A 29-year-old woman and her fiance are being called heroes after they used her truck to help transport victims of the mass Las Vegas shooting to the hospital.
Lindsay Padgett was attending the Jason Aldean concert at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival with her fiance, Mike Jay, when she heard popping sounds that she initially thought were pyrotechnics.
‘We just heard popping sounds and saw sparks going off of the stage, so at first we thought it was maybe electrical or part of the show, then we thought maybe it was fireworks,’ she told ABC News.
Police say 64-year-old Stephen Craig Paddock used automatic weapons to rain down gunfire on a crowd of 22,000 people attending the concert from his room across the street in the Mandalay Bay hotel.
Lindsay Padgett, 29, and her fiance Mike Jay (together above) are being called heroes after they used her truck to help transport victims of the mass Las Vegas shooting to the hospital
Padgett was attending the Jason Aldean concert at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival with her fiance, Mike Jay, and some friends on Sunday. She is pictured above left hours before the mass shooting at the event
Video she recorded from the scene shows the utter devastation as dozens of people are on the ground suffering in some form from the shooting. A bystander asks if she and Jay can transport those injured to the hospital in her truck
She said: ‘Then everyone starts yelling, ‘Get on the ground! get on the ground!”
‘I’m surprised, I really am, that no one I know was injured. I thought for sure we were all going to die.
‘We saw everyone being shot left and right. We’re just all on top of each other on the floor, huddling together, looking at each other not sure what to do.’
Padgett was able to safely run from the scene with her friends and fiance.
She explained that as soon as the sound of gunshots stopped, she and Jay went to get her truck from the parking lot across the street from the venue.
‘We realized there were people everywhere that needed help and on stretchers … People saw that we had a truck, so we said, ‘Fine, yeah,’ and started to pack everyone in,’ Padgett said of trying to help those injured.
They were able to fill her truck with five wounded victims and five others who were caring for the victims.
‘We were just trying to get people to the hospital. We got halfway there, and as we were getting on the freeway, we saw an ambulance stopped, so we went over and they started taking the most critical people and putting them in the ambulance,’ Padgett said.
Padgett can be heard replying, ‘okay, go ahead, put them all in the back! Put them all in the back sure!’ Moments later, people begin to put victims from the shooting in the back of her truck
Video she recorded from the scene shows the utter chaos and devastation as dozens of people were laying on the ground injured in the mass shooting.
Padgett said that one of the men in her truck was shot in the back. Paramedics who took him out the back told her he later died.
‘The ambulance told us to follow them to the hospital with the rest of the injured people,’ she said.
Padgett said of the other victims in her truck, one man had been shot in the chest and a girl was shot in the leg.
When they arrived to a hospital, she and Jay helped the victims inside.
They then left to check on her family members who were also at the concert, she said.
‘We were ready to go back and get more people, but my cousin called me because they were scared. My cousin was locked inside the MGM and they heard screaming, so we went there to get my cousin and my family,’ Padgett said.