He lay peacefully, staring at the sky.
His chest was covered in blood.
Melanie Cooper raced to him Sunday night. “Hang in there buddy,” she said. They were near the stage in the standing-room-only section of the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas.
Cooper tried to administer CPR. She kept talking to him. “Hang in there,” she said.
“I couldn’t do anything to help him,” Cooper, 51, a 16-year veteran of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said Monday. “There was nothing there. It was horrible. It was the most traumatic thing I’ve ever been through.”
She didn’t know his name, or anything about the man who looked at the sky.
She touched his face and watched him die.
“It still keeps going through my head,” Cooper said. “There was no way to help yourself or anybody else. People were going down all around me. I keep hearing those gunshots going off and off and off and off.”
Cooper went from body to body. She said she tried to perform CPR on six or seven people. All of them died.
She thought she was going to die.
“I didn’t expect to leave that place,” Cooper said. “I was trying to stay low, trying to think about the best way to get out. It was almost like our training, but those are rubber bullets. You get to go home. This was real. I felt completely helpless. I was waiting for bullets to hit me.”
Cooper said she made it to the exit and saw a young woman who was in a panic.
“She was scared and by herself,” Cooper said. “She couldn’t find her friends. She grabbed my arm.”
Cooper led the young woman back to the Hooters Casino Hotel, where Cooper and her boyfriend, Fred Nies of Long Beach, had been staying.
The horror wasn’t over.
A rumor started inside the hotel that a gunman was loose near the Hooters bar.
“There was mass confusion,” Cooper said. “People were diving. Tables were flying. Purses were flying. Keys were flying. I’m picturing someone coming around the bar picking people off.”
Cooper rounded up four or five people and headed upstairs. She had a gun in her room, and she said they all wanted to feel safe.
There was no shooting in Hooters. The rumor had erupted into widespread panic.
When she got back to her room, Cooper got to her gun and her phone. She texted her three adult children.
“I’m good,” she wrote.
Cooper, an investigator, was driving home Monday. She said she plans to be back at work Tuesday.
