BOSTON (WHDH) - Witnesses from Massachusetts returning home to Boston’s Logan Airport recalled the chaos that unfolded Sunday night during the mass shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas.
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“The shots just wouldn’t stop. It just kept going. It was so scary,” Nicole MaCarthur of Billerica said. “We heard Jason Aldean drop the mic and figured it was a good idea to get out of there.”
MaCarthur says the tragedy that claimed 59 lives and injured more than 500 has not really hit her yet, but she’s expecting a rough next couple of days. She says she was just trying to enjoy a weekend with friends. Instead, it was marred with horror.
The gunman, identified as Stephen Craig Paddock, a 64-year-old retired accountant, opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 people at the Route 91 Harvest Festival from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel across the street.
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Authorities found 23 guns in Paddock’s hotel room, which was about 500 yards from the concert grounds. While some concertgoers hit the ground others pushed for the crowded exits, shoving through narrow gates and climbing over fences as 40- to 50-round bursts of fire rained down on them.
Bryanna Giorgio, an emergency dispatcher from Methuen, was still in shock as she described the moment when her and a friend, Mandy Thornton, ran for their lives.
“I heard the bullets ricocheting off the stage; that’s when I said to her, ‘we need to get out of here,'” the 25-year-old Giorgio recalled.
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Giorgio and Thorton said they were just 50 feet from the stage.
“We stayed really low and ran for the closest exit. There was a back gate open and we just ran,” she said.
At the Methuen Police Department, colleagues were thankful she managed to escape the chaos.
“It just goes to show it’s such a widespread tragedy that’s going to have far reaching effects, but it’s fortunate so far everyone that we know that’s been involved made it out safely,” said Giorgio.
Giorgio says she had never been so happy to see the Boston skyline upon arriving home.
The mass shooting marked deadliest in modern American history.
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