The Las Vegas Strip plunged into chaos in the minutes after a mass shooting that left dozens of attendees at a country music concert featuring Jason Aldean dead, visiting Arkansans said.
William Kirby Bland, a drummer originally from Fort Smith, had played at on a smaller stage a few hundred yards away from Aldean's hours before the attack, supporting a Nashville, Tenn.-based country singer named Jordan Mitchell.
Bland, 22, was standing near the smaller stage, watching Aldean's show, when several "big pops" he thought were fireworks rang out.
"They kept going and going on for at least 60 seconds — at least," he said.
Bland, who now lives in Nashville, Tenn., said he wasn't in the direct line of fire, but he got swept up in the crowd of people fleeing the venue. He grabbed his backpack and sent hurried texts to his mother and girlfriend — that he was OK, that he was running — before his phone died. Then he ran almost 2 miles west to a gas station and set up camp with other survivors.
[RELATED: Latest updates from Las Vegas after at least 58 killed in mass shooting]
"No one knew what was going on," he said.
He added that it felt like when tornadoes hit near his northwest Arkansas hometown.
"It felt like that kind of panic — we need to do something right now," he said.
Someone at the gas station — not an official — checked his backpack for weapons. Two different strangers lent him phone chargers.
"People were cautious, but overall helpful," he said.
Bland camped out for three hours before he could get an Uber back to his AirBnB.
The rest of Bland's band was stuck under the stage for hours. They were still stuck on the festival grounds when Bland spoke to Arkansas Online on Monday afternoon.
[REACTION: Arkansas officials, law enforcement respond to Las Vegas shooting]
Amy Harkins, 40, of Little Rock traveled to Nevada as part of a “girls trip” with her sister and a friend, arriving around 2:45 p.m. Sunday. Hours later, the shooter opened fire.
As Harkins' group socialized at the three-story Chandelier bar inside the Cosmopolitan hotel-casino on Sunday night, it became clear that something serious was unfolding.
“I knew this was a big deal by the panic in the people around me. I knew this was not a small, isolated incident,” Harkins said by phone, noting that “within an instant, everything went into mass chaos.”
Harkins never heard gunfire from the shooting, which happened about a mile-and-a-half south of the Cosmopolitan on Las Vegas Boulevard. But shortly after the gunfire began, some of the concert-goers returned to her hotel, many with a look of horror on their faces, Harkins said. None had visibly serious injuries.
Harkins described seeing the "pure shock" of people around her, including one girl who "appeared she was about to faint."
"It was just overall absolutely surreal, like a movie happening in front of you. There was a lot of fear, frustration and anxiety," she said.
Harkins at one point got lost from the two other members of the group as they left the bar area through a darkened hallway and eventually traveled into a stairwell.
About 50 Cosmopolitan guests were later ushered into the hotel’s basement, where they remained for about 30 minutes before being taken to the building’s main level. They stayed there for about an hour before being allowed to leave.
Once in the basement, Harkins texted her husband to let him know she was safe.
“I just went into crisis management mode,” Harkins said. “My first thought was to get the facts out there.”
The trip, which was supposed to last three days, was Harkins' first to Las Vegas. By Monday morning, she and her group were considering options for an early departure.
“We’re all still in shock,” she said. “It’s just starting to hit us, the severity of it.”
Former Little Rock radio personality Sharpe Dunaway, 49, of Conway was also in Las Vegas with his 18-year-old son for a conference at the time of the shooting. He, too, had been in the city for only a few hours when the shots were fired.
Dunaway, who once appeared on classic rock station The Point 94.1 FM, said by phone that he had just left Caesars Palace on the Strip and had hailed a cab to return back to his Embassy Suites hotel off Las Vegas' Paradise Road.
Inside a taxicab, the driver's radio communications "started blowing up" with descriptions of the mass shooting as it unfolded, Dunaway recalled.
Ambulances and police cars flew past the cab, he said. Cab drivers couldn't park and were told to not take more customers.
"It was obviously exciting, and I don't mean in a good way," Dunaway said. "The heartbeats were amplifying."
In a video posted to social media, Olympian and University of Arkansas graduate Sandi Morris said she was forced into lockdown for five hours inside a Blue Man Group show at Las Vegas's Luxor hotel-casino, which is just north of Mandalay Bay.
"This is probably one of the scariest things I've probably ever experienced in my life, if not the scariest," Morris, a 25-year-old silver medalist in pole-vaulting, told viewers from her hotel room.
Morris said she later walked back to her hotel through a "ghost town Vegas."
Read Tuesday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.