“It’s something that I can’t get out of my head,” said Mark Medford, having escaped bullets and carried the wounded Sunday night at the Route 91 Harvest Festival.
“We were in a position where there were a lot of bullets flying past our heads,” he said while waiting for his luggage from Southwest Airlines Flight 726 just after 4 p.m.
“It was scary, very scary,” said Medford, still wearing the purple-and-white wristband given concert-goers — now survivors of the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. “I’ve never been through something like that.”
While no one in his group was injured, Medford talked about the psychological wounds of the mass murder in which a shooter from the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas killed 59 people and wounded more than 500.
“I did see a lot,” he said. “I helped carry a girl that got shot in the head. She’s a young girl. Got blood all over me.”
Medford, who posted video on Facebook (below) and pulled himself together enough to speak, was recognized as among the witnesses from their wristbands and shell-shocked expressions. Few were up to talking about the incident.
Some had bloodshot eyes. Many stared straight ahead with no expression, while some burst into tears upon connecting with a loved one who met them at baggage claim.
Darin Thibodeau described the tragic event as it unfolded before his eyes.
“We were about to the fourth song of the Jason Aldean concert and heard what one guy believed to be fireworks. He said: ‘Don’t panic, don’t panic — it’s nothing.’ ”
“Well, it continued, so we all hit the ground and there was a lady in front of me who was laying on her back,” Thibodeau said. “I told her to roll over on her stomach, and she wasn’t moving. So me and the gentlemen next to her rolled her over, and she had suffered a gunshot wound.”
The gunshots grew louder and closer, he said, so they dove under a truck.
“The truck that we were under was hit four or five times at least,” he said. “And when they stopped again we were able to get up and run out of the immediate event area, and ended up for about an hour in a small (apartment) complex.”
Zoen Baldwin, another on Flight 726, described the horror of Sunday night.
“We were in the middle of the venue, and there was a group of about 12 or 13 of us,” Baldwin said. “We were all together, and we stuck together. We heard what we thought were fireworks. The show stopped about 10 seconds after that. Lights went down. And we knew what was going on.”
A friend of Baldwin’s — a Border Patrol agent — recognized the popping sounds as gunfire and directed his group away from the festival to a bar, Baldwin said.
“We were fortunate in our area not to have anybody hit or hurt,” he continued, “but it was traumatic getting out.”
Describing his state of mind 18 hours after the attack, Baldwin said, “It really hasn’t hit us. We’re still reeling from it. We haven’t gotten any sleep, so we’re a little tired. But at least we want to see our kids and family and go from there.”
Jordan Senneseth told how, for an hour and a half, she hid in a storage area with other people and feared that she would encounter the gunman.
“I didn’t know what was going on, so I just started running. And I ran like a mile down the street,” said the Chula Vistan in her 20s.
She tossed her purse aside because it was weighing her down and lost track of her friends except for one who she ran down the street with.
“I don’t know what went on, but people told us different things, and we didn’t know what to believe, so … I just tried to think in the moment and got out of there,” Senneseth said.
Many on the flight arriving at 4:05 p.m. were too emotional to talk about the attack, quickly grabbing their luggage and rushing outside to waiting loved ones.
A chaplain for the San Diego Police Department arrived at the airport to assist those returning from Las Vegas.
Senneseth was asked what the fight home was like.
“I thought like at any moment I was going to start sobbing,” she said. “I just tried to not — just tried to push it out of my head. … When I got off the plane — and they gave us the grief management papers — that made it more real.”
Off-duty @SanDiegoPD Off.Tom McGrath’s wife posted pic before shooting. His heroic story & update on other local 1st responders @News8 CW 7p pic.twitter.com/V7rIbVmg96
— Eric Kahnert (@EricNews8) October 3, 2017
