KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Steve Yeo was one of thousands at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas watching Jason Aldean perform Sunday night.
"Then all of a sudden you hear like, firecrackers going off," he said.
Police say Stephen Paddock opened fire on the crowd from a room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, killing more than 50 people and injuring over 500.
"You see little yellow sparks that come out of the window. You're looking at them and I thought well what idiot is shooting fireworks up at Mandalay Bay right now? It never dawned on me that its bullets coming out," Yeo recounted. "When the police officer said run, get in, it's a shooter, that's when it all became real at that moment."
Yeo remembered the sound too.
"You'd just start hearing the clips explode and you didn't know if it was one, two, three gunmen. I mean there were six, seven, eight times that you could hear the machine guns going off," he explained. "Sitting ducks is what comes to my mind. We were all just sitting ducks down there."
He described the mantra he kept repeating in those first moments as, "Don't stop, keep running. There were people balled up crying and I'm just like guys you've got to get up. You've got to run."
This is the third year in a row Yeo and his wife have gone to Vegas for the country music festival. Sunday night she stayed in their hotel room because she had a migraine, a fact he's eternally grateful for. "So glad my wife wasn't there. That was the worst part. If she would've been there, whole different story."
