Like so many others who were in Las Vegas last week, Mike Dempsey never expected that he would be someone who survives the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
That’s mostly because never in his wildest dreams could Mike have imagined someone shooting bullets into a crowd of people.
But unfortunately, that’s what Stephen Paddock did on Sunday, October 1, claiming the lives of 58 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas.
From his 32nd floor hotel room of the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino, the shooter opened fire on a Jason Aldean concert below.
Mike Dempsey happened to be staying in that same hotel. In fact, he was outside by the pool when he heard what he thought to be fireworks. Almost immediately he realized it was bullets being fired directly above his head.
“I was right under where he was firing so that was probably the scariest part,” he said. “Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined this incident could have happened. But unfortunately it could happen anywhere, anytime.”
Mike says he ran through the casino and saw someone who had been shot before the hotel was put on lockdown.
The craziest thing about Mike being at Mandalay Bay and surviving this act of terror isn’t that he made it out alive. It’s that just 16 years and 19 days before the Las Vegas attack, Mike was working inside Tower 2 of the World Trade Center when a plane struck the building.