Trisha Leifsen was at the Route 91 Harvest music festival for her birthday weekend.
The Washougal woman and her sister-in-law wanted to see country music star Eric Church but couldn’t get tickets when he was touring earlier this year. So her husband, Thad Leifsen, surprised her with tickets to the country music festival — which Church was playing — in Las Vegas over her birthday weekend.
As the music festival’s final act, country star Jason Aldean took the stage Sunday night, Leifsen stood with her husband and her sister-in-law, Carrie Collins. Jaycob Collins, who is Leifsen’s brother and Carrie’s husband, was also at the festival but had left for the bathroom a few minutes before.
As the festival’s final show began, Leifsen turned to her husband. She was having so much fun, she told him.
Then she heard the sound of gunshots. She and her husband recognized it instantly.
“We heard this pop-pop-pop,” Leifsen said Wednesday afternoon in a phone interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive. “This short burst of gunfire.”
A gunman was firing hundreds of shots into the crowd of concertgoers from the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel. Before 64-year-old Stephen Paddock shot and killed himself in the 32nd floor hotel room, law enforcement officials say he fired high-powered weapons for about 10 minutes, killing 58 people and injuring nearly 500. The shooting is the deadliest in modern U.S. history.
Leifsen remembered watching Aldean run from the stage as she heard another round of gunfire. Around her, people dropped to the ground.
“I just thought, ‘Oh my God, this is real,'” she said.
Her husband pushed her and her sister-in-law to the ground, then laid on top of them to protect them from bullets. Over and over, he told them to keep their heads down.
Leifsen is sure her husband saved her life.
But in the moment, she thought they were going to die.
She thought about her two sons, 19 and 22 years old. Her grandson had recently turned two. She wondered if she would see him grow up. All she wanted, she said, was to tell her family she loved them.
“Your life flashes before your eyes and you think, ‘This is it. There are so many things I wanted to do,'” Leifsen said.
The sound of gunfire continued. It seemed to come from all around, she said. It had to stop soon, she told herself. The police would stop it soon, she thought.
“But it just kept going and going,” she said.
Eventually, there was a pause. She, her husband and Collins crawled to a nearby recycling bin that had been tipped over. As gunshots began to ring out again, they huddled inside.
They stayed there for what felt like a lifetime, Leifsen said.
When the gunfire stopped again, they jumped up and ran.
The three of them made it to the concert venue’s VIP lounge, then eventually, to the parking lot outside. They took shelter behind an SUV with two injured women, one who had been shot in the chest.
A man in a truck drove up beside them, Leifsen said, and said he could take them to get medical help. They scrambled inside, bringing the two injured women with them.
But the driver was confused, Leifsen said. He drove around in circles, repeating that he was an army medic and needed his transport. Terrified, Leifsen, her husband and Collins got out of the truck. Moments later, the driver hit another car.
Leifsen doesn’t know what happened to the injured women inside.
Eventually, Leifsen and her family went to the Hooters casino, where they found two friends they’d met at the music festival a few days earlier. They followed the pair upstairs to their hotel room. They barricaded the doors and windows with mattresses, afraid that there could be more gunmen. For hours, they sat huddled in blankets and sheets on the hotel room floor.
“We just sat there in the dark, afraid to make a noise,” Leifsen said.
Leifsen’s brother escaped the concert venue unharmed and met them in the hotel room. At about 4 a.m. Monday, they walked back to their hotel together.
“I kept thinking, why, how did all four of us make it?” Leifsen said.
It didn’t hit her until she got back to the hotel room. Then, she couldn’t stop crying.
She and her husband got back to their Washougal home Monday night. On Tuesday, Leifsen tried to go back to her daily life. She went to an acupuncture appointment she’d scheduled before the trip.
But when she laid face down on the table, she remembered ducking down amid the gunfire.
“Everything came back,” she said. “I just kept hearing my husband say, ‘Keep your head down, keep your head down.'”
She wanted to go to work Wednesday, she said, but had a panic attack. Even routine errands like grocery shopping are difficult, she said.
So, on Wednesday, she made an appointment with a counselor for her and her husband.
“My hope is that at least we’ll get back to a normal life,” she said.
