Singer Jake Owen was on stage on Sunday night when gunshots rang out during the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas.
“It’s been a pretty crazy evening here in Las Vegas. I think we’re all still trying to process,” he told NBC News.
Owen went on to describe the shooting:
“It got faster and faster, almost like it sounded like it was an automatic rifle. You could hear it ringing off the tops of the rafters of the stage. That’s when you saw people fleeing. At that point, everyone on stage just started running everywhere possible. It was pretty chaotic for sure.”
Police have confirmed that at least 58 people were killed, plus the gunman, and more than 500 wounded during the violence, amounting to the deadliest mass shooting in recent U.S. history.
“I kind of just ran like everyone else. At one point, I was crouched down behind a cop car with about 20 other people, that were people who had just come to the show,” Owen said in the interview.
“Everyone’s asking if everyone’s okay. There was blood on people. You can see a couple of folks in the street that looked like they had been shot, lying there. It was chaotic. It was literally like a movie that you feel like that you’ve seen before that’s not real life.”
Owen added that the entire situation wasn’t “just quick.”
“It was chaos for pure seven to ten minutes ... We live this life of not being scared, which I think is great, but this is reality these days. This stuff is really happening. We were all scared.”
The shooter was identified as Stephen Paddock, 64, and killed after a SWAT team used a controlled explosive device to gain entry to his hotel room.
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