GRAND RAPIDS (WOOD) — A Wyoming man who witnessed the mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas Sunday described the “sheer panic and utter chaos” to 24 Hour News 8 Monday.
Chris Duzan was traveling on business and said he wasn’t planning on going to the concert, but ended up attending because his friend had tickets.
Duzan said he arrived to the crowded festival, located across the Las Vegas Strip from the Mandalay Bay casino hotel, about 15 minutes before the shots rang out. He and his friend were moving closer to the stage where country music star Jason Aldean was performing when he heard what he thought was firecrackers.
“Like someone threw firecrackers like we hear back in Michigan on the Fourth of July,” Duzan said in an interview via Facebook video chat. “And then we quickly realized that once it started again, there was a guy and a girl who came by us, and she had a wound to her arm that was gunfire.”
Duzan said the second round of gunfire sounded like it was coming from above from Mandalay Bay.
“There were bullets hitting a metal container, you know: tap, tap, tap,” Duzan said. “You could hear them ricochet.”
He and his friend ducked down.
“Me and my buddy, we managed to stay calm and get people to stay and not go when they were not shooting,” he said.
Duzan said that before he left the venue, he saw at least 13 people who died.
“We checked the pulse of several people and we found one guy who was with a girl who we thought was maybe his wife and he had blood on his hands and on his shirt and you could tell he was just totally lost,” Duzan said. “We asked if this was his wife, is she OK and he said no, he sent his wife out, but this was his daughter that had died from a gunshot wound and we was just knelt down beside her.”
The death count in Sunday night’s shooting reached 59 Monday afternoon, with at least 515 others injured.
“Angels all around me. God is watching out for me,” Duzan said.
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