At around 3 P.M. last Sunday, Kinya Claiborne was standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows in her thirty-sixth-floor suite at the Elara hotel on the Las Vegas Strip. She and two of her friends were on their way to the Route 91 Harvest festival, the three-day, open-air country-music festival that’s been held in Las Vegas for the past four years. In the near distance, she could see the Luxor hotel’s pyramid, the sprawling fifteen-acre concrete lot where the concert would take place, and, beyond it, the airport. “I’m surprised, with all this terrorism happening, that nothing has ever happened in this small, captive area,” Claiborne recalls saying to her friends.
In the time that I’ve lived in Las Vegas, I’ve had the same thought about the vulnerability of the Strip, with its high-rises and casinos teeming with gamblers, all those inebriated people piled up in one windowless place. The airport is only ten minutes away; sometimes you look up and planes seem to be veering uncomfortably close. Las Vegas looms large in our country’s psyche: it is, in many ways, built on the illusion that tourists who visit are free to roam around like giant drunk children and gamble away their money, and that it will all end up fine. Many people turn their noses up at the Strip for its vulgarity and bad taste, but its licensed debauchery, its judgment-free atmosphere, has a national significance. The puncturing of the illusion of safety, too, is a reason for mourning. On Monday night, the lights on the Strip were dimmed to mourn the victims of the shooting that killed fifty-eight people and left at least four hundred and eighty-nine wounded. The darkness was unsettling, as though the sun had been momentarily blotted out.
Claiborne, who is the editor of the life-style Web site Style & Society and an Instagram influencer, was attending the festival to celebrate her thirty-seventh birthday. On Friday, she’d landed at home, in Los Angeles, after a press trip to Armenia for a brandy company called Ararat, then flew to Vegas a few hours later. The singer Jason Aldean, who was performing when the shooting began, was “the catalyst who got me into loving country music,” she told me recently, and she wasn’t about to miss him.
She and her friends watched all the headline performances on Saturday near the very front of the stage, where the bullets would later rain down most heavily. But on Sunday, when Aldean began to play, Claiborne started to feel claustrophobic, so she and her friends watched the show from a section sponsored by Malibu Rum, which was up a short flight of stairs to the far left of the stage. About halfway through Aldean’s set, Claiborne and her friends heard a series of bangs. “My first instinct was that we were right by a helicopter, like a chopper, but when we looked up in the sky we didn’t see anything,” she said. Her next thought was that maybe someone had illegal firecrackers. (All of the survivors whom I spoke to told me that when they heard the loud popping noises, they looked around for fireworks.) The first round of shots went off, and no one reacted. Aldean stopped playing and left the stage after the second round. Then the lights went out. “When the music stopped, that’s when everyone realized it was gunshots. It was a machine gun—that’s what we were hearing.”
A male voice said, “Everyone, drop!” Claiborne dropped to her stomach. The gunshots continued, then paused. “He was like, ‘O.K., Everyone, get up! Everyone, run! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!’ So, on command, we just followed,” she told me. Claiborne and one of her two friends ran down the stairs, while the other jumped off the back of the platform. It was dark, so they couldn’t see where the shooter was or where the bullets were coming from, but Claiborne thought it sounded like it was inside the concert venue. “There would be a pause, and then it would continue again,” she said.
As she was coming down the platform, Claiborne had a bird’s-eye view of the people on the ground below. When the gunfire paused, some of them got up and started running and screaming. “It was just pure fear,” she said. “Pure fear.” In the chaos, Claiborne and her friends were separated. There was a small gate behind the Malibu Rum platform that someone had knocked down. Claiborne ran through the opening and found herself in a parking lot. “As I’m running, the shots seem like they’re getting closer and louder—it sounded like someone was following, hunting us—and no matter how far we ran, it sounded like they were louder and closer,” she said. “There would be a short pause between each round, so just when you think it’s over, just when you stop running and start to catch your breath, it starts up again.”
Claiborne kept moving, ducking beneath vans and hiding behind cars, before spotting a woman driving slowly through the parking lot. She opened up the back door and jumped in. Several people piled into the car after her. “So, she’s driving through the parking lot, right? While the gunshots are still going—they’re coming from behind us. We’re driving in the opposite direction of them.” Suddenly, the car reached a dead end. There was a barbed-wire fence and, on the other side, an airport runway. Several other cars reached the same barrier. “The gunshots were still going on, closer and closer, and everyone is crying, freaking out,” Claiborne said. “What do we do? You know, we’re trapped now.”
Claiborne got out of the car, scrambled over a wall that was about six feet high, and climbed into a dumpster, where she found a couple of other people who were already hiding. It was full of garbage, and it smelled awful—a fear of rats crossed her mind, but only briefly. “So, I’m in there, and I’m terrified, and people are trying to figure out what to do at this point because they can’t turn back around and drive toward the gunshots.”
A pickup truck was stuck alongside them. People began yelling at the driver, “Drive through the fence! Drive through the fence!” He was apprehensive, but after a couple of minutes, he drove his truck in reverse into the fence, creating a small opening. Twenty-five people or so, as Claiborne recalls, squeezed through onto what appeared to be an active airport runway. “So now, I’m thinking to myself, I’m either going to get run over by a plane, or the gunman is going to come through this opening and come after us—and now the airport’s exposed, too.” Earlier that day, when she’d looked toward the airport from her hotel window, she never imagined that she’d find herself there that evening, running for her life in the dark.
Meanwhile, at the Route 91 festival, Tas Upright, a yoga teacher who bartends at events on the side, hid behind some beer carts covered by a tarp. She’d been standing at a long bar, serving drinks with about twenty-four other bartenders, when she first heard the gunfire. She, too, thought it was fireworks before she took cover with a few of her co-workers. Upright, who is thirty-two and has lived in Las Vegas since 1995, was one of the roughly three hundred bartenders and bar backs working the festival that night. She had picked up the gig the previous afternoon. “I was hired at 4 P.M., two hours before the last orientation session,” she said.
At first, there were only four people, all fellow-workers, hiding behind the beer carts and under the tarp with her. Then some concertgoers came and hid with them. “There was not enough space back there, but people were trying to make room for each other,” she said. She remained calm, holding the hand of a co-worker, who was crying. “I’m still calm,” she told me. “I don’t know why.”
A young woman who said she was ex-military told the people hiding under the tarp that she was going to barricade them in the space using beer carts and tables. “I need you guys to stay down here and stay low,” she instructed. While the shots continued around her, Upright got out her phone. Friends who knew she was working at the festival were texting her. She got on Facebook, then typed “Shooting Strip” into Google. She checked the police scanner, then Facebook again. “A lot of people were actually pretty on it,” she told me, referring to how quickly the news had spread among her friends. “They knew what was going on.”
Lying there, listening to the shots, which sounded as if they were getting closer, Upright felt an eerie sense of clarity. “That’s when I realized this was really happening,” she said. “That’s when I realized I was probably going to die there.” Upright contacted her eleven-year-old daughter via text. “I just wanted her to know that I loved her.” Mom, her daughter responded, Why are you telling me this? Upright texted back, “I’m working at a festival and there’s a shooting going on.”
Kara Nichols, a forty-nine-year-old payroll and human-resources manager at the Las Vegas-based Wendoh Media, experienced a similar moment of clarity as she ran for cover with her friends. “I thought, This is it. I’m going to get shot in my back, and my friends are going to get shot next to me,” she said. She and a female friend, also named Kara, had been seated up front when they decided, soon after Jake Owen played and before Aldean took the stage, to go to the bathroom and buy a pretzel and beers. They were slowly making their back to the front when they stopped to talk to two guys, fellow-locals, whom they knew.
“There were two of us, and two of them, and they were military,” Nichols recalled. (At one point, she told me that one of the bands who had been playing at the festival, Big and Rich, a “fun pro-military band,” had asked members of the crowd to raise their hands if they were in the military; by her estimate, more than half of those in the audience raised their hands.) “We were just chatting, and that popping sound—I’ll never forget that popping sound—started going off,” she said. “It sounded like fireworks. And you just have this heightened sense that something’s amiss. Then people started freaking out. People were cowering. Jason Aldean stops and runs off the stage. Those guys, they grabbed us, and we all went down.”
During a slight lull in the gunfire, the guys hollered, “Run!” “The lull was nothing, but literally slightest second you think you have, just go for it,” she said. Her friend, who was wearing jeans and moccasins, “bolted so quickly,” whereas Nichols was wearing a dress, high-heeled boots, and an uncomfortable thong that she had to keep yanking back into place, all of which hampered her movements. She held a cup of Jack Daniel’s. She remembers looking down and thinking, Why am I still holding this fucking drink?
The group ran behind a set of high-rise bleachers on the right side of the stage. Nichols’s friend started to crawl under the bleachers. “Get out from under there!” Nichols told her; she could hear the bullets ricocheting off of the metal and she didn’t want her friend to get trapped. Stuck between the bleachers and a chain-link fence that was behind her, Nichols had nowhere to go. Her ex-husband was at the concert with some of their mutual friends and, she knew, in a completely open area, on the tall left side of the stage, where Kinya Claiborne had been with her two friends. She texted him; he didn’t text back. (He and his group were all fine.) Later, she couldn’t believe that she’d texted her ex-husband. “But you share lives with people, and no matter if they’re good people or bad you still want them to be O.K.,” she said.
From where she was crouching, Nichols saw a police officer setting up a gun. “It was pointing up at Mandalay Bay, and I saw, like, this green flash, and I was like, What’s that?” Nichols had her phone in her hand, so she started filming a video. (In it, as the cop aims his rifle in front of a lit-up booth selling chicken strips, you can hear a woman weeping and hyperventilating, while a male voice tells people to stay down.) “I turned to the people next to me, and I go, ‘Did you guys see that light? Is that where the shooter is?’ I know nothing about guns. They go, ‘Absolutely. That’s the shooter.’ And they shove me back down.”
On the runway at the airport, where Claiborne was trying to find cover, she noticed that people were hiding in the engines of private jets. “Multiple people are in there, covered up hiding in there—I mean, people were hiding anywhere they could,” she said. Increasingly desperate, she found a little storage room, full of water and supplies for the private planes, where about twenty-five other people were hiding. A couple of people were on the ground trying to help resuscitate and stop the bleeding of a girl who had been shot twice. “They kept saying, ‘Don’t look, don’t look,’ and I glanced at her, and her skin was purple,” Claiborne said. She wasn’t making any noise.
Claiborne received a message from a friend, a news reporter in Los Angeles. She’d heard about the shooting. Was Claiborne O.K.? “ ‘I don’t know,’ I told her. I didn’t know if I was going to make it.” Claiborne posted a Facebook message to let people know what was going on: “I’m at Route 91 harvest festival in Las Vegas. shooters with machine guns started shooting in crowd. Multiple gunshot victims . . .” She thought to herself, We can’t stay here. We’ve created this opening in the fence. Now we’re all hostages if he comes through.
Upright, the yoga teacher who had texted her daughter, was still behind the beer carts when she noticed a lull in the gunshots. She wasn’t sure if the attacker was reloading or if it was over. She didn’t care. She crawled out, but hadn’t gotten far when she realized she’d forgotten her purse. “My thought was, I need my purse in case I don’t make it so they can identify my body. I made peace with the fact that I was going to die.” She went back to retrieve her purse, grabbed it, and then ran.
By that point, victims were being wheeled out already, helped by first responders and fellow-attendees like Mario Montemayer, a twenty-year-old criminal-justice major at the University of Nevada, who stayed until the last person was brought out. (When I asked him if he had considered running, he shook his head politely: “No ma’am.”) On her way out, Upright saw a man who had been shot in the hip wearing only his boots—the people helping him had taken off all his clothes and used them as a tourniquet to stanch the blood. Upright ran east, toward the Tropicana, Hooters, and M-G-M hotels. She ended up in Topgolf, a high-tech driving range. But it was all glass windows, and she didn’t feel safe: “I seriously thought the shooter was going to come around the corner.”
Nichols, too, had escaped—a group of guys had torn down the chain-link fence behind her—and was making her way east down Reno Boulevard. She could still hear gunfire. She saw four people trying to resuscitate a man lying on the ground. “Nothing was happening, and they’re screaming and crying. It was horrific,” she said. A girl next to her on the road told her she’d been shot in her head. It had just skinned her, but she was bleeding a lot. “My girlfriend Kara goes, ‘What can we do?’ ” Nichols said. “You’re standing there, and you feel so helpless, and you want to help people.”
One of her friends who was not at the festival called her with updates. “There was so much, so much misinformation at first—Oh, there’s a shooter at New York-New York; there’s a shooter at Tropicana.” Screw this, she thought: screw the Strip. The two women headed down Tropicana Boulevard until they reached a restaurant called Coco’s Bakery. They could see people inside, and started banging on the door. An off-duty cop herded them in and barricaded the door. For the next few hours, they stayed there on lockdown and watched the news.
Around 11:30 P.M., at the airport, Claiborne and a few others in the storage unit ran to another building, which turned out to belong to a private-jet company. A group of staff members were sitting inside watching the news. At that time, only two deaths and twelve injuries had been reported. From the text and Facebook messages she was receiving, Claiborne could tell that the public didn’t understand the extent of the horror. No one who had fled could believe that only one gunman had been responsible for all those bullets, all that carnage.
She was still afraid to leave, and stayed for another hour and a half. Around 1 A.M., she decided to head back to the Strip, to get ready to catch a 7:30 A.M. flight home to Los Angeles. Walking alone in the dark, she flagged down an empty bus. The south end of the Strip was still blocked off, so the bus driver drove her part of the way, to the Town Square Mall. She sat on the patio of the closed Lazy Dog restaurant with a group of women and children who could not get back to their hotel. Eventually, she reached her brother, who lives in Las Vegas; he came to take her back to the Elara. It was 4:30 A.M. The friends she’d been separated from were both there, sitting on the couch, and immediately rose to hug her. After a few minutes, they turned on the television. Clark County Sherriff Joseph Lombardo was holding a press conference. The death toll was now at fifty.