Hard to believe we're coming up on the 7-year anniversary. The Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting remains the deadliest mass shooting in United States history, after 60 people were killed and over 800 were injured when a gunman opened fire on the country music concert along the Las Vegas strip.
Jason Aldean was the headliner for the final night of the festival, and was onstage when the gunfire broke out. He's spoken a little bit in the past about his horrifying experience that night, but during a recent conversation with Tucker Carlson, Aldean opened up with details that he said very few people had heard about before now. As the country singer explains, he was wearing in-ear monitors at the time the gunfire began, and initially thought that the sounds he was hearing was an issue with his equipment. But once he realized it was gunfire and ran offstage, he realized just how close the shots really were:
"I was on stage. I thought we had a blown speaker, no clue what was going on... I just heard something sound like it was cracking, but it was the gun going off. It was coming through the microphones and it just sounded weird, but I didn't know what it was. So we got offstage and I took those out and I heard him shoot again, and that's when I knew what was going on. I had no idea until I got off stage." Aldean says that after he got offstage, his main concern was his wife Brittany, who was 8-months pregnant at the time:
"When I took my headphones out the first thing I said was, 'Where's Brit?' We just kinda hunkered down for awhile, and I kept noticing the guy would shoot and then there'd be a little break where I guess he was going to a different window or whatever he was doing. So I just told her, 'Next time he stops like that, get up and start moving, we're going to the bus.' So she got up and we started heading to the bus, and we got about halfway there and he started shooting again. She kind of froze up and I grabbed her, took her to the bus, got in the back of the bus and just kinda hunkered down back there..." And besides the safety that the shelter of the bus provided, turns out Jason had another reason for wanting to get back there:
"I got some stuff on the bus that will at least, you know, somewhat of an even playing field." I think we all know what he was talking about... But even on the bus, Jason later realized that he wasn't out of the line of fire:
"You go and see the aftermath after it happened, there's bullet holes in the front of my bus and in the side, the windows got shot out of the band bus." And once he got his equipment back, he realized just how close he came to losing a member of his band:
"My bass player, who was on stage with me, one of my best friends in the world for the last 25 years, was standing next to me, had a bullet lodged in the bass he was playing at the time. A bullet hits the bass he's got on at the time playing." He also said that it was days later before they were even able to get their gear off the stage, a grim reminder of the chaotic scene they had to run to escape from:
"I took my guitar off, laid it on stage the night of the shooting, it stayed right there in that spot for two weeks while the FBI went out and did the crime scene and all." Of course, the FBI was never really able to figure out a motive for the senseless shooting - something that Jason says still bothers him:
"I hated that happened, and to never have any reason for it or get any closure on what that was all about, it's just kind of been annoying. It's just wild that we can put a guy on the moon, we can't figure that out." As the years go by and the tragedy grows further and further from our everyday consciousness, it seems to become less and less likely that we'll ever truly know the motive or why the shooter decided to target the country music festival. But for Aldean, it's an experience that he'll never truly get over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpF26prP0_M
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