Jon knew something was wrong when he heard a noise that sounded like firecrackers going off.

That’s not the type of thing he expected to hear at the Eagles of Death Metal’s Friday the 13th gig at Paris’ Le Bataclan. He was attending the show by himself, enjoying one of the band’s upbeat songs from the venue’s pit area, when the concert hall erupted into a massacre.

Jon, who asked that his real name not be used in this story (Upvoted has verified the validity of his story), was caught in the middle of the chaos Friday at the Paris concert hall where 87 people were killed as part of a series of coordinated attacks around the city. He shared his experience in a thread in the World News community and talked about his night with Upvoted via email from his sister’s home in Paris.

“I guess I owe it to sheer luck and deciding early on … that fuck that, I wasn’t staying … in the pit,” he said about surviving attack.

After the first sound of shots, there was a five-second pause, said Jon, a 23-year-old student from eastern France who attends school in Paris. Then, a man charged through the hall’s front door about 40 to 60 meters from where Jon was standing. The crowd moved back, and people dropped to the floor.

“I just tried to hide under other people like everybody else,” he said.

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The single gunman opened fire on the crowd, and people began to scream. The shooting stopped, and Jon lifted his head up to see the gunman move from one side of the hall to the other before unleashing another volley of gunfire.

“This is when I raised myself and started crawling … over other people … ,” he said. “I made for the safety fence in front of the stage, which looked thick and strong. I fell on my hands hard, and some guy fell on me a second after that.”

“There were people everywhere,” he added. “It made it pretty much impossible to stand up.”

At the fence, Jon noticed people crawling over steps, past an exit door, and out of the venue. He made a break for the stairs and the exit, stomping on others as he tried to escape the carnage.

So ppl understand – Bataclan is the Paris venue that an American band imagines from wild movies, dreams,truly wonderful people. #Mourning — Cold War Kids (@ColdWarKids) November 14, 2015

“I am not proud of all this,” he said. “I don’t know how to justify it. I intellectually guess that “it’s okay,” but it feels fucking bad either way.”

Finally outside the hall, Jon sprinted down the street, not stopping until he reached a nearby subway station. He got on a train, but disembarked after a few stops when he realized that mode of transportation might not be the safest given what Paris was going through. He hailed a cab and took that the rest of the way to his sister’s house.

Once there, Jon contacted everyone who knew he was at the Bataclan show to tell them he was all right. For the rest of the night, he listened to news reports on the radio and tried to relax. Jon estimates he was caught in the hall for only a handful minutes before he was able to escape. But those harrowing minutes lingered with him into the early morning hours, crushing any hopes he had of sleeping.

“My thoughts go to the people who had to actually witness all the horror in there … ,” he said. “I feel scared just thinking about staying there. All the news about bombs in the venue and more gunmen give me shivers.”