Daily Mail TV got an exclusive sneak peak at Dr. Phil’s visit with Las Vegas shooting victims still recovering in the hospital.
In the segment, set to air in full on Dr. Phil on Friday, victims speak of the horror of the Sunday shooting and how they are dealing with the psychological trauma of surviving the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
One of the patients that Dr. Phil visited was still wearing his purple wristband from the Route 91 Harvest Festival, the concert targeted by gunman Stephen Paddock, 64.
He said that the shooting quickly brought everyone at the festival together.
‘When everybody was so terrified, it didn’t matter who you were and what you looked like, anything like that. You grabbed the person next to you and you helped them,’ the victim said.
Daily Mail TV has an exclusive first look at Dr. Phil’s visit with victims of the Las Vegas shooting
One of the victims, Diane, started to tear up as she spoke about the ordeal
Dr. Phil spoke to two friends who attended the festival together, who spoke about trying to outrun Paddock’s bullets.
‘I just looked at her and I said, “We have to go.” So then we just started running,’ one of the girls said.
Her friend, still recovering in her hospital bed, added: ‘Literally seconds after we started running, I knew I had got shot and I just went down.’
Dr. Phil asked the first girl how she was getting through the nightmare ordeal.
‘At this point, I keep telling myself that we’re thankful and I’m so glad that we made it out alive,’ she says, tearing up. ‘Because it could have been so much worse.’
One woman that Dr. Phil interviewed had a bandage over her neck.
These two friends were at the music festival together when shots rang out. As soon as they started running, the friend on the right got shot and fell to the ground
The woman named Natalie says at first she thought she had been shot twice, but later learned that she had only been struck once. Doctors think the bullet ricocheted and sliced her leg open.
Natalie described a horrifying scene after being shot and falling to the ground.
‘Someone got shot in the eye, another to the right [of me] was dead. People were holding my hand. I told them, don’t get up. As soon as the shooting stopped, then we moved a little more and jumped over the fence and I was like, “Ok, I made it over the fence, I’m safe.”‘
Dr. Phil encouraged Natalie not to suppress her feelings as she recovers and she said ‘I appreciate that’.
One of the victims was still wearing his wristband for the three day country music festival
Another woman named Diane said she saw the flash of the gunfire and immediately knew it was gunfire.
‘It wasn’t fireworks,’ she said. ‘The next thing I know I was laying down and I was turning towards my girlfriend and then I turned towards another girlfriend and it was just this girl laying there dead next to me. Her boyfriend, whoever she was with, was huddled over her so she wouldn’t get shot again.’
She thanked Dr. Phil for the opportunity to ‘tell what happened’
After the interview, Daily Mail TV host Jesse Palmer asked Dr. Phil about how the victims were doing.
Dr Phil said there was a different attitude in the trauma unit, because the patients had all been through something together.
A victim called Natalie, left, wore a bandage on her neck about told Dr. Phil, right, about how a bullet tore open a part of her leg as well
‘All of these patients really have a sense of camaraderie they’re pulling together,’ he said. ‘Oftentimes in an emergency room you’ll see patients demanding care. “Hey, get to me, I want to be next”. But that’s not what you’re seeing in this trauma unit. “There’s somebody that’s worse off than me, take care of them.” There is really a bond among this group that has survived.
‘Think about it. We had all of these people that were in a killing field. They were getting shot and these were the survivors. They realize how fortunate they were to get out with their lives. These are people filled with gratitude,’ he added.
Dr. Phil says an issue the patients may have going forward is survivor’s guilt and PTSD.
But overall, he thinks that the survivors are a testament to the American spirit.
‘We saw Americans rally together. We saw them helping each other get out of this killing field. We saw them lined up around the blocks standing for hours to give blood. We saw the American spirit come through. America is alive and well and this isolated event is not going to break the american spirit,’ he said.