#*a gunshot is heard offstage*

[pow-creations-headcanons]

Outsiders headcanon. Spoilers for the final

___________________________________________________________________________

O!nico is an angel idc that there's no proof

O!eryns a demon (comeon)

O!nico is also younger then oeca

Nico loved to entertain people, specifically with his 2 best freinds Zoey and cash

Outside the maze nico was an athlete and was in a decent amount of tournaments but once he got to into the zone and somehow ended someone's life.

That got him put in the maze

When he got put into the maze he woke up to eryn helping him up

He couldn't remember anything, anyone or where he was

Nico looked up to eryn and wanted to impress him somehow

After awhile in the clearing they went into the maze nico got quite a few burn scars on his legs and arms after the first few times in the maze

After a few times he goes into the maze with eryn, to try and impress the only person he knew he bridged, got decently far before getting panicked as it turned to night randomly and he fell 100s of blocks down to his death. He tried to fly but his wings were far to small his halo dinted and he hit the floor

Eryn just stared down, it was to dark.

He turned as he heard a groan and bones. He quickly ran around the shifting maze, why was it changing?? It feels like something was trying to end him.

But he eventually found a chest with a netherite kantana and a flute, he was able to defend himself. He was lost he couldn't find the doors

Years later he found them, he couldn't remember, much of nico, but he still here's his voice somehow, the only voice he can hear

He finally found it after years he finds the clearing (the stream takes place)

As eryns in the dark maze the crimson Vines on his arms hurt so much, but he can't get them off. The voice of nico warning him of monsters, it was always right

He used his flute to get past the greiver hall

Found and ignored nik, he reminded him to much of nico, he didn't like it

Climbed the rope

Broke the iron door down in the story room

And got into the memory room. The Vines hurt more as he pushed the hand print

He remembered something about a red Crimson egg? And a war..

He finally got into the final room and he stepped onto.. a stage??

___________________________________________________________________________

The watcher forgot to put chips into eryn and Nico's head

That's why they tried to kill them, there's no point, they won't earn them cash, but eryn ended up escaping somehow..

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THIS IS SO COOL,,, whoever you are anon I love you /p

spoilers under the cut <3

Okay but you know how the Guards/Watchers/Wallmen threatened to shoot the gang when they got to the stage? Eryn takes a few steps out. There's a quiet gunshot and a thump.

Maybe an observant few noticed, but many people would never know about the sixth survivor, killed and dragged offstage for being a mistake that STARR had made.

[nathancable]

My first thought this morning was.

Would one pay someone ONESELF to shoot you (and miss) for a sympathy vote...?

THAT, kids, is the way my head works.

[seositetool]

Donald Trump Rushed From Rally Following Gunshots

Former President Donald Trump was rushed offstage by Secret Service agents at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on Saturday, July 13. The chaos came after a series of loud pops that may have been gunshots were heard. Trump fell to the ground and was covered by agents. In a video of the rally, Trump is visibly bloody around his right ear after standing back up. He halted his Secret Service detail to…

[npi]

Donald Trump injured after shots fired at rally in Pennsylvania; shooting being investigated as attempted assassination

Presumptive Republican nominee and former president Donald Trump was rushed offstage after gunshots were heard at a campaign rally he was speaking at on Sunday. Video from the event, which is widely available, shows Trump bleeding after being helped to his feet by Secret Service agents. Trump was then escorted by agents to a waiting U.S. government sport utility vehicle and whisked away. A…

[iowamedia]

Trump taken off stage at Butler rally after possible gunshots heard

BUTLER, PENNSYLVANIA – JULY 13: Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump is rushed offstage during a rally on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) BUTLER — Shortly after former President Donald Trump took the stage at a rally in Butler at 6 p.m., several loud pops could be heard, and Trump was whisked off the stage. Multiple reports…

[bazaarwords]

a huge, huge shoutout to my dude, @willoghby for this HELLA RAD picture to go with this thing i wrote for korrasami week! 

she is the greatest and y’all need to be checking out all of the awesome stuff she does RIGHT NOW IMMEDIATELY @pichikui because she’s doing a mini comic for inktober and it’s wonderful and EVERYONE NEEDS TO SEE IT

[steves-legs]

“I Swear to God, I’ll Love You Forever” (Tony Stark x Reader OneShot)

**GIF NOT MINE**

Masterlist | Requests

A/N: So I was watching Avengers Assemble last night, and wow this idea came to me. Also loosely based on Pints of Guinness Make You Strong by Against Me! :’-) I died writing this by the way. Don’t come for my neck, I haven’t written in 6 months. Enjoy.

 Song(s): Lullaby / Sia || Pints of Guinness Make You Strong / Against Me!

Warning(s): mentions of possible death, anxiety, mentions of PTSD, reader under severe emotional stress, sad tony, emotions emotions emotions, and TONY FLUFF near the end ig??

 _______________________________

You sat on the main deck of the helicarrier with Hill at your side. You bit your nails nervously, awaiting some form of assurance that your friends were alright. You’d been taken over by Loki just hours ago, and you were a little more than worse for wear. The team had begged you to stay back and of course, you didn’t want them to be worrying about you, so you did. Maria rubbed your shoulder soothingly.

               “They’re going to be alright, Y/N.,” she said although she didn’t sound too sure. Her voice was unsteady despite her stoic expression. You nodded, not even bothering to return the full eye contact. Your attention soon was drawn back to the floor, then your shoes. You worried for your new friends in a way you’d never felt before. You’d known Clint, Tony, and Natasha for years, but somehow you cared for the other Avengers just as much already. If something were to happen to Bruce, Thor, or Steve… You didn’t know what you’d do, especially knowing you’d chosen to sit on the sidelines. And that’s when Fury came stomping out onto the deck, mumbling something about some “stupid-ass decision” Council had elected to make. You’d heard him shout “nuclear strike on the island of Manhattan” and “thousands of people will die”, but that was about it and honestly you were too afraid to ask. Maria gave your shoulder a comforting squeeze before heading directly over to her superior. They talked in hushed voices, concerned looks curtaining both of their faces. Maria glanced back over at you but never returned to your side.

What followed was the most agonizing ten minutes of your life. Radio silence. Then, just as you began to feel hopeful there was no way this day could get any worse, Hill’s voice echoed through the room.

               “Sir, we have a bird in motion! Anyone on the deck, we have a rogue bird! Shut it down! Takeoff is not authorized!” You looked around, panicked, and saw Fury speed out of the room, guns-a-blazin’. You heard multiple loud explosions and gunshots but watched in horror as the jet sped through the clouds anyway.

               “No… No, no, no, no, no…” you exhaled loudly, panic taking over your body. Your heart rate was through the roof and no matter what you did, you couldn’t seem to slow it down. You felt as though the world was spinning around you. As Fury came back in the room, you heard him speaking to Tony.

               “Stark, can you hear me? You got a missile headed straight for the city--” A pause. “—Three minutes… max.” You tried to catch your breath, but you couldn’t help the guilt pulling at your gut.

               Why the hell am I not out there fighting with them? I should be… I shouldn’t be here. This is a coward’s way out. As the news blared on all the computers around you, you felt as if you were falling, falling, falling and you weren’t going to stop anytime soon.

“We have limited information on the team, but what we do know is that billionaire Tony Stark’s iron man……--”

You could feel the room shrinking around you, and if it weren’t for your phone suddenly buzzing in your back pocket, you were positive that you’d be crushed between the walls. You went to check your phone and the name that came up on the phone pulled tears from your eyes. You stood abruptly, answering the phone as fast as you could.

               “Tony… What the hell is going on?!” you shouted into the speaker.

               “I… I’ve got the missile… I’m going through the portal… Y/N… I’m… so sorry.” He said breathlessly, not wasting any time. You could hear the pain in his voice and it made your heart wrench.

               “Tony… Dear god, no. I should’ve never let you talk me into staying. I could’ve been there. You asshole, why’d you talk me out of it!?”

               “Jarvis reminded me that I should probably give you a call. I gotta say, it’s really… really nice to hear your voice right now…” Tony sighed weakly. You could hear the smile in his voice. “J is telling me my power’s getting real low.” The reception cut out a little bit near the end, and you felt like you were being crushed by the weight of every single word Tony said. Maria watched you curiously, worriedly, and Fury headed over to one of the monitors. He looked as though he wanted to give you space.

               “I don’t know what I’ll do if you don’t come back.” You said softly. You heard the breath hitch in his throat.

               “I love you, Y/N. So much. If I don’t come back, I need you to know that, okay? I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone, and I mean anyone, as much as I do you. And I swear to God, I’ll love you forever.”

               “You really are a dick.”

Tony’s broken-up laugh sent you into a mess of tears. You sniffled slightly.

               “Don’t cry, angel.”

               “I’m gonna punch you in the stomach for telling me at a moment like this.”

               “What better moment to tell the girl I’ve loved for years?” Tony asked, almost nonchalantly. You couldn’t help but crack a smile. You laughed a little, tears streaming down your cheeks. You breathed a little, the static sound becoming louder. You could hear what you guessed was the strange ear-ringing sounds of the portal get louder and louder. Tony grunted in what you knew was excruciating pain.

               “I think it’s time to go…” he said, and you could tell he was panicking, more so than you.

               “Make me proud.” You said. “I’ll love you forever.”

               “I always try. I’ll see you soon, I-- promi—"

And the call dropped. Either the suit had run out of power or Tony had made it through the portal, where cell towers obviously couldn’t reach. Everyone around you cheered; he’d made it through the portal with the missile. But you were thinking of the next few moments… The fall would kill him. Or the portal could close. You dropped your phone, reality suddenly hitting you like a sack of bricks. There was a large chance you’d never see him again. You sat back down, unable to stand any longer. Maria came to your side, almost immediately, and put her arms around your shoulders. You put your head in your hands, waiting until you weren’t crying anymore to wipe your eyes and show your face again. You put on a brave face, turned to Maria, and said, “I have to head to Manhattan. Whether it’s street cleanup, talking to officials, or clearing the Avengers’ names. I have to go.” She nodded, understandingly.

 Weeks Later

               “The Avengers Initiative is a collection of the ablest individuals to defend our planet Earth from imminent global threats. These individuals have come together as a functioning response team to said threats which are too great for humankind to handle. But enough of that, you all look just about ready to fall asleep hearing me explain what you already know. Now, most of you are probably wondering what I’m doing up here, representing the Avengers Initiative. The reason that I’m up here is that I’m fully human. No special suit, no trust fund” –this earned laughter from the crowd—“no shield, special training, or bow and arrow… and certainly no green skin. I went to your average public high school in Queens. I lived there my whole life. I grew up with my mom, my dad, my little brother, and a dog.

“My life was like yours. I hold that chapter of my life near and dear. It’s in my heart and always will be. And although my life has changed drastically since then, I am always looking out for people like me, people like my mother, my father, and my brother. People who aren’t superhuman, specially trained, or billionaires. I believe that with the Avengers on our side, defending our lives, we have no reason to worry. Our lives are in good hands with these people. They love our Earth, they love the streets we walk on just as much as we do… and ultimately, we all have the same goal: global protection. Now that we are all fully aware of extraterrestrial beings, that’s something we need now more than ever. Protection. For our families. For our mothers, fathers, siblings, children, and, yes, our dogs too. It’ll take time, it’ll take getting used to. The truth is, I don’t need each and every one of you to take what I’m saying and accept it, to trust it. It’d be the smart thing to not quite trust us yet… Give us a chance to show you why you can. But these past few weeks, these past events in this city marked the end of an era… and with the end of one era comes the beginning of another. Welcome to the future... A world protected!” You called, raising your hands up. The crowd cheered loudly, excitedly. You’d done your job: clearing the Avengers’ names in the people’s eyes. As you stepped offstage, Happy pushed you in the direction of the BMW awaiting you. You waved at the crowd, smiling, and blowing kisses as you climbed into the backseat of the vehicle. To your total surprise, Tony sat there in the backseat, waiting for you.

“Hey there,” he smiled. You felt your heart skip a beat. You didn’t say a word, just pulled him into a tight hug. You hadn’t seen him since you flew out to Manhattan and discovered that Tony was still alive; Bruce had saved his life. You had a lot of cleanups to do outside of Stark Tower, and Tony had decided to completely remodel, as well as begin working on rebuilding the city. He chuckled softly, returning the hug. “Missed you too, angel. I saw the entire speech. You did amazing… Stellar.”

“I think I might just be spending too much time around you, Mr. Stark.”

“I don’t think that’s a bad thing, Y/L/N.,” he said smiling like an idiot.

You opened your mouth to speak, but before you could get your quip out, Tony grabbed your face in his hands and kissed you softly but passionately.

               “I’ve seriously missed you so, so much.” He said more seriously this time. You knew your cheeks were bright red by how warm your face felt.

               “I missed you too, Tony. But… probably not as much as you seem to have missed me.” You teased, and he feigned offense. He leaned back, hand on his chest, and gasped audibly.

               “And to think, I came all this way for you to just reject me!”

               “You literally had Happy drive you here.”

               “Not my fault you decided to hold your speech in the rubble and ruins of a building we blew up…” Tony said cockily.

               “I wish you were up there with me.” You said. Tony took your hand and squeezed it.

               “I can’t face a crowd of people and talk about how… how that made me feel.” He said, and you could tell he was trying his best to keep his voice steady. You placed your other hand over his and leaned your head on his shoulder.

               “It’s going to be alright, Tony. I promise. That’s never going to happen to you again. And if it does, if everything around you falls apart, I’ll still be here. And if you need proof of that, just look at the past three years. I’ve been here.” You promised. You held up your right pinky in front of the two of you. He locked his left with yours.

               “If you’re wrong, you owe me $10,000. For emotional trauma.” He said, then let your hand go. You smirked.

               “If I’m wrong, I can write you an IOU and a 10-page apology.”

               “Deal.” Tony agreed, then sighed. “Do you swear you’re here to stay? You’re not going to go away?”

               “We did just pinky swear, didn’t we?” you asked. Tony smiled, laying his head on top of yours.

               “I love you forever, Y/N.”

               “I love you too, Tony.”

_______________________

Feel free to lmk how y’all like this! Make sure to like & reblog!

Also, send me some requests here :)

[sidpah]

Cold War Souls

Blessedly alive, outside in the bright morning haze, a large field stretches green and full before me. Megaphone in hand, from a tall nail and glue stage, white flag waving behind, a voice peals out from my throat to a mass of half-clothed natives. I am paying my recompense…

“All these Cold War Souls, you, you, you! Selling yourselves for an empty political promise and a slice of stale bread! – The body is a market, the world an industrial stripmall – Poor panicked souls clinging to ghosts of pleasure, long extinct. Driven to scavenge, suckling rain pipes, forgetting every lake they pass, they dry up, crumble, sell themselves for air…” I am so inspired by Jerry Greenestreet’s vibrancy I co-opt his whole patina…

“Oh, but to be sovereign. To be steadfast. To be dreaming of daybreak… To be willing to walk through the desert all alone, all open and pliable and fragile. This heavy armor crumbling into sand; will for survival forsaken in peace. To enter the tunnel and not think about the mountain or ocean that’s swallowing you whole… Saints and Patriarchs cling, cling, cling to tradition, while Saviors and Soldiers burn for their collective faith. (But who trusts a man with a Russian automatic beaded on your eyebrow? Who trusts a man cutting a D for Damnation into your chest with his short scepter?) Their pockets are overflowing but their arms are too short to reach their own spoils… Sages and Heretics stand fast behind one opinion, but a Martyr knows that only one is all it ever ever ever takes. Where the Piper plays, neither wonder nor mystery find nutrients to grow – Steel and granite anthems – Plowing eighteen miles an hour over cemetery fences – straight through mosque walls and footbaths, tiled fountains and the kneeling faithful – Surrounded by three hundred and sixty degrees of rocket-proof alloy the fires of Hell don’t seem so hot! Lies justified by injections of fluoride and testosterone – Drink up plenty Pride! Eat much Loyalty to make muscle strong! You’ve heard them on the streets, you’ve heard them on the radio waves, you’ve heard them in your fitful dreams! ‘What’s right is right, what’s left is mine, what’s black is burnt; I’ll hear no goddamned debates!’ Pilgrims chant, repeating the names of their god on ninety-nine clay beads, polished by friction of finger pads, friction of mind on mind, burning itself out until it relinquishes control and reveals the nature of their unified god – Everyone’s unified god – Tanks rain the melody of chaos, screeches of twisting steel and crumbling mortar – Singing along staves of fetid retribution: ‘Any line they lay out, you’ll suck it down whole’ those voices tell us without saying a goddamn word... They’re selling you nine pounds of ether bronzed with fool’s gold, and eleven soldiers waving a flag at half-mast to distract all the cameras as the carnage slips past – And the rockets slip past and caskets slips past and the gospel slips past and more Cold War Souls slip into the reinforced bear hug to slumber away that long winter with red skies and brown grass and a black halo dispersing above mountain peaks –”

“So let’s lean upon the leaders and judges! Let their rhetoric and lies be the wind for our sails! Let it push us to find ourselves a New Land far away from their covert wiretaps and black sites torturing children in the cursed name of liberty! We’ll draw upon our weakest moments and display them sans the obligatory shame… Sometimes it feels a disgrace just living off water and fruit… We’ll laugh, comparing scars, tracing the light outlines on each other’s limbs and forget how they’d ever come to be. We’re all the squeamish products of billions of manipulating fingers molding us in their own morbid self-image… So fuck being lazy! And I say fuck playing sane to continue the contrived cellophane ugliness of our suburbanite ideals…. Let’s listen for each cell in our skin to join together a roar like city streets revolting and turbines taking flight just to know there is life within us! And let’s realize as one that between feeling and craving exists the root of all our pain, and let’s cut it away like wheat from chaff!”  

I’m not convinced they can understand a word I say, but I continue, too driven to wrap up my prelection…

“Why else do we bother to pretend someone’s listening? That they’re motivated and planning a movement we’re all awaiting, though secretly a little terrified it might actually come to fruition? – (change is too unpredictable to be comfortable) – Why pretend that divine inspiration is a communicable disease? And that epic shifts really happen by tiny imperceptible degrees?...”

I notice then, a man very much out of place. He wears a white short-sleeved button down linen/cotton blend it looks like from here, and cargo shorts, green like he’s on a Polynesian vacation. As I talk he seems to be looking uneasily around and he’s starting to give me the fantods because I realize that on more than one occasion it’s appeared that he’s been speaking covertly into a watch which means he’s either undercover or deranged and I’m not looking for competition on either front, so I decide to pack it up for real…

“We’ll recount our greatest defeats, caving in to Easy. When we daydream the long amatory lists of If Onlys and Someday I Wills, when they’ve all turned stale in our midlife sobriety and seen as feeble pipedreams that’ve smoldered down leaving us filled with cancer and emphysema, oxygen tanks slung across our bony shoulders… Let’s run far, far from all the men of promises and power stations, greedy congressmen and their football-headed gold-plated champagne sons, cold rubber sheets on the oily beds of prostitutes and the locust hands of the suffering wretched destitute. Let’s sit here and wait for humanity to slow itself down so we can reconvene with the world, or if she likes, let her wither fondly, adored by handful of children present at her bedside. Her last words reminding us there’s no purpose to life except learning the best way to go about dying…”

My message is garbled. I forget my original point. Why I am up here trying to incite a riot? It was all related to something…

“I give up! I see! I drip stagnancy and chemical noise! – I lack an inherent meaning,” I yell to the congregation. So why can’t I stop looking for assurances in the places where I should be cultivating uncertainty spontaneous and rippled with delight? I don’t expect a miracle will happen. I don’t expect to survive this ordeal… Still, I can’t say I’d mind a sign from some wise old dimensional porta-god… maybe one telling me this plight’s not just a big mistake… Giving me assurance that there’s no road to a distant blistering hell… Gentle reminders that there is a path up to a place where a mountain can still sit still and silent as a still and silent mountain – not erupting spark laughter, not carved out for rumble of tourist picnics and suicidal presence-junkies leaping from jagged cliff-nose… And that an unconcerned breath watched is still just a breath witnessed by the Universe – Inhale the sparks of divinity and exhale the bones that are left!...

“Let’s plant our fields and wait for the Sun to get tired or burn herself out like an enraged toddler crying herself to sleep. No more of our incessant struggle to unearth an ultimate, cerebral meaning to existence when there never was one back when we emerged from her crescent womb… What could we find to pacify our trembling minds except that it’s okay to lie down and collapse into Unity?… And that there is a greater peace in surrender than in revolution…”

A gunshot offstage… a hole above my ear… crowd noise drifting into the ocean… …there is no Moon at the bottom of the sea… she never thought to throw herself into the water… …thick green leaves protruding from the side of my head… drops of animal blood across my cheek… chanting, repetitious vowels in asymmetrical phrases… a low moaning chorus of throats all directed from the same worried mind… A pale distant song… gorgeous in its simplicity, yet I can’t follow more than a note without forgetting what came before… this way I can’t tell whether it’s a melody I’m hearing or a long droning hum… Kalday, Kalday… Just let me sleep here… just let me sleep…

[computacionalblog]

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic.

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-they-thought-it-was-a-shooting-the-real-danger-was-mass-panic/

Nature

Image

Panic spread through the crowd gathered for the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Sept. 29 after people scattering away from a fight stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.CreditCreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cardi B had just stepped offstage after performing for thousands in Central Park when a loud pop pierced the air, sounding like a gunshot and igniting fears of a shooting. Backstage, police commanders scrambled to find out what was going on, and quickly determined no shots had been fired. They rushed to the stage to tell the crowd.

“Remain calm,” Assistant Chief Kathleen O’Reilly pleaded into a microphone, saying the sound had been a fence falling over.

But it was too late. Frantic concertgoers ducked and rushed for a limited number of exits. Some people screamed “Shooter!” Barriers and tall fences were toppled. People fell and were trampled. Many fled shoeless. Some police officers even contributed to the pandemonium, telling people to duck and run.

Though no one was seriously injured, the chaos at the Global Citizen Festival on Saturday jolted law enforcement authorities, security experts and policymakers. It has forced an examination of whether the police need new ways of curbing the risk of crowd panic in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear of attacks.

By the next day, police commanders had determined that it had not been a falling barrier that had started the original stampede. It was, instead, a fight between two people near the stage. As concertgoers scattered, they stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.

Once the false reports of a shooting spread, controlling the crowd “was like putting toothpaste back in the tube,” Chief James R. Waters, the police counterterrorism commander, who had been on the stage, said in an interview this week.

The events in Central Park unfolded nearly a year to the day after a gunman killed 58 people at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas, the worst shooting in modern American history, and one in a series of mass killings at churches, concerts, newsrooms, nightclubs and schools.

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Dozens of concertgoers suffered minor injuries in the onrush of people after popping sounds triggered a scare.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“People subjectively feel like they are in greater danger than ever before,” said Steven Adelman, the vice president of the Event Safety Alliance, a nonprofit trade association.

Police officials have defended their handling of the panic in Central Park, saying the 100 officers at the concert were able to restore order within a few minutes, in part because the department has studied shooting attacks and conducted drills.

But behind the scenes, officials are grappling with what went wrong and are adopting changes that would make events like the annual music festival safer for participants during an emergency.

Those changes include marking the entrances and exits with color-coded lights, installing runway lighting to highlight emergency routes, displaying urgent messages on screens and placing specialized teams of officers in positions high enough for them to oversee the crowd, Chief O’Reilly said on Tuesday.

“Situational awareness will be what we are messaging out next year,” Chief O’Reilly said. “People have to understand where they are.”

The police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said on Wednesday that the police could have moved faster to get a message out to calm the crowd — not just from the stage, but on social media as well. “I think our first hit on social media was about 12 minutes into it,” he said. “We can do better there.”

Mr. O’Neill said the department would “go back and take a look at what happened and see how we can prevent it in the future.”

In New York, the risk of stampedes is acute in places where crowding is common, like tourism sites and transportation hubs. Last year, Amtrak police officers set off a stampede in Pennsylvania Station when they used a Taser stun gun on a man amid delays on New Jersey Transit. Sixteen people were injured as commuters fled.

The panic in Central Park laid bare the challenges for the police and event organizers to effectively communicate with crowds during a crisis, whether it is to calm people after a false alarm, or to safely and quickly evacuate a jam-packed space. On Saturday, police commanders enlisted Chris Martin, the frontman for the band Coldplay, to get the crowd’s attention and to stress that there was no gunman.

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The panic at a Central Park concert came almost exactly a year after a gunman fired into a crowd at an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, killing 58.CreditAlba Vigaray/EPA, via Shutterstock

“When people are scared, one of the first things that shuts down is their hearing,” Chief Waters said. “They get tunnel vision, their focus narrows.”

But in interviews and online posts, dozens of concertgoers laid the blame for the stampede on the festival’s organizers, security guards and the police, whom they said had contributed to the chaos with inaccurate and inadequate information about what had occurred and what the crowd should do.

“Part of the reason there was pandemonium was because the police were telling people to run and duck,” said Maria Benedek, of the East Village. “You would think in our city that people would be prepared for a situation like this.”

Several concertgoers said there were too many barriers on the Great Lawn and not enough signs. Others said the organizers seemed to have no formal evacuation procedure. “People didn’t know where to go,” said Shannon Flynn, 41.

The flood of complaints led to an apology on Sunday from Global Citizen, the event organizer. Andrew Kirk, a spokesman for Global Citizen, a charity that has a goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, declined to comment on the group’s safety and security plans.

There was a time when loud popping sounds might not have alarmed the concertgoers who gathered on the park’s Great Lawn. But that has changed in the era of deadly mass killings, concertgoers said, and people immediately assumed there had been an attack.

Callers began flooding the city’s emergency hotline with reports of gunfire at the festival at 7:31 p.m., while the crowd of about 15,000 people was waiting for Janet Jackson to perform, the police said. Chief Waters said many of the 911 calls were people who were not at the concert relaying what they had heard from people inside.

Image

The chaos has forced law enforcement officials to examine whether they need new ways of curbing the risk of panic in crowds in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“We saw people run, fall and get trampled; people sitting down got trampled,” said Scott Hernandez, 39, a real estate agent who was standing near the back of the venue. “I heard someone say, ‘It’s a shooter,’ then we heard what sounded like gunshots, but were just other barriers being torn down. It was kind of a chain reaction. It snowballed.”

At least 37 people suffered minor injuries like sprains, cuts and bruises, the Fire Department said.

Gisselle Vazquez, 19, was standing near the front of the stage with two friends and her cousin when she heard popping noises from about 10 feet away that she mistook for fireworks.

The crowd started running. Ms. Vazquez grabbed her cousin’s hand and fled, struggling to keep up. Then someone shouted for them to duck, she said, and people began falling on top of them. She remembered thinking, “I could die right now.”

Allen Devlin, 23, a journalism student at Columbia University, saw the commotion and began recording video at 7:29 p.m. on his cellphone that shows panicked concertgoers running away from the stage in droves as police officers ran toward it. “Why are we running?” one woman said in the video.

Ms. Flynn said she heard someone shout “Shooter! Shooter! Shooter!” and the police telling people to run. So she did. “Nobody knew what was going on,” she said.

The crowd also swept up Gracie and Ellie Shanklin, teenage sisters from Millburn, N.J. They were carried along with it before running into an obstacle: the metal barriers that separated the sections and surrounded the Great Lawn.

“There were so many keeping us in the festival,” Gracie, 16, said. “It was dark, too. That didn’t help.”

Image

The police enlisted the singer Chris Martin, far left, to get the crowd’s attention and stress there was no gunman.CreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The chaos lasted for nearly two full minutes on Mr. Devlin’s video before Chief O’Reilly took the microphone.

“We’ve got to get these barriers open, guys; there are people getting crushed,” she told the crowd. “Go east, or west, or backward. There’s no way for you to move to the front.”

Katherine Lee, of Astoria, Queens, and her fiancé were sitting with their shoes off on a blanket near the edge of the lawn. They tried to stand, but the rushing crowd was too close and the couple were trampled. Ms. Lee’s head hit the ground as people walked over her, she said, and her fiancé, who was also knocked down, watched helplessly in horror.

“It was the most terrifying part of the experience — feeling bodies hitting me and being walked on,” she said.

They finally escaped the park with other concertgoers after climbing over an eight-foot-tall fence. Ms. Lee sprained an ankle.

By 7:39 p.m., the police had ruled out gunshots and were ready to restart the show, Chief Waters said, but a problem with electrical power prolonged the interruption. “Our thought process was, the quicker I can get Janet on stage playing music, the quicker we get back to normalcy,” he said.

Chief Waters recalled telling the organizers that the show must go on. “Anything short of that would be, A, failure or B, surrender,” he said. “That’s not what the people came to see. That’s not what the performers came to do.”

At 8:28 p.m., the Twitter account linked to the Police Department’s public information office shared a photo of people waiting for the last performances. By then, most concertgoers had left the park and did not return or were not allowed back in.

Mr. Devlin remained at the concert with his friends until a Canadian singer, The Weeknd, closed the show at 10:30 p.m. The police presence had surged, he said, and scores of officers patrolled the entrances while paramedics removed people on stretchers.

“It never really returned to normal,” he said.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Jan Ransom contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Follow Ashley Southall and Ali Winston on Twitter: @AshleyAtTimes and @awinston

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Noise Wasn’t Gunfire, but Crowd’s Panic Was Real, and Dangerous

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/nyregion/central-park-concert-stampede.html |

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic., in 2018-10-04 10:41:13

[captainblogger100posts]

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic.

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-they-thought-it-was-a-shooting-the-real-danger-was-mass-panic/

Nature

Image

Panic spread through the crowd gathered for the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Sept. 29 after people scattering away from a fight stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.CreditCreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cardi B had just stepped offstage after performing for thousands in Central Park when a loud pop pierced the air, sounding like a gunshot and igniting fears of a shooting. Backstage, police commanders scrambled to find out what was going on, and quickly determined no shots had been fired. They rushed to the stage to tell the crowd.

“Remain calm,” Assistant Chief Kathleen O’Reilly pleaded into a microphone, saying the sound had been a fence falling over.

But it was too late. Frantic concertgoers ducked and rushed for a limited number of exits. Some people screamed “Shooter!” Barriers and tall fences were toppled. People fell and were trampled. Many fled shoeless. Some police officers even contributed to the pandemonium, telling people to duck and run.

Though no one was seriously injured, the chaos at the Global Citizen Festival on Saturday jolted law enforcement authorities, security experts and policymakers. It has forced an examination of whether the police need new ways of curbing the risk of crowd panic in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear of attacks.

By the next day, police commanders had determined that it had not been a falling barrier that had started the original stampede. It was, instead, a fight between two people near the stage. As concertgoers scattered, they stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.

Once the false reports of a shooting spread, controlling the crowd “was like putting toothpaste back in the tube,” Chief James R. Waters, the police counterterrorism commander, who had been on the stage, said in an interview this week.

The events in Central Park unfolded nearly a year to the day after a gunman killed 58 people at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas, the worst shooting in modern American history, and one in a series of mass killings at churches, concerts, newsrooms, nightclubs and schools.

Image

Dozens of concertgoers suffered minor injuries in the onrush of people after popping sounds triggered a scare.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“People subjectively feel like they are in greater danger than ever before,” said Steven Adelman, the vice president of the Event Safety Alliance, a nonprofit trade association.

Police officials have defended their handling of the panic in Central Park, saying the 100 officers at the concert were able to restore order within a few minutes, in part because the department has studied shooting attacks and conducted drills.

But behind the scenes, officials are grappling with what went wrong and are adopting changes that would make events like the annual music festival safer for participants during an emergency.

Those changes include marking the entrances and exits with color-coded lights, installing runway lighting to highlight emergency routes, displaying urgent messages on screens and placing specialized teams of officers in positions high enough for them to oversee the crowd, Chief O’Reilly said on Tuesday.

“Situational awareness will be what we are messaging out next year,” Chief O’Reilly said. “People have to understand where they are.”

The police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said on Wednesday that the police could have moved faster to get a message out to calm the crowd — not just from the stage, but on social media as well. “I think our first hit on social media was about 12 minutes into it,” he said. “We can do better there.”

Mr. O’Neill said the department would “go back and take a look at what happened and see how we can prevent it in the future.”

In New York, the risk of stampedes is acute in places where crowding is common, like tourism sites and transportation hubs. Last year, Amtrak police officers set off a stampede in Pennsylvania Station when they used a Taser stun gun on a man amid delays on New Jersey Transit. Sixteen people were injured as commuters fled.

The panic in Central Park laid bare the challenges for the police and event organizers to effectively communicate with crowds during a crisis, whether it is to calm people after a false alarm, or to safely and quickly evacuate a jam-packed space. On Saturday, police commanders enlisted Chris Martin, the frontman for the band Coldplay, to get the crowd’s attention and to stress that there was no gunman.

Image

The panic at a Central Park concert came almost exactly a year after a gunman fired into a crowd at an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, killing 58.CreditAlba Vigaray/EPA, via Shutterstock

“When people are scared, one of the first things that shuts down is their hearing,” Chief Waters said. “They get tunnel vision, their focus narrows.”

But in interviews and online posts, dozens of concertgoers laid the blame for the stampede on the festival’s organizers, security guards and the police, whom they said had contributed to the chaos with inaccurate and inadequate information about what had occurred and what the crowd should do.

“Part of the reason there was pandemonium was because the police were telling people to run and duck,” said Maria Benedek, of the East Village. “You would think in our city that people would be prepared for a situation like this.”

Several concertgoers said there were too many barriers on the Great Lawn and not enough signs. Others said the organizers seemed to have no formal evacuation procedure. “People didn’t know where to go,” said Shannon Flynn, 41.

The flood of complaints led to an apology on Sunday from Global Citizen, the event organizer. Andrew Kirk, a spokesman for Global Citizen, a charity that has a goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, declined to comment on the group’s safety and security plans.

There was a time when loud popping sounds might not have alarmed the concertgoers who gathered on the park’s Great Lawn. But that has changed in the era of deadly mass killings, concertgoers said, and people immediately assumed there had been an attack.

Callers began flooding the city’s emergency hotline with reports of gunfire at the festival at 7:31 p.m., while the crowd of about 15,000 people was waiting for Janet Jackson to perform, the police said. Chief Waters said many of the 911 calls were people who were not at the concert relaying what they had heard from people inside.

Image

The chaos has forced law enforcement officials to examine whether they need new ways of curbing the risk of panic in crowds in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“We saw people run, fall and get trampled; people sitting down got trampled,” said Scott Hernandez, 39, a real estate agent who was standing near the back of the venue. “I heard someone say, ‘It’s a shooter,’ then we heard what sounded like gunshots, but were just other barriers being torn down. It was kind of a chain reaction. It snowballed.”

At least 37 people suffered minor injuries like sprains, cuts and bruises, the Fire Department said.

Gisselle Vazquez, 19, was standing near the front of the stage with two friends and her cousin when she heard popping noises from about 10 feet away that she mistook for fireworks.

The crowd started running. Ms. Vazquez grabbed her cousin’s hand and fled, struggling to keep up. Then someone shouted for them to duck, she said, and people began falling on top of them. She remembered thinking, “I could die right now.”

Allen Devlin, 23, a journalism student at Columbia University, saw the commotion and began recording video at 7:29 p.m. on his cellphone that shows panicked concertgoers running away from the stage in droves as police officers ran toward it. “Why are we running?” one woman said in the video.

Ms. Flynn said she heard someone shout “Shooter! Shooter! Shooter!” and the police telling people to run. So she did. “Nobody knew what was going on,” she said.

The crowd also swept up Gracie and Ellie Shanklin, teenage sisters from Millburn, N.J. They were carried along with it before running into an obstacle: the metal barriers that separated the sections and surrounded the Great Lawn.

“There were so many keeping us in the festival,” Gracie, 16, said. “It was dark, too. That didn’t help.”

Image

The police enlisted the singer Chris Martin, far left, to get the crowd’s attention and stress there was no gunman.CreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The chaos lasted for nearly two full minutes on Mr. Devlin’s video before Chief O’Reilly took the microphone.

“We’ve got to get these barriers open, guys; there are people getting crushed,” she told the crowd. “Go east, or west, or backward. There’s no way for you to move to the front.”

Katherine Lee, of Astoria, Queens, and her fiancé were sitting with their shoes off on a blanket near the edge of the lawn. They tried to stand, but the rushing crowd was too close and the couple were trampled. Ms. Lee’s head hit the ground as people walked over her, she said, and her fiancé, who was also knocked down, watched helplessly in horror.

“It was the most terrifying part of the experience — feeling bodies hitting me and being walked on,” she said.

They finally escaped the park with other concertgoers after climbing over an eight-foot-tall fence. Ms. Lee sprained an ankle.

By 7:39 p.m., the police had ruled out gunshots and were ready to restart the show, Chief Waters said, but a problem with electrical power prolonged the interruption. “Our thought process was, the quicker I can get Janet on stage playing music, the quicker we get back to normalcy,” he said.

Chief Waters recalled telling the organizers that the show must go on. “Anything short of that would be, A, failure or B, surrender,” he said. “That’s not what the people came to see. That’s not what the performers came to do.”

At 8:28 p.m., the Twitter account linked to the Police Department’s public information office shared a photo of people waiting for the last performances. By then, most concertgoers had left the park and did not return or were not allowed back in.

Mr. Devlin remained at the concert with his friends until a Canadian singer, The Weeknd, closed the show at 10:30 p.m. The police presence had surged, he said, and scores of officers patrolled the entrances while paramedics removed people on stretchers.

“It never really returned to normal,” he said.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Jan Ransom contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Follow Ashley Southall and Ali Winston on Twitter: @AshleyAtTimes and @awinston

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Noise Wasn’t Gunfire, but Crowd’s Panic Was Real, and Dangerous

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/nyregion/central-park-concert-stampede.html |

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic., in 2018-10-04 10:41:13

[blogparadiseisland]

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic.

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-they-thought-it-was-a-shooting-the-real-danger-was-mass-panic/

Nature

Image

Panic spread through the crowd gathered for the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Sept. 29 after people scattering away from a fight stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.CreditCreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cardi B had just stepped offstage after performing for thousands in Central Park when a loud pop pierced the air, sounding like a gunshot and igniting fears of a shooting. Backstage, police commanders scrambled to find out what was going on, and quickly determined no shots had been fired. They rushed to the stage to tell the crowd.

“Remain calm,” Assistant Chief Kathleen O’Reilly pleaded into a microphone, saying the sound had been a fence falling over.

But it was too late. Frantic concertgoers ducked and rushed for a limited number of exits. Some people screamed “Shooter!” Barriers and tall fences were toppled. People fell and were trampled. Many fled shoeless. Some police officers even contributed to the pandemonium, telling people to duck and run.

Though no one was seriously injured, the chaos at the Global Citizen Festival on Saturday jolted law enforcement authorities, security experts and policymakers. It has forced an examination of whether the police need new ways of curbing the risk of crowd panic in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear of attacks.

By the next day, police commanders had determined that it had not been a falling barrier that had started the original stampede. It was, instead, a fight between two people near the stage. As concertgoers scattered, they stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.

Once the false reports of a shooting spread, controlling the crowd “was like putting toothpaste back in the tube,” Chief James R. Waters, the police counterterrorism commander, who had been on the stage, said in an interview this week.

The events in Central Park unfolded nearly a year to the day after a gunman killed 58 people at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas, the worst shooting in modern American history, and one in a series of mass killings at churches, concerts, newsrooms, nightclubs and schools.

Image

Dozens of concertgoers suffered minor injuries in the onrush of people after popping sounds triggered a scare.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“People subjectively feel like they are in greater danger than ever before,” said Steven Adelman, the vice president of the Event Safety Alliance, a nonprofit trade association.

Police officials have defended their handling of the panic in Central Park, saying the 100 officers at the concert were able to restore order within a few minutes, in part because the department has studied shooting attacks and conducted drills.

But behind the scenes, officials are grappling with what went wrong and are adopting changes that would make events like the annual music festival safer for participants during an emergency.

Those changes include marking the entrances and exits with color-coded lights, installing runway lighting to highlight emergency routes, displaying urgent messages on screens and placing specialized teams of officers in positions high enough for them to oversee the crowd, Chief O’Reilly said on Tuesday.

“Situational awareness will be what we are messaging out next year,” Chief O’Reilly said. “People have to understand where they are.”

The police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said on Wednesday that the police could have moved faster to get a message out to calm the crowd — not just from the stage, but on social media as well. “I think our first hit on social media was about 12 minutes into it,” he said. “We can do better there.”

Mr. O’Neill said the department would “go back and take a look at what happened and see how we can prevent it in the future.”

In New York, the risk of stampedes is acute in places where crowding is common, like tourism sites and transportation hubs. Last year, Amtrak police officers set off a stampede in Pennsylvania Station when they used a Taser stun gun on a man amid delays on New Jersey Transit. Sixteen people were injured as commuters fled.

The panic in Central Park laid bare the challenges for the police and event organizers to effectively communicate with crowds during a crisis, whether it is to calm people after a false alarm, or to safely and quickly evacuate a jam-packed space. On Saturday, police commanders enlisted Chris Martin, the frontman for the band Coldplay, to get the crowd’s attention and to stress that there was no gunman.

Image

The panic at a Central Park concert came almost exactly a year after a gunman fired into a crowd at an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, killing 58.CreditAlba Vigaray/EPA, via Shutterstock

“When people are scared, one of the first things that shuts down is their hearing,” Chief Waters said. “They get tunnel vision, their focus narrows.”

But in interviews and online posts, dozens of concertgoers laid the blame for the stampede on the festival’s organizers, security guards and the police, whom they said had contributed to the chaos with inaccurate and inadequate information about what had occurred and what the crowd should do.

“Part of the reason there was pandemonium was because the police were telling people to run and duck,” said Maria Benedek, of the East Village. “You would think in our city that people would be prepared for a situation like this.”

Several concertgoers said there were too many barriers on the Great Lawn and not enough signs. Others said the organizers seemed to have no formal evacuation procedure. “People didn’t know where to go,” said Shannon Flynn, 41.

The flood of complaints led to an apology on Sunday from Global Citizen, the event organizer. Andrew Kirk, a spokesman for Global Citizen, a charity that has a goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, declined to comment on the group’s safety and security plans.

There was a time when loud popping sounds might not have alarmed the concertgoers who gathered on the park’s Great Lawn. But that has changed in the era of deadly mass killings, concertgoers said, and people immediately assumed there had been an attack.

Callers began flooding the city’s emergency hotline with reports of gunfire at the festival at 7:31 p.m., while the crowd of about 15,000 people was waiting for Janet Jackson to perform, the police said. Chief Waters said many of the 911 calls were people who were not at the concert relaying what they had heard from people inside.

Image

The chaos has forced law enforcement officials to examine whether they need new ways of curbing the risk of panic in crowds in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“We saw people run, fall and get trampled; people sitting down got trampled,” said Scott Hernandez, 39, a real estate agent who was standing near the back of the venue. “I heard someone say, ‘It’s a shooter,’ then we heard what sounded like gunshots, but were just other barriers being torn down. It was kind of a chain reaction. It snowballed.”

At least 37 people suffered minor injuries like sprains, cuts and bruises, the Fire Department said.

Gisselle Vazquez, 19, was standing near the front of the stage with two friends and her cousin when she heard popping noises from about 10 feet away that she mistook for fireworks.

The crowd started running. Ms. Vazquez grabbed her cousin’s hand and fled, struggling to keep up. Then someone shouted for them to duck, she said, and people began falling on top of them. She remembered thinking, “I could die right now.”

Allen Devlin, 23, a journalism student at Columbia University, saw the commotion and began recording video at 7:29 p.m. on his cellphone that shows panicked concertgoers running away from the stage in droves as police officers ran toward it. “Why are we running?” one woman said in the video.

Ms. Flynn said she heard someone shout “Shooter! Shooter! Shooter!” and the police telling people to run. So she did. “Nobody knew what was going on,” she said.

The crowd also swept up Gracie and Ellie Shanklin, teenage sisters from Millburn, N.J. They were carried along with it before running into an obstacle: the metal barriers that separated the sections and surrounded the Great Lawn.

“There were so many keeping us in the festival,” Gracie, 16, said. “It was dark, too. That didn’t help.”

Image

The police enlisted the singer Chris Martin, far left, to get the crowd’s attention and stress there was no gunman.CreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The chaos lasted for nearly two full minutes on Mr. Devlin’s video before Chief O’Reilly took the microphone.

“We’ve got to get these barriers open, guys; there are people getting crushed,” she told the crowd. “Go east, or west, or backward. There’s no way for you to move to the front.”

Katherine Lee, of Astoria, Queens, and her fiancé were sitting with their shoes off on a blanket near the edge of the lawn. They tried to stand, but the rushing crowd was too close and the couple were trampled. Ms. Lee’s head hit the ground as people walked over her, she said, and her fiancé, who was also knocked down, watched helplessly in horror.

“It was the most terrifying part of the experience — feeling bodies hitting me and being walked on,” she said.

They finally escaped the park with other concertgoers after climbing over an eight-foot-tall fence. Ms. Lee sprained an ankle.

By 7:39 p.m., the police had ruled out gunshots and were ready to restart the show, Chief Waters said, but a problem with electrical power prolonged the interruption. “Our thought process was, the quicker I can get Janet on stage playing music, the quicker we get back to normalcy,” he said.

Chief Waters recalled telling the organizers that the show must go on. “Anything short of that would be, A, failure or B, surrender,” he said. “That’s not what the people came to see. That’s not what the performers came to do.”

At 8:28 p.m., the Twitter account linked to the Police Department’s public information office shared a photo of people waiting for the last performances. By then, most concertgoers had left the park and did not return or were not allowed back in.

Mr. Devlin remained at the concert with his friends until a Canadian singer, The Weeknd, closed the show at 10:30 p.m. The police presence had surged, he said, and scores of officers patrolled the entrances while paramedics removed people on stretchers.

“It never really returned to normal,” he said.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Jan Ransom contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Follow Ashley Southall and Ali Winston on Twitter: @AshleyAtTimes and @awinston

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Noise Wasn’t Gunfire, but Crowd’s Panic Was Real, and Dangerous

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/nyregion/central-park-concert-stampede.html |

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic., in 2018-10-04 10:41:13

[blogcompetnetall]

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic.

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-they-thought-it-was-a-shooting-the-real-danger-was-mass-panic/

Nature

Image

Panic spread through the crowd gathered for the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Sept. 29 after people scattering away from a fight stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.CreditCreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cardi B had just stepped offstage after performing for thousands in Central Park when a loud pop pierced the air, sounding like a gunshot and igniting fears of a shooting. Backstage, police commanders scrambled to find out what was going on, and quickly determined no shots had been fired. They rushed to the stage to tell the crowd.

“Remain calm,” Assistant Chief Kathleen O’Reilly pleaded into a microphone, saying the sound had been a fence falling over.

But it was too late. Frantic concertgoers ducked and rushed for a limited number of exits. Some people screamed “Shooter!” Barriers and tall fences were toppled. People fell and were trampled. Many fled shoeless. Some police officers even contributed to the pandemonium, telling people to duck and run.

Though no one was seriously injured, the chaos at the Global Citizen Festival on Saturday jolted law enforcement authorities, security experts and policymakers. It has forced an examination of whether the police need new ways of curbing the risk of crowd panic in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear of attacks.

By the next day, police commanders had determined that it had not been a falling barrier that had started the original stampede. It was, instead, a fight between two people near the stage. As concertgoers scattered, they stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.

Once the false reports of a shooting spread, controlling the crowd “was like putting toothpaste back in the tube,” Chief James R. Waters, the police counterterrorism commander, who had been on the stage, said in an interview this week.

The events in Central Park unfolded nearly a year to the day after a gunman killed 58 people at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas, the worst shooting in modern American history, and one in a series of mass killings at churches, concerts, newsrooms, nightclubs and schools.

Image

Dozens of concertgoers suffered minor injuries in the onrush of people after popping sounds triggered a scare.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“People subjectively feel like they are in greater danger than ever before,” said Steven Adelman, the vice president of the Event Safety Alliance, a nonprofit trade association.

Police officials have defended their handling of the panic in Central Park, saying the 100 officers at the concert were able to restore order within a few minutes, in part because the department has studied shooting attacks and conducted drills.

But behind the scenes, officials are grappling with what went wrong and are adopting changes that would make events like the annual music festival safer for participants during an emergency.

Those changes include marking the entrances and exits with color-coded lights, installing runway lighting to highlight emergency routes, displaying urgent messages on screens and placing specialized teams of officers in positions high enough for them to oversee the crowd, Chief O’Reilly said on Tuesday.

“Situational awareness will be what we are messaging out next year,” Chief O’Reilly said. “People have to understand where they are.”

The police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said on Wednesday that the police could have moved faster to get a message out to calm the crowd — not just from the stage, but on social media as well. “I think our first hit on social media was about 12 minutes into it,” he said. “We can do better there.”

Mr. O’Neill said the department would “go back and take a look at what happened and see how we can prevent it in the future.”

In New York, the risk of stampedes is acute in places where crowding is common, like tourism sites and transportation hubs. Last year, Amtrak police officers set off a stampede in Pennsylvania Station when they used a Taser stun gun on a man amid delays on New Jersey Transit. Sixteen people were injured as commuters fled.

The panic in Central Park laid bare the challenges for the police and event organizers to effectively communicate with crowds during a crisis, whether it is to calm people after a false alarm, or to safely and quickly evacuate a jam-packed space. On Saturday, police commanders enlisted Chris Martin, the frontman for the band Coldplay, to get the crowd’s attention and to stress that there was no gunman.

Image

The panic at a Central Park concert came almost exactly a year after a gunman fired into a crowd at an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, killing 58.CreditAlba Vigaray/EPA, via Shutterstock

“When people are scared, one of the first things that shuts down is their hearing,” Chief Waters said. “They get tunnel vision, their focus narrows.”

But in interviews and online posts, dozens of concertgoers laid the blame for the stampede on the festival’s organizers, security guards and the police, whom they said had contributed to the chaos with inaccurate and inadequate information about what had occurred and what the crowd should do.

“Part of the reason there was pandemonium was because the police were telling people to run and duck,” said Maria Benedek, of the East Village. “You would think in our city that people would be prepared for a situation like this.”

Several concertgoers said there were too many barriers on the Great Lawn and not enough signs. Others said the organizers seemed to have no formal evacuation procedure. “People didn’t know where to go,” said Shannon Flynn, 41.

The flood of complaints led to an apology on Sunday from Global Citizen, the event organizer. Andrew Kirk, a spokesman for Global Citizen, a charity that has a goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, declined to comment on the group’s safety and security plans.

There was a time when loud popping sounds might not have alarmed the concertgoers who gathered on the park’s Great Lawn. But that has changed in the era of deadly mass killings, concertgoers said, and people immediately assumed there had been an attack.

Callers began flooding the city’s emergency hotline with reports of gunfire at the festival at 7:31 p.m., while the crowd of about 15,000 people was waiting for Janet Jackson to perform, the police said. Chief Waters said many of the 911 calls were people who were not at the concert relaying what they had heard from people inside.

Image

The chaos has forced law enforcement officials to examine whether they need new ways of curbing the risk of panic in crowds in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“We saw people run, fall and get trampled; people sitting down got trampled,” said Scott Hernandez, 39, a real estate agent who was standing near the back of the venue. “I heard someone say, ‘It’s a shooter,’ then we heard what sounded like gunshots, but were just other barriers being torn down. It was kind of a chain reaction. It snowballed.”

At least 37 people suffered minor injuries like sprains, cuts and bruises, the Fire Department said.

Gisselle Vazquez, 19, was standing near the front of the stage with two friends and her cousin when she heard popping noises from about 10 feet away that she mistook for fireworks.

The crowd started running. Ms. Vazquez grabbed her cousin’s hand and fled, struggling to keep up. Then someone shouted for them to duck, she said, and people began falling on top of them. She remembered thinking, “I could die right now.”

Allen Devlin, 23, a journalism student at Columbia University, saw the commotion and began recording video at 7:29 p.m. on his cellphone that shows panicked concertgoers running away from the stage in droves as police officers ran toward it. “Why are we running?” one woman said in the video.

Ms. Flynn said she heard someone shout “Shooter! Shooter! Shooter!” and the police telling people to run. So she did. “Nobody knew what was going on,” she said.

The crowd also swept up Gracie and Ellie Shanklin, teenage sisters from Millburn, N.J. They were carried along with it before running into an obstacle: the metal barriers that separated the sections and surrounded the Great Lawn.

“There were so many keeping us in the festival,” Gracie, 16, said. “It was dark, too. That didn’t help.”

Image

The police enlisted the singer Chris Martin, far left, to get the crowd’s attention and stress there was no gunman.CreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The chaos lasted for nearly two full minutes on Mr. Devlin’s video before Chief O’Reilly took the microphone.

“We’ve got to get these barriers open, guys; there are people getting crushed,” she told the crowd. “Go east, or west, or backward. There’s no way for you to move to the front.”

Katherine Lee, of Astoria, Queens, and her fiancé were sitting with their shoes off on a blanket near the edge of the lawn. They tried to stand, but the rushing crowd was too close and the couple were trampled. Ms. Lee’s head hit the ground as people walked over her, she said, and her fiancé, who was also knocked down, watched helplessly in horror.

“It was the most terrifying part of the experience — feeling bodies hitting me and being walked on,” she said.

They finally escaped the park with other concertgoers after climbing over an eight-foot-tall fence. Ms. Lee sprained an ankle.

By 7:39 p.m., the police had ruled out gunshots and were ready to restart the show, Chief Waters said, but a problem with electrical power prolonged the interruption. “Our thought process was, the quicker I can get Janet on stage playing music, the quicker we get back to normalcy,” he said.

Chief Waters recalled telling the organizers that the show must go on. “Anything short of that would be, A, failure or B, surrender,” he said. “That’s not what the people came to see. That’s not what the performers came to do.”

At 8:28 p.m., the Twitter account linked to the Police Department’s public information office shared a photo of people waiting for the last performances. By then, most concertgoers had left the park and did not return or were not allowed back in.

Mr. Devlin remained at the concert with his friends until a Canadian singer, The Weeknd, closed the show at 10:30 p.m. The police presence had surged, he said, and scores of officers patrolled the entrances while paramedics removed people on stretchers.

“It never really returned to normal,” he said.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Jan Ransom contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Follow Ashley Southall and Ali Winston on Twitter: @AshleyAtTimes and @awinston

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Noise Wasn’t Gunfire, but Crowd’s Panic Was Real, and Dangerous

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/nyregion/central-park-concert-stampede.html |

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic., in 2018-10-04 10:41:13

[algarithmblognumber]

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic.

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic. http://www.nature-business.com/nature-they-thought-it-was-a-shooting-the-real-danger-was-mass-panic/

Nature

Image

Panic spread through the crowd gathered for the Global Citizen Festival in Central Park on Sept. 29 after people scattering away from a fight stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.CreditCreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Cardi B had just stepped offstage after performing for thousands in Central Park when a loud pop pierced the air, sounding like a gunshot and igniting fears of a shooting. Backstage, police commanders scrambled to find out what was going on, and quickly determined no shots had been fired. They rushed to the stage to tell the crowd.

“Remain calm,” Assistant Chief Kathleen O’Reilly pleaded into a microphone, saying the sound had been a fence falling over.

But it was too late. Frantic concertgoers ducked and rushed for a limited number of exits. Some people screamed “Shooter!” Barriers and tall fences were toppled. People fell and were trampled. Many fled shoeless. Some police officers even contributed to the pandemonium, telling people to duck and run.

Though no one was seriously injured, the chaos at the Global Citizen Festival on Saturday jolted law enforcement authorities, security experts and policymakers. It has forced an examination of whether the police need new ways of curbing the risk of crowd panic in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear of attacks.

By the next day, police commanders had determined that it had not been a falling barrier that had started the original stampede. It was, instead, a fight between two people near the stage. As concertgoers scattered, they stepped on empty water bottles, causing loud popping sounds.

Once the false reports of a shooting spread, controlling the crowd “was like putting toothpaste back in the tube,” Chief James R. Waters, the police counterterrorism commander, who had been on the stage, said in an interview this week.

The events in Central Park unfolded nearly a year to the day after a gunman killed 58 people at an outdoor country music concert in Las Vegas, the worst shooting in modern American history, and one in a series of mass killings at churches, concerts, newsrooms, nightclubs and schools.

Image

Dozens of concertgoers suffered minor injuries in the onrush of people after popping sounds triggered a scare.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“People subjectively feel like they are in greater danger than ever before,” said Steven Adelman, the vice president of the Event Safety Alliance, a nonprofit trade association.

Police officials have defended their handling of the panic in Central Park, saying the 100 officers at the concert were able to restore order within a few minutes, in part because the department has studied shooting attacks and conducted drills.

But behind the scenes, officials are grappling with what went wrong and are adopting changes that would make events like the annual music festival safer for participants during an emergency.

Those changes include marking the entrances and exits with color-coded lights, installing runway lighting to highlight emergency routes, displaying urgent messages on screens and placing specialized teams of officers in positions high enough for them to oversee the crowd, Chief O’Reilly said on Tuesday.

“Situational awareness will be what we are messaging out next year,” Chief O’Reilly said. “People have to understand where they are.”

The police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said on Wednesday that the police could have moved faster to get a message out to calm the crowd — not just from the stage, but on social media as well. “I think our first hit on social media was about 12 minutes into it,” he said. “We can do better there.”

Mr. O’Neill said the department would “go back and take a look at what happened and see how we can prevent it in the future.”

In New York, the risk of stampedes is acute in places where crowding is common, like tourism sites and transportation hubs. Last year, Amtrak police officers set off a stampede in Pennsylvania Station when they used a Taser stun gun on a man amid delays on New Jersey Transit. Sixteen people were injured as commuters fled.

The panic in Central Park laid bare the challenges for the police and event organizers to effectively communicate with crowds during a crisis, whether it is to calm people after a false alarm, or to safely and quickly evacuate a jam-packed space. On Saturday, police commanders enlisted Chris Martin, the frontman for the band Coldplay, to get the crowd’s attention and to stress that there was no gunman.

Image

The panic at a Central Park concert came almost exactly a year after a gunman fired into a crowd at an outdoor country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, killing 58.CreditAlba Vigaray/EPA, via Shutterstock

“When people are scared, one of the first things that shuts down is their hearing,” Chief Waters said. “They get tunnel vision, their focus narrows.”

But in interviews and online posts, dozens of concertgoers laid the blame for the stampede on the festival’s organizers, security guards and the police, whom they said had contributed to the chaos with inaccurate and inadequate information about what had occurred and what the crowd should do.

“Part of the reason there was pandemonium was because the police were telling people to run and duck,” said Maria Benedek, of the East Village. “You would think in our city that people would be prepared for a situation like this.”

Several concertgoers said there were too many barriers on the Great Lawn and not enough signs. Others said the organizers seemed to have no formal evacuation procedure. “People didn’t know where to go,” said Shannon Flynn, 41.

The flood of complaints led to an apology on Sunday from Global Citizen, the event organizer. Andrew Kirk, a spokesman for Global Citizen, a charity that has a goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030, declined to comment on the group’s safety and security plans.

There was a time when loud popping sounds might not have alarmed the concertgoers who gathered on the park’s Great Lawn. But that has changed in the era of deadly mass killings, concertgoers said, and people immediately assumed there had been an attack.

Callers began flooding the city’s emergency hotline with reports of gunfire at the festival at 7:31 p.m., while the crowd of about 15,000 people was waiting for Janet Jackson to perform, the police said. Chief Waters said many of the 911 calls were people who were not at the concert relaying what they had heard from people inside.

Image

The chaos has forced law enforcement officials to examine whether they need new ways of curbing the risk of panic in crowds in an era when mass killings have heightened public fear.CreditEvan Agostini/Invision, via Associated Press

“We saw people run, fall and get trampled; people sitting down got trampled,” said Scott Hernandez, 39, a real estate agent who was standing near the back of the venue. “I heard someone say, ‘It’s a shooter,’ then we heard what sounded like gunshots, but were just other barriers being torn down. It was kind of a chain reaction. It snowballed.”

At least 37 people suffered minor injuries like sprains, cuts and bruises, the Fire Department said.

Gisselle Vazquez, 19, was standing near the front of the stage with two friends and her cousin when she heard popping noises from about 10 feet away that she mistook for fireworks.

The crowd started running. Ms. Vazquez grabbed her cousin’s hand and fled, struggling to keep up. Then someone shouted for them to duck, she said, and people began falling on top of them. She remembered thinking, “I could die right now.”

Allen Devlin, 23, a journalism student at Columbia University, saw the commotion and began recording video at 7:29 p.m. on his cellphone that shows panicked concertgoers running away from the stage in droves as police officers ran toward it. “Why are we running?” one woman said in the video.

Ms. Flynn said she heard someone shout “Shooter! Shooter! Shooter!” and the police telling people to run. So she did. “Nobody knew what was going on,” she said.

The crowd also swept up Gracie and Ellie Shanklin, teenage sisters from Millburn, N.J. They were carried along with it before running into an obstacle: the metal barriers that separated the sections and surrounded the Great Lawn.

“There were so many keeping us in the festival,” Gracie, 16, said. “It was dark, too. That didn’t help.”

Image

The police enlisted the singer Chris Martin, far left, to get the crowd’s attention and stress there was no gunman.CreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The chaos lasted for nearly two full minutes on Mr. Devlin’s video before Chief O’Reilly took the microphone.

“We’ve got to get these barriers open, guys; there are people getting crushed,” she told the crowd. “Go east, or west, or backward. There’s no way for you to move to the front.”

Katherine Lee, of Astoria, Queens, and her fiancé were sitting with their shoes off on a blanket near the edge of the lawn. They tried to stand, but the rushing crowd was too close and the couple were trampled. Ms. Lee’s head hit the ground as people walked over her, she said, and her fiancé, who was also knocked down, watched helplessly in horror.

“It was the most terrifying part of the experience — feeling bodies hitting me and being walked on,” she said.

They finally escaped the park with other concertgoers after climbing over an eight-foot-tall fence. Ms. Lee sprained an ankle.

By 7:39 p.m., the police had ruled out gunshots and were ready to restart the show, Chief Waters said, but a problem with electrical power prolonged the interruption. “Our thought process was, the quicker I can get Janet on stage playing music, the quicker we get back to normalcy,” he said.

Chief Waters recalled telling the organizers that the show must go on. “Anything short of that would be, A, failure or B, surrender,” he said. “That’s not what the people came to see. That’s not what the performers came to do.”

At 8:28 p.m., the Twitter account linked to the Police Department’s public information office shared a photo of people waiting for the last performances. By then, most concertgoers had left the park and did not return or were not allowed back in.

Mr. Devlin remained at the concert with his friends until a Canadian singer, The Weeknd, closed the show at 10:30 p.m. The police presence had surged, he said, and scores of officers patrolled the entrances while paramedics removed people on stretchers.

“It never really returned to normal,” he said.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Jan Ransom contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Follow Ashley Southall and Ali Winston on Twitter: @AshleyAtTimes and @awinston

A version of this article appears in print on

, on Page

A

1

of the New York edition

with the headline:

Noise Wasn’t Gunfire, but Crowd’s Panic Was Real, and Dangerous

. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Read More | https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/nyregion/central-park-concert-stampede.html |

Nature They Thought It Was a Shooting. The Real Danger Was Mass Panic., in 2018-10-04 10:41:13

[goodailynews]

Mindy Small/FilmMagic More than 50 people were killed after a gunman opened fire at an outdoor country music festival on the 32nd floor of Las Vegas' Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino Sunday, police said. Police responded to reports of a shooting just after 10 p.m. .................................................................................................. [HOT] Newton turns over new leaf behind camera : ♫ https://youtu.be/TpJOtaNt2Cs [HOT] Jennifer Lopez Donates $1 Million to Puerto Rico Hurricane Relief : ♫ https://youtu.be/dOAHu-h0qWo [HOT] Bella Thorne & More Stars Who Proudly Showed Off Their 'Flaws' After Refusing To Be Photo: ♫ https://youtu.be/O-hs9NiVO6w [HOT] Harry Connick Jr.'s Had the 'Weirdest Experiences' on 'Will & Grace' : ♫ https://youtu.be/kiiSPZT-_pQ [HOT] Dream debut for Missy : ♫ https://youtu.be/fM_1ZXphEIo .................................................................................................. SUBSCRIBE: https://goo.gl/Gd5aaC FACEBOOK: https://goo.gl/ybp8jQ TWITTER: https://goo.gl/o24hEF ✖ Follow GOO Daily News channel(SUBSCRIBE) to look for that. GOO Daily News - New videos evreyday! MONDAY - SUNDAY. Thanks for watching! Background music video is allowed by FreeBackgroundMusic. Please visit their channel to view more: FreeBackgroundMusic: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzdbJ_mnXo5tf-4hVNgJ5Wg Thank you! .................................................................................................. ...[continued]... as Village when the gunfire began; the hotel is located across the street from the festival grounds. Footage from the concert shows Aldean running offstage as several gunshots rang out. The 'Any Ol' Barstool' singer confirmed his safety Monday morning via Instagram. ' Tonight has been beyond horrific. I still don't know what to say but wanted to let everyone know that me and my crew are safe,' the musician wrote. 'My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved tonight. It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night. #heartbroken #stopthehate.' The singer's rep also confirmed to E! News that Aldean, his band and crew were all unharmed. Aldean's wife, Nashville-based makeup artist Brittany Kerr, also used the social media platform to let fans know they are out of harm's way. ' We are safe...our angels were definitely watching over us tonight,' she wrote. 'No words for what happened...Just horrific. Praying for everyone.' Jake Owen, one of the headliners who performed before Aldean, also announced his safety: Another performer, Lauren Alaina, sent her prayers to those affected by the shooting: The Brothers Osborne, who performed Friday, tweeted: The weekend festival's other main stage performers included the Josh Abbott Band, Tucker Beathard, Big and Rich, Lee Brice, Kane Brown, Eric Church, High Valley, Sam Hunt, Maren Morris, Brett Young and others. Radio host Bobby Bones also gave an update via social media: Concertgoer Meghan Kearney was at the concert when the shooting began. 'We heard what sounded like firecrackers going off. Then all of a sudden we heard what sounded like a machine gun. People started screaming that they were hit...When we started running out there were probably a couple 100 [people] on the ground,' she told MSNBC. 'People kept dropping and dropping...People were getting shot one foot away from us. People were

[kansascityhappenings]

More than 20 dead after shooting on Las Vegas Strip

Watch Video

LAS VEGAS — More than 20 people were killed and more than 100 injured in a shooting on the Las Vegas Strip Sunday night police said.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters that police responded after reports of shots being fired from the Mandalay Bay towards the Route 91 Harvest festival around 10:08 p.m. Sunday (1:08 a.m. ET Monday).

“We determined there was a shooter on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay,” Lombardo said. Officers engaged the suspect, whom Lombardo described as a “local resident.” He said that the shooter is dead and that police believe that there are no other shooters. “Right now we believe it’s a sole actor, a lone-wolf-type actor,” said Lombardo.

Police have identified the gunman but will not be naming him at this time, Lombardo said.

Though it’s too early to give an accurate estimate of the number of dead and wounded, Lombardo said that “20-plus” have died and “in excess of 100” people have been injured.

Police are searching for a woman named Marilou Danley who was traveling with the suspect, Lombardo said. He described Danley as an Asian woman, 4 ft 11 inches tall and 111 pounds. “We have not located her at this time and we are interested in talking to her,” he said.

Two Las Vegas police officers are being treated at a local hospital for injuries they sustained during the shooting, Lombardo said. One is in critical condition and the other sustained minor injuries.

In addition, the sheriff stated that there were off duty officers attending the concert who may have died. The identities of the officers involved have not been released.

“Pray for Las Vegas,” the city’s mayor tweeted. “Thank you to all our first responders out there now.”

Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval said on Twitter that a “tragic & heinous act of violence has shaken the #Nevada family” and offered prayers to all those affected by “this act of cowardice.”

Concertgoers describe shooting

CNN spoke to three people who were attending the concert at the Las Vegas Village outdoor arena when gunfire broke out, causing them to flee. They described hearing the sound of gunfire while Jason Aldean was performing.

Aldean, his wife Brittany, his band and crew were able to get offstage safely and unharmed.

“We were close to the stages — about six rows from the front on the left hand side and he was just performing,” Rachel Dekerf said.

“People went down on the Mandalay side of the stage,” Joe Pitzel said. “I don’t know if people were ducking or if people were hit.”

Derkef filmed her escape from the venue using her cell phone, starting just after the first shots were fired.

She described ongoing gunfire, and played out the video she had recorded during which more than five minutes of gunfire were intermittently audible.

“The gunshots lasted for 10-15 minutes. It didn’t stop,” she said. “We just ran for our lives.”

‘Go, go, go, go’

Derkef’s sister, Monique Dumas, said that everyone instantly crouched when they heard the shots.

“The band was rushed off the stage, the floodlights came on the crowd, and you see on the right hand of the stage the person who was injured, so they’re calling for medics, calling for security, then there was gunfire again,” Dumas said.

“It seemed there was a pause in the gunfire and the people in the yellow shirts were telling the people to ‘go, go, go, go’ … the gunfire never ended, it seemed like it went on and on and on,” she said.

SiriusXM Country radio host Storme Warren was on the side of the stage as Aldean was performing and shots rang out.

“I thought it was fireworks going off and maybe it mistriggered, and then it happened again. And when it happened the third time, we knew something was wrong,” Warren said. “To say that I saw things I never want to see again is the truth, and it’s a scary situation.”

Warren said he heard “more than 50 shots fired and probably in the hundreds.”

“The shells were hitting the deck of the stage when I was on it,” he said, adding that he could still hear the shells as he went under the stage for protection.

Aldean posted a statement on Instagram saying that he and his crew were safe after a horrific night.

“My Thoughts and prayers go out to everyone involved tonight. It hurts my heart that this would happen to anyone who was just coming out to enjoy what should have been a fun night. #heartbroken#stopthehate,” he wrote.

A concertgoer told CNN affiliate KLAS that everybody was lying on top of each other trying to get out of the shooter’s way.

“Everybody’s hiding everywhere, they’re hiding under the bleachers and the stanchions, anywhere they could and everyone is telling us to ‘run, run as fast as you can,’” she told the news station. “And my husband and I ran out toward our car and there were people hiding underneath my car for cover and there was a gentleman who was shot and he said, ‘can you help me?’ and so I put him in my car and I had like six people in my car, people without shoes, running, just to get away.”

‘Sounded like firecrackers’

Eyewitness Bryan Heifner spoke to CNN from a room in a hotel across from the Mandalay Bay, which he said he could see from his window.

“Mostly I heard the shots, just so many shots — I just thought it was a semi braking with the air brakes, but then I went downstairs and saw people running and looking for family,” he said.

“I immediately went back to my room, locked the door, turned the lights off.”

Another witness told CNN affiliate KSNV that the shooting sounded like firecrackers at first.

“It didn’t sound normal, it sounded like machine guns and it was like several rounds, it was like hundreds of rounds,” she told the news station.

“My boyfriend had me move behind a building here because it just didn’t sound right,” she told KSNV. “And then we hid behind a building and we could just hear hundreds of rounds going off and then about 10 minutes later the police came and just blocked off all the streets.”

She said she was about a block from the Route 91 Harvest festival.

MGM Resorts, which owns the Mandalay Bay, tweeted that its thoughts and prayers were with the victims.

“This evening there was a tragic active shooter situation at the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. Law enforcement and emergency personnel responded quickly to the incident a secured the scene. Law enforcement requested that we put hotels in the vicinity on lockdown to ensure guest safety. We will provide more information as it becomes available,” it said in a statement.

Facebook has set up a crisis response page to help people establish whether their loved ones are safe.

Developing story – more to come

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports http://fox4kc.com/2017/10/02/more-than-20-dead-after-shooting-on-las-vegas-strip/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/more-than-20-dead-after-shooting-on-las-vegas-strip/