Video: U.S. Olympian Sandi Morris Recalls Being On Lockdown Across From Las Vegas Shooting
U.S. Olympian Sandi Morris posted a video on Twitter informing her fans and followers that she was across the street from the deadly Las Vegas concert shooting that has left 50 people killed and more than 400 hurt.
It is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Morris, an Olympic silver medalist in the pole vault, was on vacation with a few other athletes in Las Vegas. She was in attendance at the Blue Man Group show at the Luxor Resort and Casino, which is just across the street from the country music festival where shots began to erupt on a crowd of more than 22,000 people.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department say that 64-year-old Craig Paddock, a white male from Mesquite, Nev., opened fire on the concert-goers from his hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel at around 10:08 p.m. The concert was taking place across the street at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. When police breached the suspect's hotel room, he was found dead.
"This was probably one of the scariest things I've experienced in my life, if not the scariest," Morris said in a video. "We were at a show—The Blue Man Group—and after the show ended, they announced that the building was going on lockdown but they didn't tell us why at first. But as we were sitting there waiting for how long we weren't aware of, I saw on Twitter that there was a shooting going on across the street. As we were sitting there, you could hear the whispers start as people were looking at social media and started to figure out what was going on. They had us on lockdown in there for five hours and we didn't know when they were going to let us out but eventually that fifth hour rolled around. This was after they passed out bananas that were left over from the show that they didn't use during the show because they mash up bananas and shoot them at the crowd in the show. They gave us water and passed out blankets and things like that. I thought for a second we were going to spend the entire night in there but they finally let us out at like 4:30 a.m. We had to walk back to our hotel through Las Vegas and it was a ghost town. It was very surreal and odd."
Watch her full comments below:
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reports that there is no specific credible threat to other public U.S. venues after the Las Vegas shooting. Police have not yet determined a motive in the shooting.
