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For FloCombat via A.G Fight



"It looked like it was a movie."



That's how Gabriel Checco described the events on the Las Vegas strip last Sunday, when Stephen Paddock killed 58 people at a country music festival and wounded hundreds more after opening fire from his room at the nearby Mandalay Bay hotel before taking his own life.



Checco, an MMA fighter originally from Brazil, worked as a bartender at the festival area.



"There were a lot of people on the ground -- there was chaos," Checco said. "People were running with gun wounds in their feet or legs. We didn't know if there was a terrorist still there, if it even was a terrorist attack. It was terrible. I felt like I was in a movie. It's the kind of thing I never thought I would go through in life. It's shocking."



Checco, a 10-2 professional MMA fighter originally from Sao Paulo who has competed for Resurrection Fighting Alliance (RFA) since 2014, was working at one of the festival's bars. At the time of the attack, though, he had left the bar to restock beverages. When the gunshots echoed through the area, the Brazilian at first believed that a pyrotechnic show was taking place, and, like many others, it took a while for him to notice that the noises were actually gun shots.



"I was working at one of the bars, right on the side of the stage," Checco said. "About 10 minutes before it happened, I had left my place to get drinks from one of the other places because my bar was empty. I had drinks in my hand, [and] I was in the crowd when I heard the first shots. I thought it was pyrotechnics, but I looked up at the sky and didn't see anything. I thought it was strange. I thought it was the start to some kind of show. I kept walking because when the shots started no one knew what it was. I was almost back at my bar when everyone started running. That's when I realized they were gun shots.



"I learned that it was a sniper from inside Mandalay Bay... I thought he was a terrorist and traded shots with the police. I ran but I didn't want to. I wanted to help the people I saw being trampled on, women, ladies. Imagine how many people were running. I helped a lot of women up who had fallen down. I helped, but when the crowd was moving, I tried to get to the VIP area to pick up my belongings.



"I heard more shots, and each time they seemed to be getting closer. I left my wallet, left my car, I only thought about saving my life. I jumped across the bar. Me and thousands of people. I saw people bleeding, people with a bruised hand[s] coming up on the bars, people who took a shot. Everything you can imagine."



While Checco managed to get through the attack physically unharmed, many others weren't so lucky.



"I saw the guy who was working with me carry a woman who had been shot in the head," the 31-year-old fighter recalled. "Surely she was dead by then. I saw that there was no way to try to stay there to try to help people who might already be dead. I started to tell people to run. Don't stop running. It wasn't a particularly young audience. It was a country festival. I think there were a lot of people 30 years old and up. And a 40-year-old woman doesn't run that fast. I saw a lot of people falling behind. It was terrible."



Not knowing where to run and what to hide from, Checco eventually got some distance between him and the scene. On the way, though, the full scope of the massacre started unfolding right in front of his eyes.



"There were rumors of [other] armed people in some places, so there was a lot of police on scene," he said. "There were lots of trucks with bodies. I remember seeing a white pickup truck that had at least 15 people on it, one on top of the other. I don't know how many of them were dead, but most of them had been shot. Then I went to the parking lot for private helicopters -- there was a lot of ambulances that couldn't even handle so many wounded people."









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