B.C. resident Quinn Mell-Cobb thought it was going to be a fun night filled with music at an outdoor festival on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday night.
They were sitting in the bleachers watching Jason Aldean on stage when the first shots rang out.
“At first, it was just seven or eight of them in quick succession, what sounded like firecrackers or bottle rockets, or something like that. Everybody around us got sort of startled but didn’t really think that much of it,” Mell-Cobb said.
“But then another five seconds later we had another burst and then a bunch of things started happening, everything just started going haywire.”
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He said they looked up to the stage and saw Aldean run off and the house lights come back on.
“We were sitting in the bleachers, 400 to 500 yards back from there, I would say, with a general admission field in the middle. And all these people started running back towards us and at this point as well we had a gentleman behind us, who I believe was ex-military, and he said ‘those are gunshots, everybody get down,'” said Mell-Cobb.
“We basically hit the deck at that point. Before I could react, basically, my girlfriend was next to me and she went down kind of abruptly, to be honest with you, at first, because this was while the shots were ringing out, I thought she might have been hit.”
“That is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. That was the most terrifying experience of my life.”
He got down and tried to cover her.
“Just shield her, I couldn’t really tell where the shots were coming from.”
“And then when that burst ended, she told me she was OK, I thought ‘we’re basically sitting ducks out here, we should really run back to our hotel.'”
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The couple are staying at the MGM Grand, which is about two and a half blocks away.
“We just jumped down off the bleachers, joined the stampede of people running back and from that point on it was just tunnel vision,” he said.
Mell-Cobb said they are both doing OK this morning, letting their loved ones know they are alive and safe.
He said this morning, they went outside to get some air and went to the bridge that connects the MGM Grand with the Tropicana Hotel.
“We just looked out at the scene on the street. It was really quite remarkable because Las Vegas Boulevard is usually, you know, it’s the street that’s never supposed to sleep right? It’s bustling, there’s traffic and people, and you could hear a pin drop. Honestly.”
“You see cop lights but no sirens, no people, just complete silence.”
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