Story transcript

Heather Gooze says she stayed by Canadian Jordan McIldoon's side for more than five hours after he succumbed to his gunshot wounds on Sunday night, even though she'd never met the man.

"I couldn't just leave him by himself," Gooze told As It Happens host Carol Off. "I don't know, I just couldn't leave him."

Gooze said she was bartending at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas on Sunday night when shots started to ring out.

"I had a British gentlemen's credit card in my hand and was like swiping it through the machine to charge for his Budweiser when all of a sudden there was thousands of people pushing their way into the bar and screaming and saying, 'Shooter!'" she said.

"It sounded like thousands of fireworks going off."

She was about to run herself, she said, but "something inside of me made me stop."

That's when hoards of injured people began pouring into the bar, many of them carried on makeshift stretchers by other festivalgoers, she said.

"People were holding people," she said. "This guy was dragging a guy by the fingers through the bar because he had gotten shot."

She'd just finished helping to load one man with a head wound into the back of an ambulance when a group of men came in with a bleeding young man stretched out on a piece of security fence, she said.

They dropped him off with Gooze and went back out into the streets in search of more victims.

People scrambled for shelter at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival after gunfire broke out.

Gooze held the man's hand.

"I felt his fingers, like, tighten and then loosen," she said.

She checked his vitals. She said he was already dead.

Then his phone started ringing.

It was his friend. She learned the dead man's name was Jordan McIldoon, and that he was a 23-year-old man from Maple Ridge, B.C.

She said she wrote his name on his arm, and she looked him up on Facebook and started messaging his family.

His phone rang again. This time it was McIldoon's mother.

I would never want myself or one of my family members to be left alone. - Heather Gooze