Eyewitness account of Las Vegas shooting — ‘We thought we were going to die’

**WARNING: this post contains graphic photos taken after the Las Vegas shooting**

Shawn Rawl is a Bayville native who works as a concierge in Las Vegas. His job is to take care of people's needs. Shawn took that to the extreme Sunday night. While sitting in the front row of the Jason Aldean concert, which he attended to see his friend DJ Silver. He heard the shooting, saw people dropping, screamed to Aldean and the band to get off the stage, then started helping people evacuate. He told me his chilling story in this video:

"About five songs into Jason Aldean, I heard these pops and at first i thought it was someone lighting off fireworks, making a joke. Then we thought it was the static coming from the speakers." Then Shawn put two and two together. "I was waving to the band to get off the stage, I was like 'Go! Go! I know what this is!'"

Shawn says he'll never forget the look on the faces of the two police officers who came with guns drawn confirming his suspicions. "Then I knew what was going on."

It was then Shawn's "Jersey" kicked in. "The way I was raised, being from Jersey and being adopted, my Dad was a hard guy and he taught me really good values. My mindset was to help people and I really wasn't thinking about myself."

There's this huge guy who was there trying to get his wife over the barricades and I was bringing them and other people over that." Where was security? "Nobody was helping people, they were getting scorched, the security had run away because they were getting shot at."

Rawl then left for the backstage area, since he knew the arena, he knew where the VIP door was, and he pulled people up over an 8ft gated fence bruising his hands in the process. "I was pulling them up and my knuckles were going into the sharp edges of the fences."

Throughout the ordeal, many people including Shawn thought that there were multiple shooters. "We all thought that there were multiple shooters, everywhere we went, we thought we were going to die, people were yelling 'Shooter! Shooter! Shooter!"

Rawl then found an opening in the fences to get people out and then calmed them down before taking a taxi out of there.

The next morning Shawn received a very sad text. "Today I had a text from a client asking 'Can you help me, my nephew's there. Then I woke up to see another text from that person saying 'he passed away.' That's when it hit me and I started crying my eyes out."

Shawn is hoping there will be a benefit convert in the future to take care of all these victims.

**Editor's note: In the video, the photo of the backpack is incorrectly labeled as "found," it is actually Rawl's backpack, not one he found. We apologize to Rawl for the mislabeling.**

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