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Former Hawaii resident Ashley Quiocho and a couple of friends from work were dancing in front of the concert stage in Las Vegas when the first burst of gunfire went off.
“We’re drinking, having a good time,” she said. “We’re just looking around, and saying, ‘What is that?’ Nothing really made sense.”
Quiocho said the rapid-fire rounds sounded like the rotors of a helicopter, so they dismissed it at first. The band kept playing.
After the second burst, “the band just runs,” she recalled by telephone Monday.
Her first thought was, “‘Oh, my God, is this really happening?’” she said, “So we duck down and everybody is on the ground.”
“The shooting stopped and we run,” she said. “We’re screaming, ‘Run, run!’ We’re running across the field and the shooting happens again, and we kind of duck. There’s no cover or anything.”
When the gunfire stopped, they ran again, but then it started up again.
“We duck, and at that point I got shot,” she said. “I got hit. I saw blood on me. My adrenaline is pumping so hard I didn’t care. I said, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine!’”
Her friend, seeing people on the ground, said, “Oh, my God, they’re dead.”
Ultimately, an ambulance transported Quiocho to the Sunrise Hospital, a trauma center where she said at least 50 people lined the halls of the emergency room.
“People and blood and gurneys, people moaning,” she recalled. “Horrible, horrible.”
She eventually was discharged at 2 a.m. and was able to walk.
“I’m really grateful, and I really got lucky,” she said. “There’s so many things that were way worse.”
Quiocho said the injury to her buttocks is deep, and doctors told her it might be more dangerous to surgically remove the bullet since it is close to arteries.
“The best decision is to leave it in there,” she said. “It’s not that bad.”
She said she is scheduled for surgery this morning to remove bullet fragments in her hand.
Quiocho moved to Las Vegas with her family in 1995, and has often returned to Hawaii for the summers.
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