M.I.S.D.’s Executive Director of Curriculum, Sharon Carroll attended the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017.

Carroll was attending the concert with her friend Marcy Ross for their birthdays. They had been looking around to see when singer/songwriter Sam Hunt would be in Dallas. They noticed that he would be in Las Vegas performing at a three day event.

“It seemed pretty far-fetched to travel all the way to Las Vegas, but it was in between both of our birthdays. It seemed like something fun and neat to do to celebrate,” Carroll said.

Carroll and Ross were staying at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on the 22nd floor. Everyday the concert would kickoff at 2 p.m. Carroll and Ross would head down around 4-5 p.m. depending on which artist were performing.

“We would spend the morning and afternoon going to different places around Vegas. Then we would head back to the concert area for the night,” Carroll said.

On Sunday they started their normal routine going to eat, sightseeing around Vegas, and then heading down to the festival. They were attending the Jason Aldean concert and everything seemed to be normal, but around 10:08 p.m. gunshots started to go off.

“Jason had just finished a slower song and had walked back onto the main stage to start a faster song,” Carroll said. “He was singing and then we heard ‘pow pow pow’ then it paused so we thought it was just end of the show fireworks. We heard it again, thinking it was more fireworks somewhere, after it happened a third time Jason left the stage.”

The concert lights had been turned off and everyone was ordered to get down. Carroll and Ross grabbed hands and decided to run, they were hiding behind building structures and even underneath an 18-wheeler trailer. They both made phone calls home and ended up about four blocks away from the Mandalay at another hotel casino resort.

“The gunshots were still going off and they were so loud people thought it was coming from the new hotel they were in. People were in panic trying to run towards the exit, I was even knocked over at one point. During all the chaos my friend and I had gotten separated,” Carroll said.

Carroll was in a laundry room closet inside the new hotel, on the sixth floor with two couples from Los Angeles. Carroll’s cell phone died and the couples allowed her to communicate with Ross through their phones to make sure she was okay.

“Once we got back together we started hearing more information about the event. The Mandalay was under lockdown until about 7 a.m. Monday morning, and we were allowed to head back around 8:30 a.m. We packed up and left for the airplane home,” Carroll said.

The chaos, sounds of gunfire, and seeing others being carried away to the hospital will be stuck in their minds forever.

“The sounds will definitely impact our lives. When you are watching television or the videos it does not even began to display how loud it was that night,” Carroll said. “Every time something made a loud noise while we thought we were safe, it would make us jump. Ross and I are so blessed to be back home and we will not stop living because of fear.”