Concertgoer Bryan Hopkins hid with about two dozen others in a freezer as bullets rained down on a country festival in Las Vegas on Sunday, Oct. 1, CNN reported.
The musician was close to the front row of the last show of the Route 91 Harvest Festival when he told CNN he heard a “pop, pop, pop” that he said he initially thought was the sound of firecrackers.
As it continued, he said he remembered thinking the sound system or the pyrotechnics were malfunctioning. Then he saw singer Jason Aldean drop his guitar and start running to the back of the stage as the lights went out.
About 10 feet away, a man went down, then another, then two more girls, and his friend told him to run.
He grabbed the hands of two women and started running while long bursts of “pop, pop, pop, pop” continued, with only occasional breaks that last a few seconds.
They hit a wall and he saw a trailer, which they later discovered was a freezer, and got inside.
“There must have been 23 to 30 of us [inside the freezer],” he told CNN.
Fearing that there were live shooters outside who would eventually find them, he and some guys went back outside to see what they could do.
According to the latest count at the time of writing, at least 58 people were killed that night and at least 515 more were injured before police got to the shooter, later identified as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who had locked himself in a 32nd-floor room of the Mandalay Bay hotel.
Paddock had a cache of weapons, police said, and was firing down on the crowd from his room. Police said he’d killed himself before they got to him.
The FBI has said that there is no evidence that Paddock was associated with any terrorist organization, and Sheriff Joe Lombardo said he was not known to law enforcement before the event.