LAS VEGAS — He'd met her just a few hours before, the woman from California who had come to the country concert on the Vegas strip alone. And Kody Robertson liked her. They hung out for a few hours, danced together, laughed.

They stood together just about in the middle of some 22,000 packed-in and partying country music fans at the Route 91 Harvest Festival late Sunday night when Robertson, a 32-year-old salesman from Hilliard, heard the first pop-pop-pop-pop-pops echo across the Las Vegas Strip. He thought they were fireworks, just a part of the show.

But as people started to scramble and push and tried to figure out just what the hell was really going on, his newfound friend fell. Two shots. Standing next to Robertson, the woman — her name is Michelle Vo, a family friend confirmed to The Dispatch — was one of the dozens shot and killed by 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, the man police say sprayed the concertgoers with gunfire from an automatic weapon out of a window on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

"She just went down," Robertson said by phone Monday morning as he sat in the waiting room of Vegas's Sunrise Hospital for word about Vo's fate.

He later learned about 2 p.m. (Ohio time) that Vo was among at least 59 killed in the deadliest mass shooting in this country's modern history. Authorities said at least 527 others were injured either by the shooting or in the ensuing stampede and chaos.

Robertson, the brother of Dispatch photographer Kyle Robertson, said as soon as he realized the direction from which the gunfire was coming, he looked up and saw flashes from the Mandalay Bay hotel window. He threw himself on top of the injured Vo in an effort to shield her. The gunfire continued raining down on the now-panicking crowd. People ran. People screamed. They hid under bleachers and anything they could find. There would be a second of pause, then more gunfire.

"We'd run and duck and run and duck and run and duck," Robertson said. "Your instinct is to run, to get away from that, but there were so many people, too many people down all over who needed help."

This was Robertson's second year at the outdoor Vegas concert, essentially a fenced-off venue in a parking lot. He had arrived Thursday with several friends, including 32-year-old Dave Knerem, a teacher at Columbus City Schools' West High School. They had split up at the concert earlier Sunday night and were not together when the violence erupted. They all texted and called one another to mark themselves safe as soon as they could.

Monday, Robertson had delayed his flight home so that he could wait at the hospital until word came about Vo; Knerem continued on.

Not long after dawn broke, Knerem was among those packed into Gate 23 of McCarran International Airport awaiting their flight to Columbus. Most were still in shock. People comforted one another. Strangers offered to buy others food and drinks. Knerem sat and awaited his boarding call, the gunshots and three days of country music still ringing in his ears.

Like so many others, he initially thought firecrackers made the flashes and the noise. Then he heard someone yelling what he thought was, "There’s a shooter, there's a shooter.”

The 6-foot-3, 205-pound Knerem was knocked to the ground by other concertgoers, and a woman pulled him all the way down onto his stomach. He got up and never stopped running until he made it to the MGM Grand Casino.

“It was as scary as you think it would be," he said. "Everyone was running and yelling and no one was sure what to do.”

He had been among the lucky, able to leave the normally packed Vegas strip and catch his flight. Others were not so fortunate. They were left behind to wander about and try to figure out what comes next. Even as the sun came up, there were bodies in trucks, blood on the pavement, people crying on the side of the road. Others yelled out the names of the loved ones they'd become separated from. Armed police guarded every casino on the strip.

Adriana Sandoval, 32, of Los Angeles, was with a friend at the concert in the middle of the crowd, near the stage. She heard the shots and noticed flashes from the window of the Mandalay Bay. Sandoval and her friends were knocked to the ground three times by others who were fleeing. Time after time, Sandoval said, she scrambled to her feet and ran until she reached a hot dog stand where the friends took cover.



“The shots never stopped; they just kept coming,” she said.



Giselle Kurianski and Liz Gonzalez, two 20-year-old friends from Whittier, California, were among the masses. Early Monday, they held onto one another as they walked the strip, wrapped in plain white beach towels that workers at the Hooters Casino & Hotel had handed out to those in need.

Kurianski said that when the shots rang out she and her friend threw themselves on the ground. “It was like a video game where you would hear shots and they would stop and then they would start again. We then got up and ran. Everyone was pushing and shoving.”

The two women hid in nearby bushes for nearly an hour, responding to loved ones who were reaching out through social media and text messages on their phones. Other witnesses described forcing their way into nearby hotels and cowering under tables or cramming together in underground storage areas until the madness had settled and people crept back out to see what was left.

Robertson, though, had a life to try to save. He and others carried Vo from the chaos, all performing CPR to try to save a stranger. The bodies, Robertson said, were everywhere. Five here, 15 there.

"You can't even process it," he said. "Husbands and wives on top of one another just screaming, people crying and trying too hard to get someone to wake up."

In the throngs of the dead, the fleeing, the injured left behind, a man in a pickup stopped and Robertson and the others (they identified themselves to him as a paramedic and several military veterans) put Vo in the truck bed with others. The driver sped away toward a hospital.

That's the last Robertson saw of her.

Before finding out that Vo had likely been taken to Sunrise Hospital, he had walked to get her phone from the people who had found it and answered when he called it. Then he walked back to his hotel — about an hour in the dark, alone. It was along that route that he had his first few minutes to breathe, to think.

"Your mind, you can't even know ... " he said Monday, his voice trailing off. "There was anger, sadness, crying. It's an up-and-down roller coaster. You just don't even know."

He was only beginning to try and make some sense of the senseless Monday. He ran it all over and over again in his mind, a movie scene that wouldn't stop.

He said the gunfire went on maybe three or four minutes, but that it seemed a lifetime. At one point, he took cover in a nearby bar. But people couldn't stay inside for long. Too many needed help.

He was among those in the crowd who ripped apart metal perimeter fencing and turned sections into makeshift stretchers. After Vo had been sent off in that truck, he grabbed men shot in the leg, women shot all over. He said he and so many others just grabbed whomever they could and applied pressure to their wounds.

"We checked people, tried to see if they were breathing," he said. "And then we'd put a person on what we could and run for help."

"The cries of these people, I'll never forget," Robertson said of those waiting in the hospital for word about their loved ones. He had planned to catch a late flight home Monday night but at the last minute, changed it again.

He stayed one more night because Vo's family was coming to meet him. Maybe, he figured, they could lean on each other.

Dispatch Reporters Hollly Zachariah in Columbus and Mike Wagner in Las Vegas contributed to this story.

hzachariah@dispatch.com

@hollyzachariah

mwagner@dispatch.com

@MikeWagner48

After waiting all night at 2 different hospitals I was just told she didn't survive... R.I.P. Michelle

— Kody Robertson (@Robeko17) October 2, 2017

Just talked with the sister of the girl who was shot right next to me... I don't think I could have a more difficult conversation.

— Kody Robertson (@Robeko17) October 2, 2017

The gut wrenching cries from family members being notified their loved ones have passed is heartbreaking every time

— Kody Robertson (@Robeko17) October 2, 2017

I'm waiting outside a hospital and trying to comprehend everything. Hearing other people's stories about what happened to their loved ones

— Kody Robertson (@Robeko17) October 2, 2017

Words can't describe what happened tonight

— Kody Robertson (@Robeko17) October 2, 2017