Jessie Wood was wading through the crowd of country music fans, headed for the bathroom, when she heard the pop-pop-pop late Sunday night.
The 22-year-old Ogden resident had come to the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival with her friend and friend’s mother. The trio glanced at each other: Was that fireworks? Then Jason Aldean stopped singing. The stage lit up. The women realized they were in danger.
“The shots started coming real quick,” Wood said in a telephone interview as she traveled home Monday morning. “The atmosphere changed so fast.”
Wood was among a number of Utahns in attendance Sunday when gunfire rained down on the festival crowd from a room on the 32nd floor of nearby Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, ultimately killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500. Some crouched in the dirt, seeking shelter. Others climbed fences in a desperate bid to escape. Nobody had a clear sense of where the shots were coming from.
There had been no reports of Utah residents who were killed or hurt in the attack, Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox told reporters Monday.
However, former Salt Lake City resident Neysa Tonks, 46, died in the assault, according to a GoFundMe page to raise money for her family. A graduate of Brighton High School and mother of three, Tonks worked for Technologent, a technology company based in Irvine, and she lived in Las Vegas, according to public records. The fundraising page, showing many photos of Tonks flashing a big smile, said she “brought joy, happiness, fun and laughter to so many of us.”
“Our first thought was, we know there were Utahns there for sure,” Cox said. “We heard from some of them. We haven’t heard of any casualties of Utahns that were there but we know there were many that were right there on the ground, literally on the ground, lying down, trying to get out of there, crawling out. The stories you hear are just horrific.”
Wood and her companions didn’t wait to see the carnage unfold. They grabbed each other’s hands and ran, she said. They were already walking toward the back of the venue, allowing them to escape just before other concertgoers began stampeding for the exits.
“A bunch of people were just panicking,” Wood said.
The women arrived back at their room at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino and promptly barricaded the door with a dresser. Who knows what might be unfolding out there, they figured.
They said a prayer. They surfed Facebook and news reports and listened to police scanner traffic online. They couldn’t sleep.
“It‘s not easy thinking about it,” Wood said.
Karen Larsen, of Clinton, was about 20 yards from the stage with several friends when the shots rang out, she wrote on Facebook. She crouched down, later posting pictures of her legs caked in dirt.
“There was bloody people, and there was dead people. And we‘re all OK, but we’re scared,” Larsen said in a video as she huddled in her hotel bathroom.
“We can‘t stop shaking,” she wrote.
DJ Tischner, a radio disc jockey at Big Kickin’ Country 107.3 in St. George, was finishing up three days of festival coverage in the media tent when he heard the first series of pops.
He and other photographers and DJs thought it was probably some kids lighting off fireworks on a street behind the tent; they went back to taking photos with each other and saying goodbye.
There was shortly another, longer series of pops, Tischner said in a video he posted to his Facebook page and a subsequent interview with a Midwest radio station. Tischner said a sense of realization and dread quickly spread among the other media members inside the tent: They were stuck in the middle of a shooting.
He went and found several people near the tent who had come to the festival with them. They fled out the back and climbed a fence. Soon, hordes of concertgoers were pushing the fences down.
Tischner said he ran into the street with his friends, where they crammed into an Uber with several other strangers; one of the passengers had been shot in the arm.
He said nobody knew the gunshots were coming from above — a hotel room. Many figured there must be multiple gunmen, perhaps roaming the area around the concert venue, Tischner said.
“We thought they were in the venue with us. You don’t know, am I gonna turn, and there’s someone with a gun there? It was complete pandemonium,” he said.
The car full of concertgoers ended up at a nearby business, which eventually allowed them to shelter inside. Tischner realized he had blood coating his jeans and jacket.
“There was nothing scarier in my life than running, and hearing gunshots, and you think the next [gunshot] you hear is going to be you. The next one,” he said.
“The biggest mass shooting in American history has happened. And we were there.”
Reporter Pamela Manson contributed to this story.