Las Vegas massacre survivors were in California bar during shooting
Some of the people who were inside the California bar where a gunman went on a deadly rampage also survived last year’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, according to a report.
Chandler Gunn, 23, of Newbury Park, Calif., rushed over to the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks after the Wednesday night massacre to check on a friend who works there — a woman who also was at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Vegas, where a gunman killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“A lot of people in the Route 91 situation go here,” Gunn told the outlet. “There’s people that live a whole lifetime without seeing this, and then there’s people that have seen it twice.”
His friend told him that some kind of tear gas was thrown into the bar during the attack and that she saw smoke and heard gunfire before fleeing out the back toward apartments nearby.
Gunn said he hasn’t been able to contact his friend again, but knows she’s safe.
Meanwhile, 27-year-old Josh Coaly, 27, stood on the sidewalk waiting to hear from a friend — also a survivor of the Vegas shooting — inside Borderline who had texted him about the massacre.
Coaly said he spoke with his friend, who said he is with his father and doing fine.
“I just came to see if there’s anything I can do,” Coaly said.
And Carl Edgar, 24, who lives in LA’s Tarzana neighborhood, said he had about 20 friends inside the bar, where he’s also a regular, though he wasn’t there on the fateful night.
After hearing about the incident on Snapchat, he immediately texted friends who were at the club.
“Call me,” his friend answered, telling him later that she had escaped and was hiding behind a gas station. After midnight, another friend texted him that she was hiding in a bathroom.
“As far as I know, all of my friends are OK, safe,” he said. “There are a few people we can’t get ahold of, but in these situations people usually turn off their phones to be safe so I’m not gonna get too worried.
“A lot of my friends survived Route 91. If they survived that, they’ll survive this,” he told the paper.
In the Las Vegas shooting on Oct. 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock sprayed gunfire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel into a crowd of 22,000 people at the music festival, killing 58 in the deadliest mass shooting in US history. He later blew himself away with a gunshot to the mouth.