Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Come on a ride along with a Veteran Homicide Detective as the twists and turns of the job suddenly end his career and nearly his life; discover how something wonderful is born out of the Darkness. Embark on the journey from helping people on their worst days, to bringing life, excitement and smiles on their best days.
Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Jason and Tina: Surviving the Las Vegas Jason Aldean Mass Shooting...11 Minutes in Hell
In an eye-opening episode, we delve into the harrowing tale of Jason, who experienced the tragic mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas. What should have been a night filled with music and joy turned into chaos as gunfire erupted, fundamentally altering the course of his life. Through Jason's eyes, we witness the immediate panic, the act of survival, and the journey toward healing that followed that night.
Jason shares his path from that fateful October night and the days that followed, highlighting how trauma manifests differently in individuals and the importance of support systems. Conversations about preparedness and resilience emerge as crucial themes, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own lives and be ready for life’s unpredictability. This episode is not just a recollection of past events; it's a call to action for empathy, mental health awareness, and the power of community. Join us as Jason inspires us all toward a more profound understanding of survival and the ongoing quest for well-being in the aftermath of tragedy.
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Murders to Music podcast. My name is Aaron, I'm your host and you guys are in for another awesome show. You know I think we can all remember back at least the headlines October 1st 2017, there was a mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Remember that's when Jason Aldean was performing and Steven Paddock, a 64-year-old guy, took aim from a Mandalay Bay suite and shot over 1,000 rounds into the crowd, killing 60 people and wounding and injuring 413 others. The ensuing panic that occurred after that, and that aftermath of people just trying to escape, not knowing where the gunfire I mean.
Speaker 1:Picture this guys and girls and ladies and boys and gentlemen everybody else listening You're out at a great fun event and, all of a sudden, gunshots start ringing out. They're echoing up and down the streets. You don't know where they're coming from, but people all around you are dropping dead. What do you do? Where do you run? What direction do you go to? Well, today, on today's show, I've got Jason. Jason was at the Harvest 91 festival. He and his wife, tina, survived the mass shooting and he's going to tell us all about it. But we're not going to start at the mass shooting. Let's talk about how they even got there in the first place, and then what is he doing in the aftermath that is going to help other people in their current situation. So, jason, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1:Awesome man. Well, hey, you heard the intro a little bit. Um, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day one to support the murders to music podcast we're going to talk about your podcast in a second, um, but also just to tell us the story. You know, sometimes, myself included we get involved in these traumatic situations and we are so reluctant to talk about it uh, bring up triggers, that type of stuff. So I really appreciate just your openness, your honesty and your candor and being willing to talk about this and share your experience openness, your honesty and your candor and being willing to talk about this and share your experience. So tell me a little bit about this trip to Vegas. Do you guys live in Vegas? Were you visiting? Where do you guys live? Tell me about you, your wife or you got kids. Go there with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, we live in Canada. We're in Alberta, Canada, and obviously, big music fans, big country music fans. I have a wife, as you mentioned, three kids who are in their 20s now who have started getting into country music and concerts as well. But you know, back in 2017, we hung out with a crowd that obviously loved country music and we had made plans with a couple of the friends from that crowd to go to this concert in Las Vegas.
Speaker 2:I can't even think, you know, looking back, where we actually heard about it or came up with the idea, but we decided we wanted to go to this concert and one night, hanging out, we bought tickets and this was well in advance, of course. So, leading up to the concert, you know, we obviously heard of Jason Aldean and some of the other bigger names that were there, but didn't know a lot of the smaller names, so we listened to some of their music online. Uh, get you know, get familiar with them and, yeah, just looked forward to this big concert and not only that a trip to Vegas. Right, who doesn't love a trip to Vegas?
Speaker 1:Seriously so for those listeners who you know we've got listeners all around the world like where's Alberta, canada, in relationship to the US? And then where is that in relationship to Vegas? What kind of travel, what kind of plans do you guys have to put in place? Do you need passports? Tell me a little bit about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, alberta is pretty much directly above Nevada, where Las Vegas is. The only province to the west of us is British Columbia, and then you have the Pacific Ocean, which is directly above California. So it's quite a trip. By car it would be 24-hour drive, but obviously that's crazy and people that do that are very special people that can handle that kind of trip. But we booked flights. I think that trip we actually booked the flights separately from our hotels because it ended up being cheaper for some reason, but so it's about a two and a half hour flight from here and, yeah, it's somewhere that we've actually been back to several times since then as well. This has been our second trip to Las Vegas.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I'm actually going there next week, Um, so you guys, how many people in your group are going? What? What kind of party do you guys have?
Speaker 2:There's only four of us. There's myself, my wife Tina, and two of our friends who were also uh together at the time.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So yeah, keep going, tell me your story, what happened next?
Speaker 2:So obviously it comes time to take the trip. Um, we fly to Vegas, we arrive in Vegas. This is only our second time in Vegas, so you know we've been there before. We kind of know what to do, but kind of don't know what to do. So first thing we do, of course, is catch an Uber to our hotel so we can drop off all our bags and stuff, and then, immediately after that, we head to the Luxor, which is where we had to pick up our concert passes. So we go to the Luxor, we pick up our concert passes and bracelets and all that kind of fun stuff and we're set for the show. I believe that was the day before the festival started.
Speaker 1:Okay, then what?
Speaker 2:So then next, you know we go and we do a little bit of walking around on the strip. We went to Margaritaville at the time it was still open had a giant heap of nachos they had the best nachos in the world, but now they're not there anymore, so that's another story. Uh, we uh do a little walk around on the strip and then head back so we can get up early, uh, head down to the venue early in the morning, which would be the first day of the show, of the of the festival. So the first day we get there and uh, so let me lay out the the festival grounds a little bit for you. So the main stage is at the very South end of the site and the main entrance where we go in is the very far North end.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So we so we walk there and get in the North end, and the North end there's also a a, b stage, if you will, for all the supporting artists, if you will, and that'll come into play later on the story. So what we do is we head in, we grab some drinks, we go to the B stage to watch some of the supporting artists, because they play mostly during the day and all the headliners kind of play at night. They kind of intermix them a little bit. But we watched Ashley McBride who of course is big now. At the time she wasn't On. On day number two we saw Morgan Wallen on this B stage.
Speaker 1:of course he's a huge star now yeah, my daughter would be so jealous if she knew you were watching Morgan Wallen we were front row watching Morgan Wallen before anyone even knew him. I think she's gonna be jealous.
Speaker 2:She wants to marry him anyway, so keep going yeah, so I mean, throughout the first two days we kind of, uh, go back and forth between stages depending on what artists we want to see. The first night the headliner was eric church, uh, the second night was sam hunt. And every time we go there we kind of follow a specific system. Um, we go in, we grab drinks, we go between the two stages, but when we go between the two stages we're always sticking to the same area for some reason. I don't know why we did that. We just go back to the same area we were in before, which is kind of close to the front of the stage, on the left left side. I guess it would be stage right, but it's on our left side and, um, and that's the main that's the, that's the main stage that's the main stage, yeah all right and real quick.
Speaker 1:You said something I didn't understand. Sorry to interrupt. This is a multiple day event it's a multi-day event. Yeah, it was three days and the shooting was on the third day or second it was on the third day or second day.
Speaker 2:It was on the third day I had no idea.
Speaker 1:I thought this was a one one and done one day and done all right. So sorry, keep going um, what happens next man?
Speaker 2:yeah, no worries. So, like I said, we kind of stick to the same routine every day. Um the third day we come into the event. We kind of do the same thing. We go back and forth between the two stages depending who we want to see, who we don't want to see. About an hour before Jason Aldean takes the stage, luke Combs is playing on the smaller stage so we decide that we're going to leave. Big and Rich, I think, was playing at the time. So we decide we want to leave to go see Luke Combs instead. So we left our area, went to the smaller stage. When we got to the smaller stage area it was jam-packed because Luke Combs he wasn't huge yet but he was well-known, so there was a few people there. We couldn't really get close enough to see the concert, so we decided to head back towards the main stage. So we're walking back towards the main stage and we decide to stop and grab some food, because the walk between the, the b stage and the main stage has all your food and drink vendors.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So on our walk back we grab some food and we kind of just sit there and eat it, and Jason Aldean is about to be the next act. So we head back towards the main stage. We decided that we had to go to the bathroom first because we didn't want to leave the main stage area to go to the bathroom later. So we head to the bathrooms now. Like I said, we were the whole weekend we were sticking to our left side. Weekend we were sticking to our left side, which would be stage right bathrooms. We went there, drinks. We kept getting on the left side.
Speaker 2:This time we decide the bathrooms. The lineup is huge, so we go, try the right side. So we were the right side bathrooms and they're almost just as packed. But we wait anyways and do our thing. We go to the bathroom, grab some drinks while we're over there. At that time we asked ourselves you know, do we do we want to just stay on this side or do we want to head back to where we usually are, which would be a key decision that night?
Speaker 2:um, because the the side that we went to the bathrooms on, that we questioned staying on, would be the side closest to the mandalay bay okay so we decided to go back to our regular side and, uh, I asked my wife, if you know, she wanted to get closer because at that time it wasn't really packed yet because the concert that Jason Aldean hadn't started yet. So I asked my wife if she wanted to get any closer, and she's not a huge Jason Aldean fan. So we decide that we're just going to kind of stick back and not go closer to the stage like we had been doing all weekend, not go closer to the stage like we had been doing all weekend. So we're sitting there waiting and the concert finally gets underway, probably about 9.30, 9.40 maybe. Jason Aldean takes the stage and we at that time we push a little bit closer. So I don't remember exactly where we were standing, but I know we were.
Speaker 2:The sound crew was somewhere just off to our right and maybe a little bit ahead of us, so we were kind of just to the left and back from the sound crew. There's also two towers of speakers that were. They were either behind us or directly beside us. I couldn't remember exactly. That'll come into play later in the story as well. So Jason Aldean gets underway about 9.40, I think, gets through. I think he gets through six or seven songs and then he gets into a song Any Old Barstool which is a slower song, and I vividly remember people in front of us, you know, kind of holding each other and kind of slow dancing, rocking back and forth, cause it's a slower song. Near the end of the song we hear some loud cracks. Now I originally thought that it was, uh, you're a sound guy, so you've heard when there's uh feedback on speakers and it makes a crackle sound, kind of yeah, totally that's what I thought it was.
Speaker 2:I thought it was the speakers on the tower that were directly beside us crackling. Other people, of course, have have said that it was fireworks or that they thought it was fireworks.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So we hear these few crackles and, and you know everyone's kind of oh, what was that? And uh, you know I'm thinking it's the, the speaker's crackling or some something like that. Jason Aldean actually also said that he thought it was some kind of feedback as well. Now, of course he can't hear it as well, cause he's got his monitors in. But, um, then, as soon as that song is over, he starts into the song when she says baby, and at about five or six seconds into the song it's full onon, automatic gunfire. Nobody knows where it's coming from. Nobody knows uh, you know what's happening, whether there's somebody on the grounds, whether you know, nobody has any idea. Some people actually didn't have a clue that it was gunfire. We didn't either at very first. So this starts we kind of see some people hitting the deck and ducking down. So we do the same. We hit the deck, lay on the ground, which in hindsight, not the smartest, but you know, we don't know that. The guy's up in the 32nd floor, right floor, right, so, and anyone that knows the story knows that he was shooting in volleys. So there's probably about, probably about 70 or 80 rapid fire shots and then it stops. At that point a lot of people are getting up and running and we make the quick decision to get up and run, so we get up.
Speaker 2:Now the concert venue has kind of three main entrances on each side and we happen to be almost directly beside one. So we get up, we make a beeline directly for that exit and after that another volley starts. So we get outside the venue and we can literally hear gunshots hitting fences, hitting the concrete, hitting the concrete. We can hear screaming, we hear sirens, because apparently after the first calls there were some reports made, so there was already sirens. I remember as we were exiting Now the concert being almost over, there was also a police presence outside already because the concert was going to be over soon and they would need to direct traffic and do stuff like that.
Speaker 2:So there was already cops on scene. So as we come directly out of the venue, directly in front of us is a giant parking lot and it's a giant parking lot, gravel parking lot. And I always joke about this because if you've ever watched the movie the hangover, when, uh, chow, when they discover chow is in the trunk and he let him out of the trunk and he beats them and he takes off running. He runs across that same parking lot oh, wow so my wife and I always make reference to
Speaker 2:that. So there's a big, huge parking lot across the street from the venue. There's about an eight-foot chain link fence. Our friends all go over, my wife goes over, lots of people are going over. I'm wearing some pretty bad shoes so I can't even get my feet in the in the links to climb this fence. So I immediately am in a panic. I'm in a panic, there's shots being fired and I can't get over this fence. So our friends and my wife actually lift up the fence, the bottom of it, and I slide under the fence.
Speaker 2:After that we beeline across this parking lot and it's kind of a commercial area around there, so a lot of offices and industrial type buildings over there. So once we're across the parking lot, we're looking for trying to get inside these buildings or any of these doors open. None of the doors are open. We're checking every door as we go. We're kind of hiding behind cars every time we hear a volley of shots. I believe there was 11 different volleys of shots, like you said, over a thousand rounds fired. Wow, the whole time we're running, you know, we're hearing bullets hitting everything. At least it sounds like that. Part of that could be the echo, maybe, but it sounded like there was literally bullets everywhere and we still don't know where this is coming from. Nobody has any idea where this is coming from.
Speaker 2:So we're running through this kind of industrial park checking buildings. None of them are open. We come to a street where there's a heavy police presence now, like there's cops everywhere, and we come to this street and this intersection I don't recall the street names, but there there's I distinctly remember two cop cars, I think, in this intersection and I can see them as we're going by putting on full armor, getting their weapons like they're getting big guns out. And they got some full armor on and, uh, at that moment I was like holy shit.
Speaker 2:I mean this is this is for real, this is real this is getting real, um, and again we still have no idea where anything's coming from. So at that intersection there's the desert rose, um, which is kind of a little complex, of little I wouldn't say hotels, but maybe motel type things. It's kind of it's sweet. We decide we're going to go in there. It's a hotel, it's got to be open. As we're getting to the doors there's other people running with us and I noticed they're going in front of me. She's been shot in her shoulder and I said to her I said it looks like you've been shot. Now she I don't know if she didn't know at the time because she didn't appear to know, but once I said that it kind of came to everyone's attention and she had stopped and, uh, we got her some medical attention. But we all go inside the desert rose in or desert rose I can't remember exactly what's that desert rose sweets or something like that. Um, so we go inside and again we have no idea where this guy is that's shooting. We don't know how many are shooting. Takes us about 11 minutes to get there and I actually wrote a little thing called 11 Minutes that I'm going to put up on my podcast. I'm doing a special Vegas episode coming up here Nice.
Speaker 2:So we're inside. We have no idea what's going on, where the shooting is coming from, who it is. We do the best we can to get everyone inside and at first we thought about barricading the doors with the furniture from the lobby. But then we thought, you know, that might stop other people from coming in as well, that might need shelter. So maybe not a good idea, but at the same time, you know, might also keep out the guy with the gun. So we're kind of torn. So we decide that we're not going to bar the doors. We decide maybe we need to grab some weapons or be prepared in case we have to face a gunman. So there's a couple of guys, I believe I think it was two guys. They grabbed these big lamps that are in the in the lobby and they're just standing there holding lamps. I'm not sure what they're going to do with lamps, but Improvised weapon to smack somebody with them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they're kind of guarding stand and watch. Meanwhile there's a little store in the lobby. We decide maybe a good idea, grab some water for people, anything else they might need. Everybody's making phone calls to family, they know. So at that point I figure it's maybe a good idea to call my family, just in case you never know. So I make a phone call to my parents probably one of the worst phone calls ever, parents, probably one of the worst phone calls ever to tell them that we're being shot at and we don't know what's going on. But they were okay, sorry.
Speaker 1:Don't be sorry, this is, this is all part of it man.
Speaker 2:That was probably the worst moment of my life.
Speaker 1:Could only imagine.
Speaker 2:So I continue on the phone telling them that we're okay for the moment. We don't know what's going on or what's going to happen, but that if everything's all right we'll get back to them later. So my wife and our other two friends took shelter behind the front desk along with some other people. Behind the front desk, along with some other people, and I was walking around just kind of seeing if people are okay and if they need anything.
Speaker 1:Is there still gunshots at this time?
Speaker 2:I think, no, no, I believe the. I believe when we got to the desert rose, it was about 11 minutes to get there and, according to reports, around 11 minutes is where the gunfire stopped. So I believe the gunfire stopped right around the time we arrived there. We didn't know that, of course.
Speaker 1:Yeah totally yeah, totally Okay, go ahead. Sorry Because we're inside.
Speaker 2:But I noticed some people near the back of a lobby watching a TV and it's on the news. Of course, we still don't really know any details. All we know is there's shooting on the Las Vegas Strip. There's reports of shooting in other hotels. If anybody knows the story, they know that there's a lot of reports of shootings at other hotels at that time, which may have been from the chaos of people running around. And, of course, it's America where everybody's got guns, so people may be running around with their own guns and nobody knows what's going on right.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:So after a little while there I don't remember exactly how long, it's probably about half an hour or so Somebody from the hotel arrives. The actual staff from the hotel have locked themselves in the back room. So somebody from the hotel arrives and tells us that you know they're going to move us into some of the rooms because there's so many people in the lobby. Number one, it could potentially be a dangerous area. Still. Number two, who knows how long we're going to be there? So maybe they want to make us a little more comfortable, move us kind of into separate rooms. So we get moved into a room and probably with about there had to be about 10 of us in there, 10 people, maybe 15 in this room. So the four of us go and plant ourselves in one of the bedrooms and turn on the TV to see what we can find out.
Speaker 2:And at that time, at that time we still didn't really know anything. Again, it was just shooting on the strip. So we kind of just sit and talk and you know we're in shock. Obviously. Um, we, uh, we all just uh laid on the bed it was a king size bed and there's four of us on there and uh tried to go to sleep. Eventually, I guess we all fall asleep and when we wake up in the morning we see the news. We see I don't know if they knew exactly how many people had been killed yet I don't recall what the reports were on the news in the morning. At that time they had found out who the shooter was, I believe, and his girlfriend, and the investigation was kind of underway.
Speaker 2:Then we called Ubers to try and go back to our condo and I remember walking outside to wait for the Uber and if you've ever been to Las Vegas, you know Las Vegas is never quiet and when we walked outside it was was a ghost town, there wasn't a sound and it was so eerie and so strange. Um, still police everywhere. Um, and as the sun's coming up, we get into our uber and we go back to our condo and, uh, we were supposed to go home the day after, so we were stuck there for another day, or did we? Did we extend a day? Maybe we're supposed to go home day, but we extended a day anyways, because we were like there's no way we're going home right now. So we go back to the condo.
Speaker 2:And it was weird because when we got back to the condo. We went and sat around the hot tub and the pool. It was almost as if it didn't happen. Wow, it was as if nothing happened. We were just sitting talking. I don't think we're even talking out of shock. So somebody from Red Deer, who knew I was there and has connections to media, he contacts me and he says hey, just checking to see if you're all right. Glad you're all right. I have people that would like to get some information if you're cool with doing interviews.
Speaker 1:And I was like yeah, sure I can do whatever.
Speaker 2:So I was on CBC News, I was on the Ryan Jesperson, which is a local radio show here, and did some newspaper interviews. You can Google me and probably the first thing that pops up is some newspaper interviews. I did. But yeah, I was sitting around the pool. I was doing media interviews while everyone else was sitting around the pool. I was doing media interviews while everyone else was sitting around the pool. And the next day we fly home and as we're leaving, as we're flying home, the jet takes off right towards Mandalay Bay and we can see the busted out windows where the shooter was shooting from.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we come home and start the process of healing, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's man. That is quite an experience and I want to get to that process of healing, um, and talk a little bit about how, about how things have changed since you guys have been home. But before we go there, I want to dig in, uh, a couple of questions I have about the incident, if you're cool with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, so here we go. Um, I'm going to start back kind of chronologically towards the beginning of your story and we're going to work our way through it with these questions. Yeah, but you said that you were there and the music is going. Jason Aldean is playing that slow song, you're seeing people kind of sway back and forth and I think everybody listening to this can kind of picture that in their head and all of a sudden we hear this cracking that you perceive was feedback or some kind of audio glitch. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:That's correct.
Speaker 1:And then shortly thereafter you recognized automatic gunfire. What was your feelings when you heard that gunfire? I know you get from Canada. Guns are different in Canada than they are in the US. You guys don't have them, or if you do, there are a lot less than we have. We have guns everywhere here and we have a propensity for mass shootings here. What were your thoughts?
Speaker 2:Yeah, First of all, the the. I'll just let people know that the feedback that I thought I was hearing from the speakers was actually gunshots, a single gunshots. And then we hear the automatic gunfire, and I've watched a lot of movies. Automatic gunfire on the movies is not what automatic gunfire sounds like in real life.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:I don't know if anyone else has an experience with real automatic gunfire. I'm sure you do. But it does not sound like it does in the movies.
Speaker 1:Explain that to people. What's different about it?
Speaker 2:I don't know if it was the way the bullets were hitting concrete or flying through the air or the type of bullets, but it was more like a really loud cracking sound, rather than you know, gunshots on movies. It's kind of like you know, boom, boom or whatever you know. It's just a different sound.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And um I, even though we'd never heard that before, we see people running and we don't know exactly that it's gunfire, but it it's a pretty good assumption sure so we decided to take off as well. So, and at that moment it's like you know, holy shit, there's automatic gunfire, like what? Now, we don't even know what direction to run, but for some reason we run in a direction.
Speaker 1:It's chaos and pandemonium. So are you seeing at that point you said you saw the girl later on that had been shot. Are you seeing anybody falling? Are you seeing anybody getting hit with gunfire, Anything like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah no, we were lucky enough that we did not see anybody get shot. We did not come across anyone that had been shot during our route to shelter, so really the only thing we have is screaming gunfire, sirens, eventually gunfire sirens eventually.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, masks, and that one lady that had the gunshot when you guys got some medical aid to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, when we got to the hotel we realized she had been shot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and earlier you were talking about stage left, stage right. So, just so listeners know there's a stage left, stage right, upstage, downstage. So just so listeners know there's a stage left, stage right, upstage, downstage. And the way that is determined is if you were the performer on the stage looking out at the audience. So it's, everything is opposite. Right, it's kind of like looking in a mirror. If I'm on the stage looking at the audience, my right hand side is going to be stage right, my left hand side is going to be stage left. But now put yourself in the position of the audience member. Everything is reversed. So, with that being said earlier you spoke about being on stage left, I believe for the majority of it, move over to stage right to use the bathrooms and then make the decision to go back to stage left to watch the show. Um, where was the casualties? I know you said stage right was closer to the Mandalay Bay. Uh, where most of the casualties over there? Or where was the chaos really centered?
Speaker 2:No stage left was closer to Mandalay Bay. That would be our right. Thank you, and um, that is where most of the casualties were. Um, most of the casualties were stage left, which would have been our right. Um the, the West, the Western, most part of the venue.
Speaker 1:So had you guys stayed over at that bathroom area? Uh, when you asked your wife, where do you want to go, had you guys stayed over there, potentially you guys would have been kind of in the heart of the chaos, am I right?
Speaker 2:Yeah exactly. Okay, exactly, yeah, potentially you guys would have been kind of in the heart of the chaos, am I right? Yeah, exactly, okay, exactly, yeah. I can't remember how many casualties, uh, there were on on that side of the stage, but it was probably around 20 or 30.
Speaker 1:So gunshots are going off. You guys have turned, you're now exiting the, the to the, to the North side, or you're exiting out of that area, whichever direction it was. Um, what are your thoughts in your head? I mean, I know eventually we get to calling your parents. Are you thinking about your kids? Are you thinking you're going to get killed every time a gunshot goes off and you hear it hit the concrete? Are you looking around you? What is that experience like for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, like we're definitely looking around everywhere and kind of almost seeing where other people are running, maybe to gauge where gunshots might be coming from. We were in the parking lot and we had pondered taking cover behind a vehicle, but then decided not to do that because if a gunman's running he may find us. So we decided to keep running. Um, what I? To be honest, I did not think about anything really other than running and making sure that my friends were also running with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, and I spoke about it in one of my earlier episodes episode three or four or five or something where I started talking about the brain and the impacts that trauma have on us. We have two brains. Right, we have one brain, but we're split up into two sides, one being the reptilian side and one being more of the logical thinking side, for simplicity's sake and the reason that you are running and thinking about nothing other than unass in the area and avoiding gunfire, because that's that reptilian brain that is survivor flight. If you're trying to get your ass eaten off by a saber-toothed tiger in the middle of the Sahara desert, that's going to be that reptilian brain that keeps you alive. Then, once you slow down, now you can process those thoughts.
Speaker 1:To back that up, I'd be pretty sure that when you hear that first crack that is your logical before the automatic gunfire, you hear that crack. You hear it. It sounds abnormal. You're like what is that in your head? You're trying to put a situation or an explanation to this weird noise and ultimately you thought it was some kind of feedback or audio abnormality. That is your rational brain.
Speaker 1:Now automatic gunfire kicks in. Now it's your reptilian brain. I gotta save my ass and the people with me, and that's why you start running. And then, at some point, when you get back to that hotel, you start to have that shift again. And now, okay, logically, what are we going to do? We're going to barricade this door, we're going to arm ourselves with lamps, we're going to have improvised weapons, we're going to give aid to the people that need it? Um, and you start kind of slow down that thinking process, and that you know, at least in my experience, when I've been shot at and when I've had those situations, that is when I really start to have feelings because the blood is flowing correctly again and all this stuff is coming back. You know what I mean. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2:A hundred percent. You hit the nail right on the head. It's the moment you hear the automatic, it's instinct. It's instinct and other people's instinct was to stick around and help people that were injured. Different people have different instincts. I would say but yeah, as soon as we get back to, you know where we think is safety. You're right, it kicks. A different brain kicks in and it's like you know what can we do? What now? What's the next step? And yeah, that's exactly it. A different brain kicks in and it's like you know what can we do? What? What now? What? What's the next step? And yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker 1:So you said that you had called your parents. Um, and that was the hardest call of your life, that hardest moment of your life. Um, in that moment, what were you feeling, what were you thinking? What made that moment so difficult for you?
Speaker 2:Um, I guess, I guess it's just the uncertainty.
Speaker 1:Um, we had no idea what was going to happen.
Speaker 2:Um, did you think you might die? I almost really didn't know what to say. Definitely thought that we could die. Entered my mind many times At some point, you know. Eventually it got to a point where you know if nothing's happening by now I think we're probably okay, yeah, but yeah, it's definitely a million emotions and thoughts running through your head at that moment.
Speaker 1:What was the chaos like for everybody else that was around you? I mean, you're running with this group, you've got 11 minutes of hell between the parking lot or the venue and when you seek shelter into this hotel. What was everybody else doing around you? Were they kind of in the same mindset? Are there people screaming? Are there people just absolutely losing control and you know, can't do anything? In our world, in the police world, you have condition black. Condition Black is where people can no longer function, they can't regulate, they're in a free state and they literally just stand there and panic. Did you see anything like that?
Speaker 2:No, I don't recall anyone that was kind of frozen or or couldn't move. Looking back at footage, I definitely saw some of that. But, at the time. I don't recall it, I just recall a lot of running a lot of screaming, a lot of panic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, totally. Are you guys religious at all? Church Christianity, anything like that?
Speaker 2:No, we're baptized, but not practicing. Did you find yourself religious at all? Church Christianity, anything like that? No, we're baptized, but not practicing.
Speaker 1:Did you find yourself praying at all that day?
Speaker 2:I don't know if I'd say praying per se. I you know, please God please, god, help me. Please, god, help us, please, god, keep us safe Like, oh my God, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:I think those conversations are all right and we can have those. You mentioned something a second ago. You said it was quiet when you stepped out and you saw the sunrise for your Uber and the city of Vegas was quiet. That reminded me a lot of September 11th. I don't know if you remember September 11th, but you know I was in Port or Phoenix at the time and it's a hustling, bustling city and there's planes everywhere and you step outside on September 11th and just the eerie silence across the nation, you know, was deafening. Um, and it just reminded me of that when you said that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean anybody that. Anybody that's been to Vegas also knows that there's always planes, always helicopters, flying around. That morning I don't recall any, so air traffic may have also been shut down at the time.
Speaker 1:Wow. So tell me, tell me this man, how have things changed since then, since this incident you've got back home, how have things changed in then? Since this incident you've got back home, how have things changed in your world? Um, and tell me a little bit about the podcast, how you got into the podcast and why you started that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's. It's been seven and a half years now, uh, since the shooting. We've, uh, my wife and I have gone through a lot, um a lot of issues, uh, issues with the different ways we dealt with the shooting. In the aftermath. I went to a few counseling episodes or counseling sessions. She did not, she didn't want to, and that's fine. I didn't want to pressure her into anything. I joined some Facebook support groups and wanted to literally talk to everybody about it and she didn't want to really talk to anybody about it, which I, you know, I can respect that. I can respect how people you know deal with things differently.
Speaker 2:Talking to a lot of people in the support groups. A lot of people were devastated and heartbroken, like I. Myself had found myself with a weird feeling, like the months after that it was I had no heart in my chest. It was broken or gone or not working.
Speaker 1:Um you know, these are people that I don't know that have been killed.
Speaker 2:yet I somehow feel for them.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah totally.
Speaker 2:So I talked to a lot of people. Um, I decided that one way I could help was I started actually making some T-shirts and I collected photos from people that they took at the concert and I put them into a memory book and I sold the T-shirts and the memory book online to raise money for the families of the people that were killed. I don't know the exact number, but I probably made around 20 or $30,000. Wow, yeah. And after that, I started noticing the bad in people as well in these groups, because a lot of people started bickering about money, who should get it where it should, of people started nonprofits and we're, you know, trying to collect money and it. Uh, I definitely saw some some bad in people as well, but I saw a lot of good and I wanted I changed the way I look at people after that.
Speaker 1:Um.
Speaker 2:I, I, for some reason, I started to feel more for people that I don't know. There's a gentleman that I discovered in the group who was doing things, random acts of kindness for people in honor of the people that were killed. And you know I was thinking you know, what more could I do? How could I help people? So the thought of the podcast popped into my mind. A few years after that I thought, you know, I want to, I want to do a podcast.
Speaker 2:That's when podcasting kind of really blew up, was, you know, about eight years ago or so. So podcasts were becoming a big thing, and so I had the idea of starting a podcast that was geared towards mental health and helping people first of all, first of all, and it grew into kind of helping people in all aspects of their well-being, in their lives, you know, financial, physical, mental, spiritual. And so I started the blog about two weeks ago, finally got some posts up and started blogging two weeks ago, and then the podcast I just start. Actually, no, it would have been longer than that, because I'm already in episode number four of the podcast, so that would be four weeks.
Speaker 2:I guess it was longer than I thought. I guess it was over a month ago. Um, yeah, I've recorded four episodes of the podcast now where I want to talk to other people who, you know, either have podcasts that are aligned the same or people who have been through experiences and want to talk about it. And you know, the biggest thing I find about mental health and even financial health and stuff like that is a lot of people don't like to talk about their problems that they're having and don't like to talk about getting help and that they're getting help, and I wanted to bring more of that out.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, no, I think it's great. What is the name of your podcast? Where can people find you? Where are you streaming? What's the name of your podcast?
Speaker 2:It's called Superior Wellbeing. It's called superior well-being um you can go to superior well-being dot site dot s-i-t-e. Okay and there you'll. There you'll find my podcast, my blog, everything all in one place oh beautiful, that is awesome man I'm uh, I'm also on instagram and facebook superior to well-being and way cool.
Speaker 1:Well, dude. So on the law enforcement side of things, I've actually had the opportunity to sit down and be debriefed by the criminal team that responded to this, and you know, as you can imagine, when law enforcement responds to this, there's several different elements that are happening. First, we need to identify the threat and eliminate the threat or neutralize the threat. Sometimes that means that we kill them, sometimes it means they kill themselves, or sometimes it means they surrender. In this case, uh, this person killed themselves. Uh, the police found him. He killed himself. So, as as most of them do, they're cowards and once confronted, they want to take the easy way out and they can't stand up.
Speaker 1:Analysis and crime scene processing Well, you know, imagine this You've got 60,000 people, 70,000 people stiffed into a 15-acre parking lot.
Speaker 1:Essentially, when chaos breaks out, there's cell phones, purses, dead bodies, clothing, shoes, all of this stuff. There's hundreds and hundreds or thousands of pieces of evidence left behind, and everything is a piece of evidence, because everything can tell a part of the story when you've lost your shoes or kicked your shoes off because you're slow dancing with your buddy. That is your place in time, and those are the things that the law enforcement had to go back and recreate and I just remember what a massive undertaking it was to locate all the victims. Talk to everybody that had something to say. Put the pieces of the puzzle together, because it's not just oh, we found the shooter, he's dead and we moved on. We can forget about the rest of it. You have to put that holistic investigation together and hearing these people, these professionals, these FBI, these local law enforcement that did this, I mean what a complete undertaking it was. Did you ever get spoken to by law enforcement or investigators or anybody?
Speaker 2:I didn't, um, I, I yeah, it was a huge undertaking. I mean, I've read through the FBI report. I've watched all the police body cam footage. I've watched all the documentaries. I've. You know, there was no motive. There's no note, no agenda left behind. People have no idea why he did this to this day and I remember it being a huge deal. I remember a lot of people criticizing law enforcement. I never did. I mean, you know, law enforcement is, is trained to do things. And I mean, even if you're trained to do things, I would imagine in a situation like this, maybe sometimes instinct is kicking in more than training is. I don't know. I don't know. You know, I've.
Speaker 1:I can't say for sure, but yeah, you know, I've been involved in. I've been involved in two active shooters in my career and I've I talk. I talk about them on my podcast and they are on episode number 25 and it's rapid response my firsthand account with two active shooters, two separate situations separated by over a decade, but both of them were active shooters, one at a school, one at a hospital. So when you arrive on scene and those gunshots are still going off, you know, as law enforcement, we resort to our training. But we're still human beings, right, we are ultimately and I say we, I'll talk about me because there are some cowards that I worked with that did not handle the situation the way that I feel they should have and I think they were completely incompetent. But in my situation, you know, I run to that gunfire. Right, that's what we're trained to do.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean that we're not concerned or thinking or, you know, maybe stumble along the way. We don't do everything perfect. We're human beings, we're a flawed species, but at the end of the day, you know, we have goodwill in mind and that's what we want to do. It is what it is. You know law enforcement did their thing, they found him. You know you can criticize law enforcement all day long, but put yourself in the middle of those 70,000 people and then think where do I even start looking for this guy? You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, I mean even emergency medical. You know services. Uh, you know we. We called for ambulances several times, but in a situation like this there's no ambulances, you know left and usually the ambulance.
Speaker 1:People were shot, so yeah, you know, and and I'm looking at the numbers here and the numbers say that, uh, let's see what, what the hell do? The numbers say 867.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sorry, I noticed. At the beginning you said 60 people died, it was actually 58.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, well, thank you for correcting that, and I'm looking at the Wikipedia so the numbers might be skewed a little bit, but yeah, you know. So, 58 people wounding at least 413. The ensuing panic brought a total number of injured to 867 is what it says here. And this guy is a nobody. This guy is an accountant or a former auditor and real estate businessman who had been living 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas in a retirement community and all of a sudden shit goes sideways and he's killing people in, uh, at this concert.
Speaker 1:You know, I don't think we're ever going to be able to understand why people do what they do, other than we live in a broken world, and we live in a broken world with people who are a flawed species, right, um, and that, unfortunately, this shit's going to happen again and that, unfortunately, this shit's your friends were able to escape, you know, physically unscathed. The mental scars, the mental cuts and the death by a thousand wounds Mentally is something you guys will always have to deal with for life. You were there, you experienced it, but I'm glad that you know You're here in one piece and I can look at you right now and talk to you and and we get, we can have this conversation. So thank you so much for sharing your story with us. So, listeners, this is just another example of how you can be absolutely minding your own business, doing nothing wrong, but you find yourself caught up in a moment of chaos that will change the rest of your life. You know, it was something maybe you can take away.
Speaker 1:Right, the podcast is supposed to be educational, entertaining, provide value, and I think we may be. We hit all of those things today, but the one thing you can take away is always be prepared. You don't have to be paranoid. You don't have to live a paranoid life, but be prepared. You know, you heard from Jason today. He knew the layout, he knew where everything was and whether he consciously did it or not, he had an exit plan, exit strategy and reacted and responded. In that moment, when up jumps the devil and the world turns to shit, you cannot just stand there. You have to act. You have to power through whatever that is. Don't live paranoid, but be prepared. Ladies and gentlemen, I am so honored to have Jason on the show today to explain his story. Thank you guys so much for sticking around. Thank you guys so much for listening to this podcast. Please share it with a friend. I love you guys so much. That is the Murders to Music podcast.
