'It’s one of those things I’ll never forget for the rest of my life' — scenes from aftermath of Las Vegas shooting
Israel Cabanas, a performer who attended the festival, described chaos as concertgoers frantically tried to escape without knowing the best direction. After Cabanas encountered a woman who had been shot in the stomach, he resolved to keep running toward the main stage, where the bulk of injuries and casualties had occurred
He counted 20 people who had succumbed to their injuries on scene. Cabanas, 33, and other attendees broke apart metal barriers to use as makeshift gurneys to transfer the injured away from the scene, he said.
"We were all just trying to help and save as many as we could," said Cabanas, a former corrections officer.
Cabanas was still wearing his green festival wristband late Monday afternoon.
"I wish I could have helped more," he said. "I wish I could have done more."
Even the initial rounds of gunfire scattering concert-goers at the Route 91 Harvest festival did little to convince Sage Leehey that she was in danger.
Now ubiquitous through the many videos shared on social media showing the sprays of hundreds of rounds of ammunition raining down in the middle of a Jason Aldean setlist, the initial sounds weren’t immediately apparent to the 25-year-old server and Las Vegas native that she might be in the midst of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“I thought it was fireworks,” she said. “And I kept looking for fireworks, but there were no fireworks.”
She and a friend quickly attempted to drop to the ground in front of the stage, but the mass of human bodies crowding the confines of the concert area made it difficult to seek adequate cover.
Still believing it to be some sort of precautionary measure or training exercise, she and a friend rushed to a gate near the stage, before moving on to ground behind media staging tent, running into a friend who tried to assure them that the intermittent bursts couldn’t possibly be gunfire.
“I sent a text to my whole family, to let them know, and I wanted to send it quickly so I just sent a group text and I said, ‘There’s gunshots, I’m not sure if they’re real. I love you all.’” she said. “And then we looked in the tent and there was blood and there was a body, and then we knew it was real.”
They ran across a street and through a parking lot as gunfire continued and responding police rushed in, debated whether or not to shelter in the bed of a truck before climbing in a friends car and laying across the back seat, driving away from the concert and away from the danger.
Her friends dropped her off a few miles away at the Town Center shopping complex on S. Las Vegas Blvd., where her parents picked her and took her home where she’s obsessively kept up with news coverage of the shooting. Leehey said she’s counting her blessings to have been standing in a spot where the concert stage may have obstructed the shooter’s vision.
“My friend(s) was recording, we just didn’t think it was real at first," she said. “But then it just kept happening — but we still didn’t know, not until that body.”
Democratic Rep. Ruben Kihuen said he went to Sunrise Hospital at about 3:30 a.m. on Monday, a few hours after the shooting.
“I almost wish I hadn’t been there. Every single bed taken, every single room taken, every single hallway taken, people literally dying right in front of my face,” he said.
Almost half of the people didn’t have identification on them, he said.
“They’re literally sitting there almost dying and nobody knows who they are,” he said.
Now’s the time for saving lives, he said, and then it’s time for policy talks.
“Hopefully this will start a discussion — how did it happen, could it have been avoided,” he said. “How did this gentleman manage to get so many guns into a hotel room?”
UMC surgeon Stephanie Streit said there are a lot of patients she treated late Sunday night, the vast majority of which were gunshot wounds.
“The individual injuries were nothing we’d ever seen before,” said Streit, who’s also a combat doctor in the Air Force. “We just had to do more of it and faster.”
But there was one patient who came in early Monday morning that she’ll never forget.
One young girl came “this close” — Streit held up her fingers barely a centimeter apart — to being paralyzed, she said. The girl peppered her with questions. Was she going to be okay? Would she be able to walk? Would she be able to run? Would she be able to graduate?
“She’s going to be okay, and she’s going to graduate from law school in the spring,” Streit said. “And it means a lot to be able to be here for her.”
The Smokin Gun Club sits in Arizona across the Nevada border, about five minutes away from Mesquite. Employees there spent several hours today checking for any potential paper records or surveillance footage of Paddock.
"At this point, we've been through all our records, and he has never been on our property," said Jason Shaw, a spokesman for the shooting range. "He has never come here to do any shooting, and we have had zero affiliation with him."
Shaw, who lives in Mesquite, said he was shocked by the news this morning and shocked that it involved several automatic weapons. "It's just the bad guys that have stuff like that," Shaw said.
He said no one out here owns automatic weapons.
"That's why he was such a surprise to people in this area," Shaw said, noting that most ranges in this area don't allow automatic weapons.
Like most residents, he wants to know the shooter's motive. "We've got a lot of questions," he said. "What's happened that made him do this?"
Clark County Commissioner Steve Sisolak spent part of his morning at the hospital speaking to the widow of an off-duty Las Vegas police officer who was killed in the shooting. The couple had been at the festival together on Sunday night.
“It’s one of those things I’ll never forget for the rest of my life,” Sisolak said.
He says the state could “absolutely” use more support from the federal government to shore up security.
“Just because we have so many tourists here, and we are a potential target, we need more resources here,” he said.
But there are limitations.
“We’ve definitely hardened the target for the Strip corridor, but it wouldn’t have mattered if you had 10,000 more officers out there. You wouldn’t have been able to stop this guy,” he said.
He praised the first responders who quickly tended to the victims.
“Literally, this death toll would have been three, four, five times more if it hadn’t been such a fast response,” he said.
A family assistance center has been set up in the south hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, where police, fire and coroner officials are providing services for victims' families.
On Monday afternoon, families were streaming in and out of the convention center as cars stacked up on the other side with people waiting to drop off donations and other supplies.
Officials were meeting with the families to collect information about their loved ones as they work to identify the victims. Boyd Gaming, Station Casinos, Siegel Suites and the South Point Hotel and Casino are providing housing to families of the shooting victims.
Therapy dogs appeared to be heading inside this afternoon. A van from The Cupcakery also drove by, seemingly headed toward the donation drop-off zone.
Clark County Chairman Steve Sisolak said the center he been inundated with supplies from community members trying to helping however possible.
University Medical Center surgeon Dr. J.E. Coates said Sunday’s shooting is unlike anything he’s ever seen, even when he was a doctor in Pennsylvania during the 9/11 attacks. At that time, his hospital cleared out operating rooms and prepared for the worst, but there were few survivors.
“Last night was a process of what we call damage control, where you just take them in and then you stop the process of dying,” he said outside the hospital, where he performed three surgeries on victims the night before. “You control the hemorrhage, you staple off pieces of bowel, you leave the abdomen open, pack them, get them in the ICU, start operating on the next one.”
On Monday, as the initial rush calmed, surgeons are revisiting patients they saw the night before and doing “definitive repair.”
Food kept coming at a parking lot near University Medical Center, where people had lined up to donate blood. State Sen. Scott Hammond brought donuts, a resort brought sandwiches and a Jamba Juice store located nearby rolled a wagon full of about 100 smoothies to give for free.
.@hammond4nevada among #nvleg folks here. Handing out donuts to blood donors pic.twitter.com/ziZq6cP9rJ
— Michelle Rindels (@MichelleRindels) October 2, 2017
Susil Sivaraman, an internal medicine doctor who works the night shift at the Veterans Administration, said he trained at University Medical Center and was trying to get privileges to help out there again. Hospitals must clear outside doctors before they can practice at the hospital to avoid liability concerns.
He sat down in a parking lot and waited to give blood with a long line of other people while he was waiting for the paperwork to be completed that would allow him to help victims.
“Even if I can’t, I can help somehow,” he said. “Everybody can help.”
Nevada Independent photographer Jeff Schied contributed to this story. This story will be updated.