The Las Vegas heroes who stepped up as chaos reigned

Amy McAslin and roommate Krystal Goddard dived under a table as gunfire rained down on fellow concertgoers in Las Vegas on Sunday night. Eventually, McAslin realized she was being shielded by someone who’d just been shot. “A gentleman – I don’t know his name – he completely covered me,” McAslin told CNN. “He covered my face. He said, ‘I’ve got you.’ “Just truly incredible, (a) stranger, jumping over me to protect me.” The man was among the many who attended to others during and after a massacre in which a gunman fired from the 32nd floor of a Vegas hotel into crowds below at the Route 91 Harvest music festival, killing 59 people and injuring another 527. Before the shooting, McAslin and Goddard were standing by the stage where country music singer Jason Aldean was performing. Then they began to hear gunfire. Running for their lives through the crowd, the pair sought refuge under a table as the bullets continued to fly by. The man shielded McAslin, who was holding Goddard. It’s not clear when the man was wounded. But he “said that he had been shot in his rear-end area, and that there was a lot of blood,” McAslin said. The roommates said the trio held onto one another tightly, while chanting: “Everything is going to be OK.” While under the table, McAslin, who had trained as an emergency medical technician, examined a woman who had been grazed by a bullet in the neck. “There was a lot of blood. But she seemed OK – it didn’t hit her artery,” she said. Eventually, they say, a woman told them to come out. The man was helped to a triage area, and McAslin and Goddard ran with others toward an exit. McAslin’s white shirt was stained by the man’s blood. Neither knows his name or how he is doing. “He’s been in my thoughts all day,” McAslin said. “He’s a truly amazing person for just trying to protect the whole, under, the whole table area where we were.” ‘Load them up. Let’s go’ Lindsay Padgett and her fiancé Mark Jay were at the festival when the shooting started. After initially ducking to the ground, they told CNN affiliate KTNV, they ran with others to an airport hangar for shelter, before making it back to their parked truck near the concert venue. They were driving away in their pickup, taking stock of what happened, when a stranger hailed them. “Right now, we need your truck. We just need to get people over to the hospital, OK?” the stranger tells Padgett, as people moved the injured on makeshift stretchers behind him, in a video widely viewed on Facebook. The couple pulled over. “We (said), ‘Load them up. Let’s go.’ (We) loaded as many as we could,” Jay told KTNV. After people loaded a number of wounded in the back of the truck, the pair said, they drove over road blocks and curbs until they found an ambulance at a freeway entrance. Some victims were transferred to the ambulance. A couple others remained in the truck, and Jay and Padgett drove them to a hospital, following the ambulance. One of the passengers, Jay said, had been shot in the chest and was using his fingers to fill the holes. Padgett played down couple’s role in ferrying the injured out of danger. “I just feel like that’s what you do,” she told KTNV. “When people need help, you have to take them to the hospital.” Wounded hockey coach helped by brother University of Nevada, Las Vegas assistant hockey coach Nick Robone was at the concert with his brother, Anthony, a paramedic with the Henderson Fire Department. Anthony initially thought he heard firecrackers. “The real moment I realized that it was gunshots was when I heard my brother say, ‘I got hit.’ I turned around and I saw him coughing up blood,” Anthony Robone told CNN. Nick Robone was shot in the chest. Anthony and a friend escorted him down a street. Seeing no ambulance, they stopped at a police car, and an officer gave them a first aid kit. “We just took a little piece of plastic – it appeared to be a sucking chest wound … (so) we put the plastic piece on his chest over the wound” and secured it with three adhesive bandages, Anthony Robone said. Nick Robone eventually was put onto an ambulance. Anthony said he and his friend stayed, helping a number of off-duty firefighters, medics, doctors, nurses and other bystanders triage wounded people on the side of a street. They treated the injured while they waited for ambulances, and helped decide which injured should go on ambulances first. “It was a group effort between everybody, whether they were trained medically or not,” Anthony Robone said. He said his brother was in a hospital’s intensive care unit late Monday. “I think he’s going to make it out, because he’s tough,” Anthony Robone said. ‘Completely horrible’ 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.” Kind Samaritan In the midst of the shooting, 18-year-old Addison Short tried to make a run for it. But Short’s knee gave way: “I just got shot, I can’t run,” she cried out. She dived into a bar for cover: “You kept hearing gunshots. They just weren’t stopping,” she said. From her hospital bed, she told CNN how a man used his belt to wrap her leg in a tourniquet and rush her to safety. “He just picked me up and threw me over his shoulder,” Short said. The man carried her to a taxi that took her to the Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center. “It was just the scariest experience of my life,” Short said. Scattering in the chaos Meanwhile, as the crowds began to scatter, Mike Cronk stood his ground and tried to help his friend who had taken three bullets to the chest. “Most people started scattering and they climbed the fence, but I had to stay with my buddies,” he told ABC News. “We got him over the fence once the firing stopped and slid him under a stage so we were safe. “My first thoughts were for my buddy. I wanted to make sure he was taken care of. But, you know, we were pretty much yelling at everybody to stay down. That was what we needed to do.”