‘Everyone was helping each other:’ Cedar Rapids women recount scene at Las Vegas concert shooting

Leah Schneider wondered if the man who helped her scale a wall as she fled for her life had military training.

He seemed like a professional, she said, yelling encouragement and helping one person after another scramble over a barrier as they fled the chaotic scene at the Route 91 Harvest Festival Sunday night.

Schneider, a licensed mental health counselor from Cedar Rapids, was in Las Vegas for the music festival when gunfire began raining down on concertgoers. In a night of terror, that stranger who offered her a hand stands out.

'I will remember the vision of that man helping us over the wall forever. I remember thinking just, you know, ‘You're a great person,' ” she said. 'Even though it was mass chaos, people weren't running over each other or any of that kind of stuff. Everyone was helping each other.”

Schneider was in Las Vegas with four friends, Steve and Leslie Hess, Melody Githens and Lori Pankey, all of the Cedar Rapids area.

'We went for the festival, we'd planned it for six months. There was a lot of buildup and excitement,” Schneider said. 'I had never been to Las Vegas before.”

She wasn't with any of her friends when the shooting started. Leslie Hess was also at the concert, but in a different part of the crowd. The others were finishing up dinner at a nearby restaurant when gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire from his room in the Mandalay Bay hotel. He killed 58 people before taking his own life.

Pankey, who owns Crave Salon in Cedar Rapids, said they had just asked for their bill, trying to hurry since they were late for Jason Aldean's set at the music festival.

'All of a sudden we heard people screaming, and a tidal wave of people passed our restaurant. Someone was like, ‘Oh, that's Vegas, maybe there was a celebrity,' ” she said. 'Then there was another wave of people, screaming, ‘He's got a gun, he's coming.' ”

Turmoil and panic followed as the crowd tried to find safety. No one seemed to know where the gunfire was coming from or if there were multiple shooters. The group moved from place to place, trying to find their friends and get back to their hotel room at the MGM Grand. Screaming people were everywhere, some with blood on them. Pankey kept thinking about her children waiting for her to come home; her son is 15, her daughter is 8.

'There were moments I was like, ‘Do I call my kids right now and say I love them?' But then I didn't want them to have to deal with that,” Pankey said. 'It was terrible. I've never been so terrified in my life.”

They did eventually find their friends, all of whom were unharmed. Schneider isn't quite sure how she made it from the concert back to the hotel; much of the night is a blur. She was on the edge of the crowd when the first shots came.

'These guys next to me turned and said, ‘Those were gun shots.' And then it just erupted. After that there was really no thinking. I looked back, and the crowd was just coming toward me, and I was running, just running as fast as I could,” she said.

Now back in Iowa, she's still processing what happened.

'The first couple of days were just pure numbness. I didn't shed one tear until last night, when I kind of had a meltdown,” Schneider said on Wednesday. 'I'm starting to feel it, I guess in different ways. I was so lucky in relation to so many people. I was lucky.”

In all the confusion, individual moments and people stick out in her memory. The woman who gave her water when she sat down in between bouts of running. The man who helped her scale the wall. Another man, who along with his friends helped walk her to her hotel room; she has since connected with him on Facebook.

'There are no words to accurately describe what that feels like, in those moments, to hear the shots,” she said. 'The part that sticks out is just the way that people came together and helped each other. ... There are a lot of faces I will remember forever.”

The women on the trip each had music festival admission arm bands. Pankey plans to leave hers on for a while, one day for each of the victims. The arm band also is a reminder of what took her to Las Vegas in the first place: a love of music, travel and life. It's a reminder she said she's clinging to, even as she keeps reliving what happened.

'I'm very much a live-life-to-the-fullest kind of girl ... honestly there are parts of me that want to take my kids and just hole up somewhere,” she said. 'But at the same time, I can't let this make me not enjoy life. I'm going to always squeeze every ounce of joy and fun out of life as possible.

'We just can't, as a nation, stop living.”

l Comments: (319) 398-8434; alison.gowans@thegazette.com