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Long Beach resident witnessed Vegas Shooting

Long Beach resident witnessed Vegas shooting
Long Beach resident witnessed Vegas shooting
Long Beach resident witnessed Vegas shooting
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LONG BEACH (CNS) - A Long Beach resident attending the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Festival on the Las Vegas Strip helped carry an unconscious woman to out of the line of fire during a mass-shooting near the Mandalay Bay Resort Sunday night.
   
Al Quackenbush told City News Service that singer Jason Aldean was performing at the open-air festival when the gunfire rang out, causing a massive scramble for survival.
   
``(We) carried a girl who was shot,'' said Quackenbush, describing the victim as a woman in her 20s. ``We carried her behind a concrete pillar with her friends, then we got out of there. We are safe.
   
``We heard many shots,'' Quackenbush said. ``Like 300-plus shots. I figure it was an automatic rifle. We were right there.''
   
Orange County resident David Wolfe said on a televised broadcast that his wife and daughter were at the concert.
   
Wolfe said he was ``in absolute panic; scared to death until my wife called and said they were OK.''
   
Brianna Taylor of Orange County said to NBC4 that she and her fiance were near the front of the stage near Aldean when the bullets began to rain.
   
The shaken Taylor said she first thought it was fireworks, but ``seconds later, we found it was a lot more serious that,'' as she saw two people within 10 feet of her get shot.
   
``We just stayed as low as we could for a while,'' Taylor said. ``(But) as soon as they said they needed medics, we knew we were sitting ducks.

``I said `Babe, this can't be how we die, this can't be how we go.' So we just got up and ran behind the stage and got out,'' eventually hiding with about 200 other people in a helicopter rental company.

``Instinctively, when you get a chance to run for your life, you run for your life,'' Taylor said.

NBC reporter Joe Fryer said he was ordered by authorities to stay in place at the Four Seasons hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, as were many other journalists at other hotels who packed this weekend into Las Vegas, where O.J. Simpson was said to be headed after his release early Sunday from a Nevada prison.

More than 50 people were killed and more than 200 injured by a lone gunman shooting from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino before he was shot to death, authorities said. He was identified as Stephen Paddock, 64. Police were seeking a companion of the alleged gunman named Marilou Danley, an Asian woman who's 4 feet 11.