Mass shooting in Las Vegas, 2/10/2017

[stickdog99]

http://people.com/crime/las-vegas-shoot ... decisions/

It was a relatively quiet night near the Vegas strip on Sunday night when the first call came in about the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival.

“We knew there had been a shooting, but we didn’t know that it was a mass casualty,” Dean, a 31-year-old paramedic, tells PEOPLE. “We headed over to help out.”

When they arrived near the Mandalay Bay Casino, Dean and his partner saw dozens of ambulances waiting. “That’s when we knew it was really serious,” he said. “The cops were telling me that we couldn’t go to the area yet, because it wasn’t secure. They wanted to make sure that we weren’t going to be targets. So we had to wait for an area to be cleared before we could go help.”

When paramedics and EMTs were finally able to get to an area where people lay injured, they were accompanied by police officers with their guns drawn. “There were cops all around the perimeter of the area to provide cover in case we needed it,” he says. “I had never been so scared in my life. I just kept thinking the shooting would start up again.”

The injured had been tagged with color-coded stickers on their bodies by a first responder team doing triage. Patients tagged in green had minor injuries. Those with yellow tags had non-life threatening injuries. A red tag meant that the patient had life-threatening injuries and needed to be transported immediately to a hospital. Those tagged in black were dying or expecting to die.

“We had to take the red-tagged patients first,” he says. “But it’s not always that easy. People were begging me to take them because they were in so much pain. One woman grabbed at my ankle and we locked eyes. All she could say was ‘please.’ She had tears all over her face. But she was tagged in yellow, and there were people in red. So I had to say, ‘I’m so sorry. Someone will be back for you soon.’

There was another man who was tagged green sitting next to a yellow,” he continues. “He said, ‘please help my girlfriend,’ but I couldn’t.”

The first patient they took was a woman with a gunshot wound to the chest. “She wasn’t able to breathe,” he says. “She was in really bad condition. We took her to the [ambulance] and to the hospital. Dispatch told us to go right back for more patients.”

“After that point, dispatch was out of the picture,” he says. “There were officers on the scene who were directing what to do. It was pretty clear that we had to take injured people to the hospital, in order of the severity of their injuries. So that’s what we did.”

On their second pickup, patients were getting more desperate. “They’d been waiting for maybe 20-30 minutes at that point, and they’re hurt and they’re bleeding,” he says. “So as you walked past them, they’d be like, ‘Help me, please. Help me.’ There was a man tagged yellow who said, ‘I have a new baby. Please save me.’

“You have to understand that yellow tags can become red really fast,” he says. “They’re all losing blood. They’re in pain and going into shock. So it’s not like he was being dramatic. I’m sure he thought he was going to die. And maybe there was. We had to make quick decisions.”

“There were officers helping us triage, but there was still some discretion. Do I pick up this red tag or that red tag? Which patient do we take? What if we choose the wrong one? It can be agonizing.”

As he took multiple trips, Weber says that there seemed to be an endless number of critical patients. “By now, some of the yellow tags were doing really bad. They had deteriorated. We were just trying to save as many lives as we could.”

“The night was endless,” he says. “This morning, we were still taking patients to hospitals, but they were mostly green — things like people who had been trampled and had broken arms or ribs. They had been waiting for hours, so they had all that time to sit on the ground, injured. The people they were with had been taken away, and they had no idea if their husbands or sisters were alive or dead. One woman just wailed the whole way to the hospital, not from pain, but from fear.”

Dean estimates that he took about 15 patients to the hospital from the scene. (PEOPLE spoke with two employees at the Southern Nevada Health District who could not verify Dean or this particular account, but said it seems consistent with the events of the evening.)

[stickdog99]

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation- ... 83481.html

Witnesses commented on how quickly first responders got to work trying to help, even before law enforcement had secured the scene.

“I saw hundreds of people standing up and running towards the danger,” Russell Bleck, who was at the concert, told Fox News.

[stickdog99]

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/loca ... 80453.html

A father and son were enjoying themselves during the weekend in Las Vegas when their vacation ended in tragedy Sunday night at an outdoor music festival.

After 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on a sea of concertgoers on Sunday, John and Travis Phippen scrambled to safety in effort to survive as bullets rained on them.

"All of a sudden, 'pop, pop, pop,'" Travis Phippen, a 24-year-old paramedic, said.

His father, 56-year-old John Phippen, died during the deadly attack that claimed 58 lives and injured more than 500 others. John Phippen, remembered for always lending a helping hand, died while trying to save others.

"He was covering this girl and he got shot," Travis Phippen said in between tears. "I got over there as fast as I could and put my arm around him and that's when I got shot."

An off-duty Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy and firefighter jumped in to help save John during the terrifying ordeal. The two found a wheelbarrow and guided him away from the flying bullets before finding a ride to a nearby hospital.

"He wanted me to tell everyone how much he loved them," Travis Phippen said. "That was the last thing he said to me."

[stickdog99]

http://insider.foxnews.com/2017/10/04/l ... ing-toward

As people fled the scene in Las Vegas where dozens were massacred by a gunman Sunday night, paramedic Brian Rogers ran into the danger.

Rogers got a call from his daughter, who was attending the concert, after he had gone to bed.

"Daddy, they're shooting at me, and there's people dead!" he heard as he picked up the phone.

Rogers, who operates the ambulances booked for the event, told her to get into the medical tent and told a member of his team to find her.

He immediately rushed to the scene of the concert, coordinating an emergency response by radio with his team the entire time, but did not let them drive too close until he knew it was safe.

When he arrived people were fleeing and some were "just lying around," Rogers recalled.

The paramedic pronounced dead dozens of the 59 people killed in the attack.

[stickdog99]

http://cnycentral.com/news/local/parame ... s-shooting

“As we turned our last corner in an attempt to approach our assigned location, dozens, if not hundreds, of individuals were running towards us. Some screaming. Some limping, some falling down in the mass panic,” said Paramedic Jay Dardano.

“Others were carrying individuals who had been shot over their shoulders and on "corral gates” that were being used as makeshift stretchers. Police officers flagging us down indicating where the injured had fallen. We were not in a staging area, we were within yards of ground zero.”

Dardano and his partner Casey Jones were four and a half hours into their Sunday night shift stationed at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. That put them a mile and a half from the final night of the Route 91 Harvest Festival concert when event staff put out a May Day call for help. They requested every ambulance from every Las Vegas agency be dispatched.

Dardano and Jones were the first to arrive just after 10:00 pm. The shooter was still firing from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

“With the volume of the screams and the chaos of the crowd it was difficult to hear. I remember hearing what sounded like fire crackers in the distance and given our close proximity and short response time, I have to believe that the noise I was hearing was gun fire,” described Dardano.

[stickdog99]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 728324001/

Dawn-Marie Gray and her husband, Kevin Gray, won tickets to the country music festival through a Portland radio station. They were enjoying the Jason Aldean concert Sunday night when bullets began to rain down.

The Grays took cover inside a VIP area. They stayed there until the gunfire stopped.

“When we came out it was horrific,” Dawn-Marie said. “A field of bodies.”

Having worked as a paramedic for almost seven years, Dawn-Marie knew the local paramedics could not move in until it was safe to do so. She and her husband turned their attention to the injured.

“Providing CPR, providing tourniquets, holding pressure,” she said.

The Grays were not alone. They were joined by other off-duty doctors and nurses who happened to be at the concert.

“You just saw bodies,” said Kevin Gray. “You’re checking pulses, breathing, people doing CPR.”

The Grays recall loading victims into waiting cars. Sometimes as many as six people went into one vehicle. Others were put into ambulances.

“That’s being a human being,” said Dawn-Marie. “That’s doing our job.”

[stickdog99]

http://www.krdo.com/news/national-inter ... /630321770

An off-duty nurse from Orange County, California, told KTNV that she ran back into the danger to help rescue those who had suffered gunshot wounds.

"We went back because I'm a nurse and I just felt that I had to," the woman, who identified herself only as Vanessa, told KTNV.

"I went to three different scenes. The first one was OK. The second one was worse. And by the time I got to the third one, there was just dead bodies.

"There was so many people, just normal citizens, doctors, cops, paramedics, nurses, just off-duty. Everyone was just communicating and working together.

"It was completely horrible, but it was absolutely amazing to see all of those people come together."

[Burnt Hill]

Sure this one instance doesn't mean much on its own, but are we starting to see a pattern of misanthropy with Paddock?

Interesting that you mention that BH. I've come across perfectly opposing reports in that regard. Most of the opinions quoted are that Paddock was surly, rude, and very unpleasant to be around. But a few others have said that he was warm and caring, with a delightful sense of humor. How about that?

The positive opinion I most can recall was that of a former employee who was incredulous that he would be capable of the carnage he's accused of. She said that for years after their working relationship ended he would check in with her to be sure she was okay. She was in tears as she spoke of what a kind person he had been to her.

I haven't passed judgment on Paddock yet and evidence of him being compassionate is nice.
There is also some evidence of some, I don't know... ...after the fact red flags behaviors?
Still processing it all.
But c'mon Paddock is a shady character, isn't he?

[stickdog99]

https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/sho ... -shooting/

On a normal call, DiGaetano acts as boss. High in authority, he only responds to mass casualty incidents and other large-scale incidents, and directs other responders from the time of his arrival until the minute he signs off.
Sunday wasn’t a normal call. Sunday’s call is one he’s never going to forget.

“In theory, if we have this kind of call, I’d be one of the guys in charge of it, running the EMS portion of how people get treated and triaged and transported to the hospital,” DiGaetano said. “Ultimately, that was done by civilians.”

DiGaetano began triage around 10:20 p.m. on the south end of the concert venue near Mandalay Bay. At about 11 p.m., he moved to the east side, where most concertgoers had fled the scene.
That night, he said, he didn’t skip a beat.

But he took one minute to peer into the concert venue. From the entrance, DiGaetano said he saw 30-some bodies with bullet holes in their heads and bloodstained extremities, lying still amid ringing phones and empty beer bottles.

The stage lights, he remembered, were bright, and for a moment, DiGaetano wondered if that aided the shooter’s aim.

It’s overwhelming, in a way,” DiGaetano said, “that you knew they were dead and you knew there was nothing you can do, but you still want to go in and try.”

[stickdog99]

Yet Another Emergency Worker in the Audience

[stickdog99]

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2017/oct/1 ... ame-medic/

In the days after the shootings at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, many stories emerged of bystander courage. Volunteers combed the grounds for survivors and carried out the injured. Strangers used belts as makeshift tourniquets to stanch bleeding, and then others sped the wounded to hospitals in the back seats of cars and the beds of pickup trucks.

These rescue efforts took place before the county’s emergency medical crews, waylaid by fleeing concertgoers, reached the grassy field, an estimated half-hour or more after the shooting began. When they did arrive, the local fire chief said in an interview, only the dead remained.

“Everybody was treating patients and trying to get there,” Chief Gregory Cassell of the Clark County Fire Department, said of his personnel. “They just couldn’t.”

...

What the Las Vegas shooting showed, trauma experts said, is that nascent efforts to teach and encourage the public to help the wounded in mass casualty emergencies should be expanded.

“Time is the most critical factor,” said Dr. Eric Goralnick, medical director of emergency preparedness at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, one of several trauma centers that were much closer to the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013 than the closest hospitals happened to be in Las Vegas. “People would talk about the golden hour. Really, what we’re talking about is the golden minutes.”


About half the 58 victims killed in the Las Vegas mass shooting died before reaching a hospital, based on mortality counts released by local medical centers. In the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, there were also many pre-hospital fatalities. “It’s convenient to put many of these deaths in the damn-shame category — ‘Well, we couldn’t have done anything anyway,'” Rasmussen said. While that reaction is understandable, he said, it was important to study what really caused the deaths, and whether any of the injuries might have been survivable.

...

The impression in Las Vegas is that they did just that. “Some of our patients were saved by bystanders,” said Dr. Deborah A. Kuhls, a professor of surgery at the UNLV School of Medicine and the medical director of the trauma intensive care unit at University Medical Center. “One had put a belt on his thigh, and it probably saved his life. There was a lot of bleeding on the scene.”

In Las Vegas, several factors impeded the arrival of emergency medical workers at the scene of the shooting itself.

Confusion abounded. One fire crew that happened to be passing by during the first few minutes saw people running from the festival and heard what sounded like gunfire. “You got reports of anything?” a member of the fire crew, Capt. Ken O’Shaughnessy of Engine 11, asked a dispatcher over the radio. “That’s a negative, sir,” he was told. Three minutes later, the dispatcher confirmed that there was an active call.

Members of that crew remained nearby, and later assisted injured concertgoers.

“From what it sounds like talking to them, they didn’t identify the hot zone because they didn’t know where it was,” said Cassell, the fire chief. “They just knew they had dozens and dozens of critical patients.”

More than 10 minutes after the shooting began, a battalion chief advised firefighters to “stage at a distance” and put on protective vests and helmets as he tried to understand the situation and make contact with a police lieutenant on the scene. The battalion chief radioed in seven minutes later that there were reports of gunfire at both the concert grounds and the Mandalay Bay across the street. “We can’t approach it yet,” he said.

The injured already were fleeing and being carried out in several directions. “Those crews making their way to the concert venue were met at every turn by patients in the streets,” Cassell said. The Fire Department helped establish several assembly points, and ultimately, about 160 firefighters and emergency medical workers from departments in the region went to the scene.

...

Over time, calls to 911 from other hotels where the injured had fled and taken shelter created the impression that shootings might be occurring in multiple locations. That “took away additional resources that were coming in,” Cassell said. Ultimately, he said, there were 60 reports from hotels that had to be checked.

...

By the time fire crews made it inside the concert grounds, they found only bodies. “Everybody that was alive or salvageable was dragged outside the venue by bystanders, all the great Samaritans,” Cassell said.

Those aiding the injured included off-duty firefighters, military medics and nurses who happened to be attending the concert. Also assisting was Community Ambulance, a private company hired for the event whose 16 emergency medical technicians and paramedics had expected to treat concertgoers for sun exposure and intoxication.

Ultimately, Fire Department and private ambulances transported 200 patients to hospitals, according to estimates by fire officials. That means that the majority of the injured reached hospitals in private cars, pickup trucks and taxicabs, including patients who were put in those vehicles by firefighters, Cassell said. Representatives of 11 area hospitals said in interviews that they treated 595 patients, although some may have been counted twice if they were transferred between hospitals.

Even when emergency medical workers were on the scene, civilians continued to assist. “We had people who were shot holding pressure on other people’s wounds,” said Amber Ratto, a paramedic with American Medical Response and MedicWest, which sent about 120 vehicles and 250 staff members in response to the shooting.

[stickdog99]

Those are all the accounts of emergency workers I can find.

So did all of the hero EMTs who just happened to be at the concert spring into action to help victims with bullets still flying? If so, where are they in this picture?



Given all the reports of Good Samaritans springing into action that I just linked. when exactly could the above picture have been taken?

[stickdog99]

No I agree this pic was taken after the shooting had stopped.

It looks like the first pic taken at the scene, when the cameraman felt safe enough to stick his neck out.

I would imagine this is about the same time First responders were cleared to assist

I would like to see the same scene 3, 5, 10 minutes later.

I am/we are making a lot of assumptions based on a still picture.

After reading all the accounts I posted, when do you think this picture was taken? If it was just a few minutes after the shooting stopped, aren't we missing at least several dozen casualties?

[MacCruiskeen]

Well of course. That's elementary logic because no person in the history of flight ever had a reason other than misanthropy to avoid controlled areas.

Sure this one instance doesn't mean much on its own, but are we starting to see a pattern of misanthropy with Paddock?

No. You just devoutly wish that we were.

[0_0]

Remember he also had a preference for asian women.