A guest that was staying at the Mandalay Bay Resort on Oct. 1 when a gunman opened fire on concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival is speaking out about his experience in the horrific situation.
Scott Burns, 41, was in the lobby of the Las Vegas hotel when he first saw four police officers ran by him. At the time, he didn’t “think anything of it.”
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Burns chalked up the sight to a typical Vegas incident such as a fight somewhere in the casino. However, he later felt his phone vibrate with a warning message.
“Active shooter. Go to your room,” a friend who was learning about the shooting texted him, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Burns then managed to make it to his room on the 10th floor. He then received more texts and was checking Facebook and Twitter to try and figure out what was happening.
“I was getting a ton of misinformation about what was going down,” Burns said. “The first wave of bad info was that there was a shooting at the country concert and that the shooter had ran into Mandalay Bay. Then it was two shooters and one shooter ran into the Aria Resort and Casino. Then there was a report of shots fired at the Aria and shots confirmed at New York, New York …. There was a brief time when there was a bomb threat at the Luxor.”
Unaware of what was going on, Burns went to his room, locked the door, turned off the lights and sat in the corner with his phone and a can of Pringles.
“I stayed as far away from the front door as possible,” he said. “If someone was to enter my room, I want them to think there’s nobody in there. I want them to think this is a waste of my time.”
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In a room on the 32nd floor, the gunman, Stephen Paddock, was firing round after round on the crowd of concertgoers below. The shooting has been labeled the most deadly mass shooting in modern U.S. history as 58 people were killed with more than 500 others being injured.
One of Burns’ colleagues, who was staying on the 32nd floor, began relaying information to him and others. Burns was grateful for the information.
“It helped ease a lot of the confusion because at one point you start to worry about multiple shooters and multiple scenes,” he said. “You start to think it’s a coordinated attack on a city. You think about it — and I know I did — in a state that has pretty lax gun laws, I figured you can drive down the street and start shooting, you can do it.”
Burns said that his colleague on the shooter’s floor was eventually evacuated to the basement of the hotel.
Around 3:30 a.m., SWAT officers came to knock on Burns’ door. He was told to come out with his hands raised.
“They went in, swept the room with guns out, thanked me and moved on down the hall,” Burns said. “They did this with every room. I thought they were for sure going to ask us to leave, but we just stayed locked in.”
