A California man described the frantic 22 hours following the Las Vegas shooting after he couldn’t locate his wife, who attended the festival with friends.
Robert Patterson’s wife Lisa traveled to attend the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Sin City strip, but the mom of three was homesick and contemplated leaving before the final day of concerts, he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
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When she told her husband she wanted to head home, he told the country music fan to stay for Jason Aldean’s set, which she was excited to watch.
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Lisa and her friends got close to the stage and were singing and dancing until Lisa suddenly fell to the ground. Her friends initially thought she fell, but when she didn’t get back up, they thought she had passed out.
They knelt to give her some air but she wasn’t responsive. They asked for help, thinking she may have had a heart attack, but soon they realized they were surrounded by gunfire. Lisa had been hit in the back of the neck, but all her friends ran to safety.
Patterson heard of the shooting soon after it occurred and texted his wife a series of more than 50 rapid fire messages, waiting for a response. They had been texting about an hour earlier, writing “I miss you” messages to each other.
He waited through the night for a message from Lisa, but just before sunrise Monday morning, he decided to drive toward Las Vegas with his 16-year-old son.
Patterson said he sped toward Nevada at 105 mph and a police officer came up behind him. He began to pull over, but the officer sped by him, also headed for Las Vegas.
“I could tell that he knew what I was doing, and I knew exactly what he was doing,” Patterson said. “So I kind of just followed him. And I didn’t care. I could tell that he didn’t care, either.” He followed the car for about 150 miles at 110 mph.
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Patterson stopped at University Medical Center after hearing a rumor that his wife may have been placed on a hospital treatment list. He waited for an hour before staff informed him that Lisa was not at their facility.
He continued to Valley Hospital Medical Center and, after another hour of waiting, was told the same thing. He went to two other hospitals and got the same response.
After passing the shooting site looking for a sign of Lisa, he went to the family assistance center inside the Las Vegas Convention Center, where he sat until 8 p.m. with his son and 19-year-old daughter, Amber, who had driven from Northern Arizona University to meet them.
Patterson was eventually called into a room where Lisa’s personal items sat. He was told they had positively ID’d her body with fingerprints and that she had died.
“They both knew once they saw my face that their mom had passed away,” Patterson said. “Amber just lost it, right then.”
After more than a week, Patterson and his son saw Lisa’s body at the mortuary.
“Me and my son couldn’t recognize her,” he said. “She was very swollen… She didn’t get to the mortuary for almost six days.”
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As Patterson and his family grieved, Clark County Deputy Fire Chief Jon Klassen couldn’t take his mind off one victim he assessed at the shooting scene. She laid face-up with no apparent bleeding and was looking toward the sky.
“Her eyes were wide open,” Klassen remembered. “Beautiful, blue eyes.”
When the forensics specialist touched the woman’s jaw to check for signs of death, a tear dropped from her eye and slid down her cheek. He couldn’t stop thinking about the emotional scene.
When Klassen identified the woman as Lisa, he called Patterson and told him the story of his wife’s fallen tear.
“If that were my wife or mom, maybe someone who loved her would like to hear that,” Klassen told him. When Robert and his son went back to Vegas to retrieve Lisa’s body, Klassen took them to dinner and the families bonded together.
In the weeks since Lisa’s death, Patterson said it has been difficult to process his new reality.
“Usually I wake up in the morning happy like, ‘I love my wife; I love my family,’ ” he said. “Now I wake in the morning like, ‘My wife is dead.’ “
Photo credit: Facebook / Lisa Marhefka-Patterson
