‘Pandemonium’: Saskatoon man describes Las Vegas horror

A Saskatoon couple is safely on their way back to Canada after surviving the Las Vegas shooting massacre.

Dan Rawlyk, owner of Unique Collision Centre, was at the Route 91 music festival Sunday night with his wife Nicolle.

They were near the stage when they began hearing gunshots, which they mistook for firecrackers at first.

“All of a sudden people were saying, ‘down, down, down!'” Rawlyk told 650 CKOM.

“There were people shot beside us, we were part of it all. We were lucky to get out alive.”

As of Monday afternoon, officials said the death toll of the shooting stood at 59 with another 527 injured.

Two people from northwestern Saskatchewan were among those wounded.

The Saskatoon businessman described horrific sights and sounds around him, including people running “with holes in them.”

“I looked beside me and a lady got shot. You could just hear the noise, the skin just ‘smacking,'” he said.

“It was just non-stop pandemonium. People laying down everywhere, I just got snapshots. We just ran and ran.”

Rawlyk said his mind went “numb” as he went into survival mode.

He immediately wanted to run, but his wife wouldn’t move.

“She was in shock … we didn’t know what happened, if she got hit,” he said.

“Those bullets, it was like, ‘holy shit it almost hit my wife.'”

Rawlyk added once they started moving, they ran for about 10 minutes before stopping in their hotel condo complex.

His wife wasn’t hit with a bullet, but the escape was still a rough ordeal.

Rawlyk said others were breaking doors down to get indoors, and there was broken glass all over the place.

“We were hopping big fences, ripping clothes and losing our shoes,” he said.

“It just didn’t matter.”

They ended up in the wrong building at their complex, and hunkered down in a stranger’s room with about 20 other people.

Two of those strangers had been grazed by bullets, and more wounded were being brought in by marines who were in the area to get treatment.

Rawlyk said the massacre will leave a lasting impression, and it will take time for him and his wife to recover.

“We’ll be happy to get back home.”