Firefighter from Modesto recalls Vegas terror: ‘Nothing had ever been like this’
A week after the largest mass shooting in U.S. history, a firefighter EMS with his roots in Modesto took to Facebook on Sunday night to write about the experience in Las Vegas on Oct. 1.
“Working the streets that night, I will never forget the mother screaming at me, ‘WHERE IS MY SON?’ I will never forget looking around at the loved ones left behind, trying to make sense of it all, or the ones on the knife’s edge teetering the fence,” wrote Aaron Rupp, who works with the Clark County Fire Department.
Rupp was working an overtime shift that night, not with his normal crew in his normal area, he told The Bee on Monday. They were sitting on a psychiatric call, waiting for police to clear the scene, when they saw a couple of shooting reports on the call screen. Then a couple more. A report of an officer hit in the neck.
The pending calls began piling up, Rupp said, but as the crew made its way to the scene, it still didn’t have a feel for the scale of the incident.
That night, near the close of the three-day Route 91 Harvest country music festival, Stephen Paddock opened fire Oct. 1 from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds.
In the 32nd-floor hotel room from which he was shooting, Paddock killed himself as a SWAT team closed in.
Rupp said he can’t be sure if, when the crew arrived at the Mandalay Bay, Paddock was done firing. “I cannot distinctly remember getting out and hearing gunshots,” he said. He does remember the blasts as police were blowing doors. “I know (Paddock’s shooting) was going for 10, 12 minutes, so the time line was really close.”
In his post, Rupp writes of being on scene as “thousands of people tore through the street, over fences, jumping in strangers’ cars, truly running for their lives. In droves, police with the same terror in their eyes, ran the other way, towards the chaos that could only be described as a battlefield. Firemen and EMS held the line somewhere in the middle, ‘sifting and sorting’ through the human rubble, working frantically to keep someone breathing, to stop someone’s bleeding, to stop the overwhelming loss of life.
“And in the brief few moments eye contact was made with my fellow brother, that same terror was there. While we have all seen the trauma, all been behind the ball scrambling to stabilize someone grasping for their life, and all had our hands on disfigured bodies trying to be a conduit of hope, but nothing had ever been like this.”
Rupp grew up in Modesto, was in the GATE program and attended the Modesto Junior College Fire Academy. He worked for the Burbank Paradise Fire District in west Modesto, then for AMR in Stockton a few years. He’s been an EMS provider in Vegas for about a decade. In November 2008, a Las Vegas Sun photograph referred to Rupp as a “rookie” at the time.
Asked roughly how many people he was able to help the night of Oct. 1, Rupp said, “Not near as many as I should have.” He worked directly on four or five victims, did “critical intervention” on an additional two or three and attended to “a lot of walking wounded, minor stuff.” Working a fire rescue vehicle, much of his time was taking patients to a hospital, then coming back to the scene, he said.
Rupp, 35, wrote that the past week has brought an outpouring of gratitude to first responders, including many gifts of food, water and coffee. He downplayed his contributions, saying, “I’m just a dude doing my job.” He said he was a “cog,” no more or less important than so many others that night doing the jobs assigned to them.
He closed his post with these words: “I’ve had hundreds heartfelt handshakes followed up with ‘thank you for your service.’ I’m left feeling unworthy, sad and humble. I can’t speak for the rest of us, all I can say is thank you, I was just doing my part. I am not a hero. I was just fortunate enough to serve. In rare instances we have brief opportunities to be, but we can always all do our part, and together that strength is #STRONG.”
This story was originally published October 9, 2017 at 12:26 PM with the headline "Firefighter from Modesto recalls Vegas terror: ‘Nothing had ever been like this’."