Las Vegas comes to grips with tragedy: Jim Gardner reports from Las Vegas
LAS VEGAS (WPVI) -- We came to Las Vegas expecting to find Sin City transformed into Somber City. After all, what else would a city be after what happened Sunday night?
But that's not what we found on Monday, at least from the point of view of the tourists.
The Las Vegas Strip - well, it's still the Las Vegas Strip.
And when gamblers are inside a casino, the outside world tends to disappear.
But for the people who live here and the people who work here, it is a very different story.
The Guardian Angel Cathedral was packed with over 1,000 mourners as another American city tries to come to grips with the unspeakable, unfathomable violence that has become part of the fabric of this American age.
Twenty-two thousand concergoers became sitting ducks for a madman who had 23 weapons inside his room at the Mandalay Bay.
Two of those concertgoers, Katie and Bob Fuhrmeister, are from Horsham, Pa. Their story is chilling.
Katie injured her foot while trying to avoid the stampede - running to get away from it all.
I asked Katie what went through her mind when she realized what she was hearing at the concert was gunfire.
"Actually, the sound was coming from every angle," she said. "All you think about is, where? Am I going to get hit? You're ducking, you're trying to go behind buildings.... Whatever you can do just to not get stuck in a crossfire."
"Pure and utter... frightening... possible death," she continued. "You know, everything goes through your mind. You know, where is it coming from? Am I going to get hit? Am I going to see all these people in front of me get shot and drop? It's like, 'fight or flight.' You can't describe it in words, because it's every emotion you have at the same time."
We heard someone say something Monday that put this into some kind of perspective: "If you live here, you probably know someone who was either at the concert, or who was wounded, or who was killed. And if you don't, it's likely that you know someone who knows someone."
And in this town, in this case, two degrees of separation is really 360 degrees of agony.
That's the story from here on Monday night.
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