandalay.
After hearing her family was safe, Linda says, “I just stood there by myself. I was in shock. And about 30 minutes later, I looked up and they were walking down the hall. And we just ran to each other.”
From my notes: “Jason Aldean, who was performing on stage in Las Vegas at the time of the shooting, says he and his band are canceling their upcoming shows this weekend out of respect for the victims and survivors of thw attack.”
Denver-area resident Rick Baughman will always know how close he came to being among those killed during the music festival in Las Vegas. His room pass became the key to his survival.
“You knew that you were inches away from not being here. It sounded like short fireworks kind of thing. And [Jason Aldean] does do that. But it just wasn’t at the right time, but still not thinking anything, right? But why would you?
Then when the real round came off. I was watching the stage and you could see him stop and look at his band. The lights went off. That’s when… just chaos just, broke out. I start running. I just ran and ran. People are falling everywhere. I lose my group immediately. You hear another round start going off and people were jumping over porta-johns, over fences. I broke down a fence and just started running with a group of people as fast as we could.
The girl next to me was laying on the ground and got shot. I picked her up with another fella and we got her to a tent. I felt a tug at my shorts and didn’t think anything of it. We put a table up to barricade ourselves from where we thought the shots were coming from. Then they stopped for a while, and so I made a run for it.
It wasn’t until later I saw that I’d been grazed by a bullet. It went through my cargo shorts and my wallet, my credit cards, even my hotel room key. It could have been much worse.
It was terrifying, such mayhem you just don’t know what to do or where to go. It’s just surreal. I hope no one has to go through it again. I am just thankful to be alive, and happy, and to be with my people. I just wish the best for everyone affected by this.”
From my notes: “Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt has postponed plans to announce his candidacy for governor in the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas.”
Sunday night, Nevada State Trooper Travis Smaka’s life changed forever. Sitting down for his shift briefing, the call came through on the radio saying there was a shooting at the Mandalay.
“[The] Sergeant told us to go and we were literally in a sprint.”
As he worked to shut down I-15 highway, he saw a vehicle flashing its lights, flagged him down.
“The female passenger started telling me they had people dying. I looked in the bed and I just saw bodies lying on bodies and they were severely injured there was no doubt about that.”
He escorted them as quickly as he could to the hospital.
“When I got to trauma center that is when it occurred to me how catastrophic this was, when they were treating people in the parking lot. I mean they were swarmed with catastrophic injuries.”
On the way to complete his original assignment, another trooper flagged him down — he too was escorting a pick up truck with people in the back.
“That is one that is haunting me. It was a man and a wife and the wife was literally missing the back of her head. He was holding her and I felt so bad for this man because she was gone and just looking at this man thinking his world will never be the same.
That is something that is weighing heavily on my heart because I didn’t want to lose anybody on my watch. I can’t un-see some of the things I saw that night and un-hear the pain and agony people were in. It is going to stay with me the rest of my days.”
The Old Blog in the Desert 