A 26-year-old man who stopped to help a wounded Manitoba woman during Sunday’s mass shooting in Las Vegas says he couldn’t just leave her behind.
“I just saw the blood and I couldn’t just leave her. I just saw one person, two people die,” Justin Uhart said Tuesday of the help he gave Teulon’s Jan Lambourne. “I just had to stop and help her and try to get her some help, any way I could.”
Uhart was bartending at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Vegas on Sunday night when he heard gunfire and ran toward the stage, hoping to find the source.
“You just start hearing the ‘ta-ta-ta-ta-ta.’ My first instinct was fight or flight, is the best way I could describe it,” he said.
Shot in the abdomen
Elsewhere in the crowd of roughly 22,000 gathered at the festival, Lambourne heard it too. Seconds later, she fell to the ground, shot in the abdomen, her pelvis shattered.
The shots were fired through the window on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, by a gunman later identified by police as Stephen Paddock. Police say the 64-year-old took his own life afterward, but stopped to reload multiple times during the shooting.
Manitoba woman recounts horror of Las Vegas shooting4:24
At least 59 people were killed and more than 525 were injured, including Lambourne and her friend Jody Ansell, also from Manitoba.
On Tuesday, Lambourne told CBC News Uhart saved her life, stopping to help her when he saw her on the ground, helping carry her into an ambulance and riding with her, holding her hand, to the hospital.
‘Everybody was scared’
“I promised Jan I wouldn’t leave her,” Uhart said on Tuesday.
“She didn’t know anybody and she was just terrified. She didn’t know her friends, her family, and she’s from Canada and didn’t know the area…. I would have been terrified. Everybody was scared.
“Just trying to calm her down and talk to her. I don’t know, I probably said some really stupid things. I know I talked to her about her cats, just to keep her mind off it.”
Uhart didn’t realize right away the shooter wasn’t in the crowd, he said. Then he started shouting for people to run.
“I just yelled it at as many people as I could and people started running,” he said.
“But during that time, you hear the shots, and the shots just keep coming and coming, and then you hear him reload, and then coming and coming, and then reload. And in those times when there was no sound, people would run.”
Hiding behind wheelbarrow
In the crowd in front of the stage, Uhart believes he saw two people killed. In the lull between shots, he ran, too.
“That’s when I saw Jan,” he said.
Lambourne was on the ground in a merchandise tent, hiding behind an upturned wheelbarrow. With help from others, Uhart carried her to a crowded ambulance and jumped in, too, using her phone to contact her family.
When they arrived at the hospital, Lambourne was taken into the operating room and doctors told Uhart he had to leave.
Hopes to visit hospital
He didn’t hear from her until Tuesday, when he was able to use a computer and check his Facebook.
“It was a huge sigh of relief. All night I was just thinking about that. What if, or what if,” he said.
Justin Uhart said people would run during lulls in the shooting. (David Becker/Getty Images)
He hopes to go visit her in the hospital, he said.
He hasn’t been able to retrieve his car, keys, phone or wallet from the concert site, he said. He hasn’t been sleeping, either, and was sick to his stomach Monday night.
‘It actually happened. This is real’
“It’s just kind of surreal, I guess. Because I mean, you still see cars driving. The sun is up,” he said.
“My family friend has been driving me around, helping me out. But it’s just like, it happened. I went to the crime scene a couple minutes ago to try to get my stuff or my car, but the FBI locked it down. It actually happened. This is real.”
Uhart said military training he did with the U.S. Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps helped him during the shooting. He moved to Vegas nine months ago and has lately been bartending on the side, waiting for his background check to be completed before he starts a job as a mortgage banker.
He praised the work of first responders and law enforcement during and after the shooting and said Vegas has come together in the wake of the tragedy.
“We’ve just got to remember this. Why does it have to be something so bad to bring us together? Why can’t we be together like this all the time and put away our side differences?” he said.
“Everybody has different opinions, but no reason to get all political in it. Just be nice, I guess. Help each other out.”
