It was the final night of the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sunday, and Pocatello resident, Meagan Knight, and her two friends were tired, grumpy and running out of money. However, they couldn’t pass up the chance to see country music star Jason Aldean live for the first time.
Knight, 27, and her two friends Taylor Ogden, 26, and Kristyne Poole, 26, both of Pocatello, had purchased their tickets to the festival months ago. They knew the experience would be unforgettable, but they did not expect to survive what is now the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“Jason came out, played his first few songs as if everything were normal, and during his third song was when it all started,” Knight said. “We heard the first few pops and immediately felt like we knew what it was but we wrote it off as fireworks exploding or the speakers going out.”
The popping sounds Knight describes, however, were not fireworks or speaker feedback.
At approximately 10:08 p.m. Sunday, the first call to dispatch came through for a report of shots fired at the music festival, which was attended by about 22,000 fans.
A suspected gunman identified by police as Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada, allegedly opened fire on the music festival from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino using one or a combination of the 23 weapons found in his hotel room. Paddock killed himself in the hotel room before authorities arrived.
At least 59 people died and more than 520 people were injured during the assault.
“Security checked everyone at the door so when we heard the pops we started looking around asking ourselves, ‘Is this really gunfire?’” Knight said. “When someone shouted out that a girl had been shot, that’s when we started running.”
Luckily, Knight said that she and Ogden were in the middle of the crowd near the stage, but were located more to the left in relation to the front of the stage. Poole had to use the bathroom and knew that she wouldn’t make it back to the front of the crowd, so she decided to hang back and catch the rest of the show near a watering station.
“I was grabbing some food and filling up my water bottle and just hanging out by the free water stand,” Poole said. “Jason (Aldean) plays his first few songs and everybody started crowding to the middle. You could hear the pops and I remember looking up into the sky for fireworks. Then the popping sound started raining down and people were running towards me.”
Knight had some emergency combat medical training for her time in the Idaho National Guard, and she and Ogden are both registered nurses. Poole is a registered X-ray technologist.
“As we started running, we tried to help a few people who were just ducking for cover by telling them to run, otherwise they were going to get trampled to death,” Knight said. “But we just started booking it.
“I remember jumping over a body of a girl with blood all over her, but our game plan was to just keep running.”
Some reports indicate the shooting transpired consistently for about 30 minutes. Knight said that the event was so chaotic that it was difficult to determine how long the shooting continued, adding that the shooting occurred long enough that she thought there were multiple shooters.
Frantically running and ducking gunfire, Knight recalls kicking down a large security fence with a group of multiple people, including Ogden, before reaching the lobby of the Tropicana Resort and Casino.
“We got inside the Tropicana, and a guy in front of me was bleeding all over,” Knight said. “I ripped my flannel shirt off and wrapped it around his arm, applied some pressure with my knee and Taylor (Ogden) asked what she could do to help.”
Knight continued, “That’s when someone shouted, ‘The shooter is coming, the shooter is coming.’”
Knight said she has no idea what happened to the man wearing her flannel shirt as a tourniquet on his bleeding arm, but while running away again, her and Ogden were separated. At this point, Poole had made it back to the MGM Grand, where the three women were staying. However, she had no idea what happened to her friends.
After hiding in a warehouse area in the Tropicana for hours, a time that included barricading herself and several others in an office with no windows, Knight eventually made it back to the MGM Grand shortly after midnight.
“We grabbed hard hats, folding chairs and filing cabinets and ran out of the locked room and started running down the hallway of the Tropicana,” Knight said. “Ran out and tried to find my friends and people were shot everywhere. Even the paramedics looked shaken up.”
Ogden was also locked down in a conference room in the Tropicana and wasn’t released to return to the hotel room until 4:30 a.m.
“When I finally felt safe, I broke down pretty hard,” Knight said. “It’s going to be hard for all of us. I can’t believe that all of us got out there without any injuries.”
The three women drove back from Las Vegas on Monday and Knight said they were so traumatized that they couldn’t even listen to country music on the drive home.
“There are people who lost so much out there,” Knight said. “The metro police were quick to respond and very efficient, and we have never been so happy to see a SWAT team arrive. By the end of it, all three of us were covered in blood.”
Knight continued, “It was like a bad dream. A bad dream that left us feeling nothing but terror.”
This story originally appeared in the Idaho State Journal. It is posted here with permission.
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