Kathy Boggio, AP Psychology and math teacher, recounts her story of survival, and human love from strangers on the night of the Vegas shooting.

The Express: Why were you originally in Las Vegas, and who did you go with?

Kathy Boggio: I was there for Route 91 because I’m a huge country music fan, and I went with my husband and two of our closest couple friends, Steve and Nicole. Nicole’s like a sister to me, and her daughter Ryan was there with her friend Danielle for her 21st birthday as well.

The Express: Before the shooting started happening what was the music festival like?

Kathy Boggio: Oh my gosh, one of the best concerts; we were having so much fun. I got a selfie with Ashley McBride… Amazing. It was amazing. Every person that had their show on rocked it, absolutely rocked it.

The Express: What happened and where you before and after it started?

Boggio: We had a suite so we were to the left of the stage, and the suites are kind of trailers so you can go outside and sit or stand inside [or on the] patios; it’s like a VIP section. So we were there for the whole concert. I went out to give them [my friends] hugs and kisses and take a quick picture.

I went back into the suite. All my friends are there, and my husband. I said, ‘You know, I need to use the restroom real quick, I’ll be back.’ I left my purse, went to the bathroom, which was right behind the suites, and I heard like a light pop pop pop. I was kind of like, is that fireworks? It was weird, I didn’t know– nobody knew– what it was. I hear other stories now, and everybody kind of went, ‘What was that?’ and so I went into the bathroom stall, and then it was (makes sounds like repeating gunshots) duh duh duh duh duh, duh duh duh duh duh, duh duh duh duh duh, and you can hear screaming. I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s terrorists here,’ and I hurried up and I ducked next to the toilet, and listened to the duh duh duh, duh duh duh duh duh, duh duh duh duh duh. Hearing the screaming, I heard the music stop, and then there’s a pause. When the shootings were happening, he would pause the same amount of time every time. So it’s just duh duh duh duh {pause} duh duh duh duh duh. I couldn’t tell you the amount of time, but it was always a pause.

So that round hit and I stayed crouched next to the toilet, pissed myself, and when it paused, I opened the door and there was a lady standing there like in shock. I go, ‘I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what’s happening.’ She just looked at me and then the second round hit and she just dove and I shut the door. You can hear the bullets hitting the metal because everything’s metal and the sound of bullets hitting metal. Again in my mind, terrorists are just walking around, just going duh duh duh duh duh, duh duh duh duh duh, duh duh duh, we’d had no idea where it was coming from, so second round hit. I said ‘Okay there’s terrorists walking around, next is gonna be bombs,’ because you see it on the news, they shoot and throw bombs. I’m like, ‘I have to get out of here,’ so the next pause, I open the door, and I ran out.

People were running, so I obviously started running in the same direction, and then (makes sounds like repeating gunshots), that round hit. People drop every time the rounds start, people just drop, but there’s a difference between dropping and being shot. That’s when the girl, I’m gonna say not any further than you, she got shot next to me and she dropped. I’m just laying there, looking at people dropping around me, and then there’s a pause, and people were helping her. I ran again, and the next round hit and I was right next to a food truck, and so people just started diving under the food truck for that round. There’s space between the seat and the back, you know it’s like a van, so everybody huddled there, and that was the first time that you know, our faces were together, and we’re making eye contact with each other. Just the terror, the confusion, the fear, just holding each other, waiting for that round to stop. And again, we don’t know what’s going on, we don’t know who this person is, we don’t know when it’s gonna hit again.

So we’re in the food truck for that round and then when that round stopped we all looked at each other and we said ‘Okay, we need to get out, we need [to get to the parking lot]. Come to find out he was shooting where people were exiting, but we didn’t know. Your whole mind is ‘exit, exit, exit,’ but the guy then started aiming at the exit, so when we got out of the truck, we started running again and then another round. At that point there was nothing to hide under so we just fell on the ground, and you could hear when the bullets were hitting bodies. Then that round stopped and at this point we’re now at the parking lot. The next round hit and everybody is just diving under cars, so now I’m under a car, with just crowds of people, we’re all just holding each other, crying, screaming, praying, rocking, and you’re seeing bodies go down around you. And then after that round a man said, I heard a man yelling, ‘My car’s right there, my car’s right there. I’ve got the keys!’ People get in and help [the injured]. So we got out and there’s a guy, whoever was next to us, and I met a couple.

Amid this whole time I don’t know where my husband is, I don’t know where my friends are, I don’t know if these girls [are alive], I know nothing. I’m just running, ducking, and running and ducking, and then there’s a guy with a bullet wound in his stomach and a guy with a bullet wound in his leg, and so we just grabbed them and threw him [man with stomach wound] in the back of the SUV, took [man with] leg wound, threw him into the back seat, carried them in. Then the guy who’s driving the car is like, ‘Google search a hospital Google search a hospital’ and just hit it. So there’s probably 10 of us in that car. So as we’re driving, his leg is just bursting with blood, and a lady was in the back with the [man with the] stomach wound, so she was holding his stomach, and the shirt [I was wearing] I took off because it was like a tank top and his leg was bleeding out. I had a bandeau on underneath, so I took that [the shirt] off and wrapped it around his leg. I was like, ‘You need pressure, you need pressure’, and then finally we found a hospital.

The Express: What happened at the hospital?

Boggio: So we dove out of the car and carried the wounded, and we got them in, and people are just pulling up behind us in their cars, carrying people out, carrying people, just bloody bodies and what you just saw there, but repeated and repeated. We laid our people down, and then went and helped more people, went and laying people down and the dead bodies, and just laying down the dead bodies…So there’s this, finally these nurses came out, in the chaos of it they were able to move the dead bodies out of the waiting room and hallways and start pulling back the people that were bad and there’s so many. There’s so many people that they couldn’t get them all. So I’m just walking around, just as you saw [in the video], just trying to help, and I saw just this shirt laying on the ground somewhere, and I’m wearing my bandeau and I gotta put a shirt on but I just found, it was like an American Flag shirt with blood on it. I just grabbed it and put it on. Then as I was walking around they couldn’t get to everybody and some guys arm was bleeding out, like the guy’s leg, and I was like, ‘Okay, okay, okay.’ I took off my bandeau and wrapped it around there and stayed with him, then they got him back and I went to the next guy who was in shock, and he’s lying just shaking. I just heard you’re supposed to make them make eye contact, and I’m like ‘Okay, okay, look at me. What’s your name? What’s your wife’s name? Do you have kids? Where do you live?’ Just trying to talk to him, that’s supposed to help. I remember that from somewhere, I don’t even know if that’s true, probably on Grey’s Anatomy.

Got him back [from shaking], and then at this time, I still don’t know if anybody was alive that I love. So in between running from victim to victim, I kept saying, ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ because I left my purse [and my phone at the hotel]. So I have no phone and I just borrow theirs and Gary [my husband] doesn’t answer, ‘I’m not shot, I’m not shot, I’m not shot’– he saved that message. ‘You can’t call me, I’m going to keep calling you.’  I finally call my parents in Ohio, and for them it must have been about 4:00 am, and my mom answered and I’m like, ‘Mom, I’m not shot, I can’t find Gary.’ She has no idea what’s going on, she’s like, ‘Kathy, I’m asleep.’ I’m like, ‘MOM, PUT DAD ON THE PHONE NOW’ because he’s a retired LA County Sheriff and he would know, so I was able to explain. ‘You have to keep calling Gary because I can’t.’ I just keep borrowing phones and keep borrowing phones, and then finally, I borrowed a phone and he answered, and that was about two and a half hours later, and he had answered. So his story parallels mine, it’s a whole different story. He answers immediately, ‘Where is everybody?’ [I said]. ‘Ryan is alive, Danielle is alive, Vanessa is alive. Everybody is alive, we’re all alive, I got our phones from the hotel room,’ [said Gary]. ‘We’re [staying] at The Delano, which is a part of the Mandalay Bay, [and they] kicked everybody out. I called, and so now he [Gary] knows where I am, ‘I just want to know where you are’ ‘I’m at the Desert Spring Hospital.’ But I have no phone, no credit cards, I have nothing, and everything is shut down so I’m just stuck there, and then I went and sat next to this couple that I came in the car with. It was them two, and then a guy sitting next to them in a chair with a belt around his leg. You could see a gunshot wound, and I sat, kinda talked to them. We were able to get away, and we hugged each other. Her name was Rose, I can’t remember his name, but we met under the car, and then we went to the hospital together. I only remember her name is Rose because I thought of the Titanic, you know, thinking of Rose going down on the Titanic.

Courtesy of Kathy Boggio

They left, and so I’m sitting there with the guy, and he’s just by himself, just sitting there, with a gunshot wound, just sitting in a chair. So I sat with him, and the nurses came over, checked his vitals, gave him a ‘three,’– so I guess they [the nurses] tag them, I don’t know if it’s that– which meant ‘not life threatening,’ put an IV in him, and I just stayed with him. He was like, ‘You don’t have to stay with me.’ I was like ‘My husband’s safe, I’m safe, I’m not leaving you.’ ‘Okay like, what’s your wife’s name? Where do you live? How many kids do you have?’ He’s turning white and I looked and the IV they put in him, it was bubbling with fluid, they didn’t get it into his vein because could you imagine trying to put IVs into 100s of dying people. So I’m like, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God.’ He’s filling up with fluid in his arm, and I got the nurse. She’s like, ‘Okay okay, I didn’t get a vein.’ She just unhooked the IV and he’s just sitting there, and he started to turn white, started to get nauseous, I handed him something to throw up, and I went and got the nurse, said, ‘You need to get him fluids, his color’s changing. You need to get him fluids.’ I came back, they put a second [IV in his arm]. They left his first IV in and just put a second one in. They gave him fluids, and he started feeling better, and I just rubbed his back, and stayed with him. He said, ‘You don’t have to stay with me,’ and I said, ‘I’m not leaving you.’ Then they took him back and then, in the meantime, my husband couldn’t get to me, because there were no Ubers and no Taxis, so he walked over four miles to get to the hospital to get me. Not knowing if it was terrorists; He was walking the streets not knowing where the threats were. So I saw him since, I had no phone, standing on the other side of the glass because they locked the doors, because they don’t know if it’s terrorists, and he’s just standing out there looking in.

So they unlocked the door, and let me out. At that time there’s a bunch of cops outside the hospital and they said they’re letting some Ubers go through, and my husband had our phones, and he called an Uber, and then the Uber just stopped at hotel after hotel until somebody would give us a room because every hotel was. It is like 2:30 am and they shut down the Mandalay and the Delano so you imagine all those people. We found a room, got in around 3:00 am to 3:30 am, just sat in shock until the next morning. We got an Uber back to where the streets were shut down, to get back to our hotel. We couldn’t go in, and then we turned on the news when we got there and saw them giving the story that it was a lone shooter.

The Express: Have you been in contact with the man you helped?

Boggio: I talked to the guy that I helped in the hospital because I used his phone a couple of times to call my husband, and my husband got a text– not last night but the night before– that said, this came in Wednesday night at 8:14, [insert text from ppt]. He said he sent that out to like four different people. My husband said, ‘Aaron, we’re so thankful to hear from you, you were in the company of a special lady, my wife Kathy. I’ll pass this on and hope we can meet someday.’ So I talked to him last night because, when I saw the text, I couldn’t hold myself together to call him, I wasn’t ready. I called him last night, and he put it on speaker, and his wife was crying and thanking me for taking care of her husband because they were separated. Then they asked if they could be Facebook friends with me, I’m like ‘yes.’ And he said, ‘do you mind if I post something,’ and I said ‘yeah [go ahead],’ and so he posted today and was thanking a lot of people and said [insert photo of post].

I saw so many dead bodies… (it’s good to cry, it’s good to cry, remember you’re not a psychopath- aid) If you can find the lyrics to Aaron Church’s new song, ‘Why Not Me?’, he just wrote it after because he played Friday night, and he was supposed to play at the [can’t hear where because phone], and he didn’t cancel, and he wrote that song, and it says everything… Why me? Why did I not die and they did, these young people, just as far away as you are… These 20 year old kids..Why me? Why did I get to live, and they didn’t?

The Express: Has it been helping you to share your story?

Boggio: Yeah, it does help to share it. Sometimes I go into autopilot. Somebody said, ‘I don’t understand, why would some people run and not help, and I have to tell you right now, there’s not like [garbled]  it’s just your body goes into automatic, and you’re like ‘There’s somebody there bleeding, grab them’. You don’t go ‘Oh, what should I do…’ Never in my mind did I ever think, ‘Oh, what should I do.’ It was always ‘Ok, I gotta dive, ok it’s a lull I gotta run, ok I gotta dive, ok i gotta run, ok you’re bleeding I gotta grab you, ok you’re scared I gotta hug you.’ Like it’s not even…  Nothing even processes, just go. Oh, and I pissed myself again under the car. (because of flight or fight instincts). But yeah, it’s therapeutic to talk about it. I was supposed to do the Color Run tomorrow, and at first I’m like, ‘No I get to, I got to live so I could do these things,’ and my friend’s like, ‘Kathy, there’s crowds, and they shoot with fake guns color at you’. And yeah I don’t think I’ll do that. Yeah the aftermath is… yeah.

[On the day of this interview SJHHS held a planned lockdown drill and evacuation. Kathy Boggio left campus for the drill because she had no classes for the rest of the day.]

When asked by Assistant Principal Darin Jindra if the school should cancel the lockdown drill, Boggio said, ‘Absolutely not, you need to do it. Kids need that feeling that there is a plan, there is something in place.’

Courtesy of Kathy Boggio

The Express: Do you have any first aid training?

Boggio: Grey’s Anatomy (laughs). The other thing though, the guy I was sitting with the gunshot wound to his leg, what I did do with him is I made him take off his belt [from around his leg] to see if he wasn’t bleeding out. Because Ms. Gideon, I don’t know if you know, Ms. Gideon’s brother-in-law just lost his leg, and he had fallen, and it was bleeding out, and he tied a tourniquet and granted, it saved him from bleeding out, but it also killed the leg because there was no blood flow for too long. That I only know from Gideon because the doctor said that’s what killed the leg; however, you would have died if you didn’t. So I said, ‘Let’s take off your belt, and if you don’t start bleeding out let’s leave the belt off’, so that wasn’t training, but that was personal experience. But as soon as we took off the belt he was like, ‘ohhh the pain’ because the rush of blood went down there, and I just held him and I’m like, ‘seriously this I do know, you don’t want to keep it tied off for too long’, and he’s like [hyperventilating] ‘okay, okay, okay’ because pain receptors are firing up. So that was from Gideon. Grey’s Anatomy and Gideon.

I’m going to go see a counselor on Tuesday night because sometimes I feel like ‘I’m fine. I’m so lucky, I’m grateful, I get to live!’ I’m going to just enjoy everything because I get to, because I’m alive! I mean, I know a little bit of my own stuff about psychology, like I’m honoring all my feelings, trying to not stuff them, trying to be in the moment, trying to cry when I want to cry, and when I’m numb, let myself be numb. But I know it’s affected me because I can’t eat, like I eat because I start to get a headache, and I’m like ‘that’s right, I haven’t eaten’, and I have to force food down. When I’m not eating, you know it’s a problem.

And for us [Gary and I], I think it’s confounded of already surviving a tragedy [three years ago their 25 year old son passed away from meningitis], you know, he just had the flu, and then he was dead, 25 years, graduate from Berklee School of Music and just a great kid. So my husband, to see these young people dying around him, and I feel like we just started breathing again three years later as you can imagine, your 25 year old dying, and he died September 10, three years ago, and this just happened less than a month later of the three year anniversary. So we’re going to the counselor we’ve been to, just because she knows that there’s more to the trauma, and my husband’s PTSD I’m sure is off the charts.

The Express:  Do you think you’ve been experiencing any symptoms of PTSD with loud noises and stuff?

Boggio: Yeah, we [Gary and I] went to get a taco and they must have had a news channel – and I’m watching the news, and I can hear the gunshots, and I can feel it physically, but I haven’t been caught off guard yet- and at a taco place we’re both just sitting there and [she demonstrates how they both jump] like that, and it must have been on the TV and it was just pop pop pop, they must have been playing it at some place in the restaurant. At home we were ready for it, there we both jumped and looked at each other. It was Wednesday night that this happened. But the fact that we both jumped at the same time and both looked at each other, so you know it has to be the news. I’m sure it will come. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use a Port-a-Potty again.

The weird thing when I was next to the toilet and when the second round hit, and I was still crouched by the toilet, I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna die, ok, I’m gonna die, ok, dear Lord, please don’t let it hurt too much, take care of my son, take care of my daughter, thank you that I had a beautiful life’ I just kept going ‘don’t let it hurt too much,’ thanks to the ones I love, I’ve had a great life, and that’s all that kept going through my head because there were multiple places I thought I was going to die. Apparently he was shooting, I don’t know if you’ve seen on the news, but they found bullet holes in big diesel gas so i think he was shooting to make them explode at.  So that was right behind us, that would have decimated us, but I guess it didn’t explode. Even at the hospital, I didn’t want to be by the windows because, again, I’m thinking it’s terrorists so if it’s a terrorist, if I were a terrorist, I’d go now, you go to this hospital, you go to this one, and I would set up my terrorist at the hospitals, right? So I kept thinking, ‘when are they coming back?’ It wasn’t until I got to my room and we turned on the news that we had any idea that it wasn’t terrorists.

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.