How a Las Vegas Concertgoer Returned to Scene of Carnage in Her Pickup Truck to Rescue Victims

Instead of racing home after surviving the terrifying storm of gunfire that rained down on a country music concert Sunday night in Las Vegas, Lindsay Padgett returned to the venue to take shooting victims to the hospital in her pickup truck.

The Route 91 Harvest country music festival became the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock sprayed a crowd of 22,000 with automatic gunfire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Casino before turning a gun on himself. Fifty-nine people died and more than 500 were injured.

“You see things like this on TV, but you don’t ever think it will happen to you,” the 29-year-old Las Vegas resident tells PEOPLE. “It was surreal.”

The night started out perfectly, says Padgett, who watched the concert from the front row with her fiancé, Mark Jay, her two cousins and three friends.

“It was a great night,” she says. “We were having a blast.”

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While country singer Jason Aldean was performing, she says heard popping sounds, then saw sparks and smoke.

“We were trying to figure out what it was,” she says. “Jason Aldean ran off stage and then everyone was yelling, ‘Get down!’ People were getting shot left and right.”

Unable to leave because they were so close to the front where it was packed with concertgoers, she and her friends huddled together on top of one another, not sure what to do.

“My friend kept looking at me and saying, ‘I don’t want to die,” she says.

Finally, when people near them were able to get up and flee, “we all just started running,” she says.

“I had called my mom to tell her that I love her and goodbye because I thought that was it,” she says.

She and her friends ran to a nearby airport hangar where they hid until they thought it was safe to leave.

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They went to get her pickup truck from a parking lot across the street from the venue when a man approached them, asking for help.

“This guy says, ‘We need your truck. We need to get people over to the hospital.’

I said, ‘Put them all in.’

They loaded the truck with five shooting victims – some in the cab and some in the flatbed.

“We were trying to get to the nearest hospital but the roads were blocked off,” she says.

They stopped when they saw an ambulance on the side of the road. Paramedics took three of the most critically wounded victims from her truck.

“My fiancé took out the kid who was shot in the back and he went to put him in ambulance,” she says. “The paramedics said to take him out right away. They said, ‘He’s dead.’ ”

After helping to load victims who were shot in the chest into the ambulance, “My fiancé picked up the guy who had died and put him back in the bed of the truck,” she says.

Another victim who had been shot in the leg stayed in the backseat of the truck. “Then we followed the ambulance to the hospital.”

After Jay helped the victims into the hospital, he and Padgett set out to return to the venue to try to help even more shooting victims. “We didn’t go right home. We wanted to go back to help more people. But so many roads were blocked off. We were having a hard time getting back there.”

So they headed instead to MGM Grand where her cousins were hiding.

While Padgett is relieved she and Jay were able to help the shooting victims, she says she will never forget this nightmarish night that stole the lives of so many.

“It was terrifying,” she says. “It was something that was out of a horror movie.”

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Trump Lobs Praise, and Paper Towels, to Puerto Rico Storm Victims

And like his earlier travels, it had its peculiar moments: He also gently tossed rolls of paper towels into a crowd that gathered to see him at Calvary Chapel, outside the island’s capital, San Juan.

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This time, however, Mr. Trump flew into a different kind of turbulence. Over the weekend, the president lashed out at the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, after she complained that the federal response in Puerto Rico had fallen short of the responses in Texas and Florida. She was not mollified after meeting him.

“The first part of the meeting was a public-relations situation,” Ms. Cruz said in an interview with CNN about the briefing she attended with the president. While she said the White House staff was helpful and receptive, Mr. Trump’s communications style sometimes “gets in the way.”

“I would hope that the president of the United States stops spouting out comments that really hurt the people of Puerto Rico,” she said, “because, rather than commander in chief, he sort of becomes miscommunicator in chief.”

Mr. Trump greeted the mayor but did not invite her to speak, recognizing instead Mr. Rosselló, who the president said “did not play politics,” and its congressional representative, who lavishly applauded the administration’s performance.

“Thank you, Mr. President, for all you have been doing for the island,” said Jenniffer González-Colón, the territory’s nonvoting representative, who declared that Washington had sent everything Puerto Rico needed.

“You were really generous,” Mr. Trump replied. “It’s so important when you have men and women that have worked so hard and so long, and many of them came from two other catastrophic hurricanes.”

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The president then went around the briefing table, praising the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, military commanders and a half-dozen members of his cabinet who accompanied him to Puerto Rico — which was already facing about $74 billion in debt even before the hurricane hit.

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In singling out Mick Mulvaney, his budget director, Mr. Trump said, “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack.” Looking around the room for his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, who was standing in the back, Mr. Trump said, “Boy, is he watching.”

Before leaving the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters he believed Ms. Cruz was now mostly satisfied.

“I think she’s come back a long way,” he said. “I think it’s now acknowledged what a great job we’ve done.” He asserted that the relief effort was as effective as those in Texas and Florida, and he added, “It’s actually a much tougher situation.”

Mr. Trump, however, repeated his earlier criticism that some Puerto Ricans were not doing enough to help themselves. Despite the roads being cleared and communications being re-established, he said, truck drivers were not transporting enough supplies. “We need their truck drivers to start driving trucks,” he said. “On a local level, they have to give us more help.”

On Saturday, after Ms. Cruz angrily disputed the administration’s assertion that the relief effort was going well, the president fired back in a Twitter post that she had been instructed by Democrats to be “nasty to Trump,” and added that Puerto Ricans “want everything to be done for them.”

White House officials were nervous that Mr. Trump would be set off again if he were greeted by protesters in Puerto Rico. As late as Monday afternoon, some aides were urging the president to delay the visit, which came a day before he was scheduled to fly to Las Vegas to meet with law enforcement officials and victims of Sunday’s mass shooting there.

There were a few other signs of discontent on Tuesday. As Mr. Trump’s motorcade drove from an air base to a church — passing hundreds of downed trees — it also passed a woman clutching a placard that said, “You are a bad hombre,” according to a pool report.

Sitting in a traffic jam near the San Juan airport before the arrival of Air Force One, a resident, Jaime Vega, disputed Mr. Trump’s claim that Puerto Ricans should be doing more to help their own recovery. “We are doing,” he said. “It’s only now that they are doing something.”

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“Let him come so he can see what there really is, and so nobody can tell him made-up stories,” said Mr. Vega, an accountant.

Outside a bar in the Santurce neighborhood of San Juan, an hour after Air Force One departed Tuesday afternoon, people debated what Mr. Trump’s visit might have accomplished.

“He was just measuring Puerto Rico by the amount of dead compared to Katrina,” said José Tormos, 62, an employee of the local government in Guaynabo. “FEMA’s response has been too slow.”

Even before the death toll was increased on Tuesday evening, others noted that the actual number of people killed by Hurricane Maria may rise significantly, given that the earlier, certified tally was outdated and that the island government’s record-keeping ability has been damaged by the storm. Mr. Rosselló said 19 of the total 34 deaths so far were directly related to the storm, like drownings. The others included electrical failures of oxygen tanks, suicides and natural causes like heart attacks, he said.

Marlene Martinez, 51, an accountant, said, “It’s just an example of how we’re treated like second-class citizens.”

Others were more concerned about the reconstruction of the island and their own precarious situations than Mr. Trump’s comments.

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“The people of Puerto Rico don’t care whether Trump is the god or the devil,” said Edgardo Tormos, 58. “This is about the recovery of Puerto Rico.”

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Still, others seemed happy just to have the president in their midst. In a 20-minute visit to Calvary Chapel, an English-speaking evangelical church that has become a collection center for supplies, Mr. Trump shook hands, took selfies and offered encouragement in the chapel’s sanctuary.

“For us, it’s really nothing political,” said Naitsa Marrero, an administrative assistant who helped organize the stop. “Puerto Rico needs help, and often this type of thing sheds light on what’s happening here — a crisis.”

Jason Dennett, the church’s pastor, said he welcomed the idea of a visit when the Secret Service contacted him five days ago. “He offered his help to the people of Puerto Rico,” Mr. Dennett said. “He said he was here to help and that the support would continue.”

Mr. Trump boarded a Navy amphibious assault ship for meetings with the governors of Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. The White House asked the Virgin Islands’s governor, Kenneth E. Mapp, to fly to Puerto Rico because of the logistical complications of flying the president to those islands, parts of which have been severely damaged.

Still, Mr. Mapp told him, “because of your commitment, Mr. President, we’re talking about opening schools and welcoming cruise ships back.”

Mr. Trump has gotten used to being a kind of second responder, having traveled to Texas and Florida after two other hurricanes over the past two months. Since the weekend, Mr. Trump has sharply scaled back his Twitter posts about the hurricanes or other potentially charged issues.

But speaking to reporters on Tuesday, he continued to emphasize the government’s performance rather than the plight of the victims.

“In Texas and in Florida, we get an A-plus,” Mr. Trump said. “And I’ll tell you what, I think we’ve done just as good in Puerto Rico.”

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