Vegas visitors recall escape from gunfire; festival gunman’s girlfriend once married to Arkansan

The girlfriend of the man who killed at least 59 people Sunday when he opened fire on a crowd at a Las Vegas music festival is a former Arkansan, records show.

Authorities identified Marilou Danley, 62, of Mesquite, Nev., as the girlfriend of Stephen Paddock. She previously lived in Springdale, according to several online directories.

Police initially named Danley, who is out of the country, as a person of interest, but later officials said they believe Paddock acted alone when he fired an automatic weapon from the 32nd floor of a hotel on the Las Vegas strip before shooting himself.

Until 2015, Danley was married to an Arkansas man, who hours after the massacre was wrongly named as the shooter online. Several online news outlets named Geary Danley, 76, of Bella Vista as the shooter before Nevada officials had identified Paddock.

While some sites deleted their erroneous reports, incorrect information about Geary Danley remained online Monday afternoon, particularly on far-right outlets that seized on information from his Facebook page supporting liberal causes and television shows.

Angry Facebook users and conspiracy theorists swarmed Danley's profile with hateful messages.

"You sorry excuse for a human, liberalism is degeneracy," a Facebook user named Josh Bannon wrote.

Bannon later edited the post after learning Danley wasn't the shooter.

"I am aware this is not the shooter, but I still stand by my statement," Bannon said.

Geary and Marilou Danley married in Nevada in 1990; they jointly filed for a divorce, which was granted a day later, in February 2015, according to Washoe County, Nev., court records.

Geary Danley didn't return a message seeking comment on Monday.

While online directories listed one of Marilou Danley's previous addresses as a Springdale duplex, Washington County and local law enforcement officials said they had no record of Danley living in Northwest Arkansas, noting that she may have lived there without any government agency knowing.

She also reportedly lived in Tennessee, Florida and Ohio before moving to Nevada, according to online directories.

Several Arkansans were among the thousands on the Las Vegas strip when the gunfire broke out near the main stage of the country music festival.

William Bland, a Fort Smith native, was playing drums for Nashville singer/songwriter Jordan Mitchell at the festival. He left the main stage where country singer Jason Aldean was performing just before the shooting began to grab a bite to eat near a smaller stage where his group performed earlier.

That's when Bland heard what he thought were fireworks.

Soon, he was swept into the mass of people frantically running.

"No one knew what was going on," Bland, who now lives in Nashville, Tenn., said in a phone interview. "We didn't know if we were going toward or away from the fire."

Bland ran for what he guesses was 2 miles to a service station. Stranded with a dead cellphone, it took three hours to find strangers willing to let him charge his phone and call an Uber.

Pat Turner of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville alumni association's Las Vegas chapter met a line stretching an entire block when he went to donate blood on Monday.

He said in an email that he wasn't aware of anyone from the alumni association injured in the shooting.

Amy Harkins, 40, of Little Rock traveled to Nevada as part of a "girls trip" with her sister and a friend, arriving about 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 less than 2 miles away.

"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."

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 KKPT-FM 94.1, said by phone that he had just left Caesars Palace on the Strip and had hailed a cab to return 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 former Razorback pole vaulter 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, told viewers from her hotel room.

Morris said she later walked back to her hotel through a "ghost town Vegas."

As Bland spoke on the phone Monday afternoon, he and his bandmates still weren't able to return to the scene of the shooting to retrieve their belongings.

"You just never think it'll happen to you," he said.

Metro on 10/03/2017