Surviving the massacre: San Diegans escape deadly shooting in Las Vegas

SAN DIEGO (KUSI) — A Mira Mesa man and his girlfriend were in the crowd of 22,000 concertgoers who were targeted Sunday by a shooter firing hundreds of rounds from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort.

Tim Reeves and his girlfriend, Kim Moore, were joined by Tim’s daughter and her boyfriend at the Route 91 Harvest festival, watching entertainer Jason Aldean.

At first, Tim says he thought the crowd was moving around because of a fight. It quickly became apparent to Tim, that something else was pushing the crowd towards the exits.

“It was like a war zone, “Reeves said, in describing the gunfire. “Bup, bup,bup. Bup, bup, bup,” he remembered. “And it was like ‘when is this going to stop?’” 

In the rush to get out of the concert area, Reeves and the others in his group joined the throng of festival-goers either walking or running away from the gunfire.

“I don’t know if somebody was pushing me or what,” he said. Reeves said all of sudden, he fell down. “We all kind of fell in unison. I looked up to kind of see what was coming behind me, to see what was coming and looked forward – and all of a sudden, I see a lady falling and the three other people that were with her picked her up, and said, ‘oh, my God, she’s shot.’”

The woman who was shot in front of them was not the only person who they saw on the ground, with injuries. Reeves said there were others.

“There were a lot more than that, a lot more,” he said.

Reeves said he was determined to keep moving, to get out of the area where the gunfire was continuing. The group finally got to the street behind the Mandalay Bay Hotel and found a hiding place behind a car, before ducking for cover, behind a dumpster in the street. 

Safe, but shaken, Reeves and his girlfriend returned to San Diego on Monday night. Tim keeps thinking about the fall he took and how it probably saved his life.

“Thank God we fell,” his girlfriend, Kim said. “Yeah, if we didn’t fall,” he added, “it would have been one of us.”  

Tim Reeves says he doesn’t think of himself as a deeply religious person, but with a quiet conviction, he said, “God was looking out for us."