Chaos on the strip

By BRIAN WALKER

Staff Writer

Jaclyn Hitchcock will never forget the images of her friends from Sunday night's mass shooting in Las Vegas.

Hitchcock, a 2010 Post Falls High graduate who works at a barbecue restaurant at Treasure Island down the strip from Mandalay Bay, said she saw on social media friends rushing to safety to the airport, UNLV's Thomas and Mack Center and other places.

"People were running in every direction," she said during an interview Tuesday with The Press.

A friend of Hitchcock's who was at the outdoor Route 91 Harvest Festival near Mandalay Bay posted that she was safe. She also posted photos of her injuries that occurred while fleeing the scene.

"Her legs were dirty, cut up and bleeding from being on the ground and trampled," Hitchcock said.

Hitchcock didn't think much of it at first when a co-worker mentioned at work that there had been a shooting on the strip. Treasure Island is on the other end of the strip from Mandalay Bay.

"To be honest, there are shootings in Vegas quite often," she said.

Even when ambulances and police zoomed past Treasure Island’s open windows, Hitchcock said she didn't consider it too unusual.

Then the social media floodgates opened to conflicting reports about where the shooter was, if there were multiple shooters and scenes, and other details. The reports caused mass hysteria, she said.

At one point, she heard the shooter could be near the garage where she parks her vehicle.

"Social media got everyone on edge," she said. "When it kept getting mentioned that they hadn't found the man yet, we closed our windows. I was a little shaken looking out the windows, making sure I didn't see anything too crazy. You didn't know what to believe for a while — whether it was some big plan unraveling and this was just the beginning or what."

"Then, when I heard that it was at Mandalay Bay, I thought that made total sense (with the outdoor Route 91 Harvest Festival happening)."

Social media also showed the realities of the event, she said.

"In videos of concert- goers you could hear gunfire, then it was like, 'Oh my God. It is real,'" she said.

While the restaurant where Hitchcock works never closed during the incident, some other nearby businesses and resorts did.

"I thought, if they're closing down, why aren't we?" she said.

Hitchcock said some of her co-workers and employees of other businesses left work after hearing about the shootings, which only added to the chaos on the streets and gridlock on major highways.

"I usually can get home in about 20 minutes, but it took an hour that night," she said, adding that she had to use side roads to escape the mayhem on the strip after work.

The next morning, Hitchcock said she had 14 text messages from friends and relatives, inquiring if she was OK.

She said there's been tremendous support in the Vegas community, from blood drives to fundraisers, for the victims and their families.

"The community down here is all in," she said.