Rochester-area residents in Las Vegas recount mayhem, fright during deadly mass shooting

Shelly and Joe Comfort vacation in Las Vegas a couple of times a year. Like most visitors to Sin City, the Webster couple has had some long, memorable nights there.

None like Sunday.

The Comforts and two friends from Rochester, Kristi and Joe Shur, had just finished dinner and were having a drink shortly after 10 p.m. Vegas time. It was their last night in Vegas and they were at the hotel bar in Delano, a sister property connected to Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, when the band stopped playing and ran off stage.

"The SWAT team came running into the (casino), running in with machine guns," Shelly Comfort said. "We were told to run as fast as we can, there's an active shooter. It was crazy. People were diving under tables."

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High above ground level on the 32nd floor at Mandalay, gunman Stephen Paddock had started shooting, opening fire onto a crowd of 22,000 people attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival below. More than 50 people were killed and 500-plus injured. It's the worst mass casualty shooting in American history.

Authorities say Paddock, who took his own life before being apprehended, started firing around 10:08 p.m. toward the Jason Aldean concert across the street.

The Comforts and Shurs scurried to the elevators, hoping to retreat to their rooms on the 60th floor. It was chaos. "Everyone was cramming in, trying to get out of there," Shelly Comfort said.

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A couple of women who were staying at Mandalay couldn't get back there. Authorities had already begun to lock down all properties on The Vegas Strip. The Comforts let the women come to their room, where they shut the blinds and stayed away from the windows.

"We were up until 4 in the morning," Shelly said, and by then family and friends back home were waking up and texting them to make sure they were safe.

Theresa Toscano of Greece had just gotten back to the Paris Las Vegas Hotel and Casino,a few blocks away from Mandalay, a little after 10 p.m. Pacific Coast Time when an announcement blared over the loudspeakers for all guests to go back to their rooms.

“They said there was a shooting, but I didn’t know where so I just got back to my room,” Toscano said.

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A representative for the Monat hair care system, Toscano arrived in Vegas on Sunday afternoon for an upcoming work-sponsored event. She arrived a few days early to meet a friend for sightseeing. Her friend from Philadelphia did not arrive Sunday night because authorities briefly stopped all flights into Las Vegas.

“And I just stayed in my room, because they kept announcing it over the loudspeakers,” Toscano said. “I ended up falling asleep and to wake up to this.”

Toscano’s phone started ringing off the hook around 1 a.m. Vegas time as her Rochester-area friends and family started calling to make sure she was OK. She said Vegas was eerily quiet Monday morning, and from outside her hotel she could see police barricades blocking off portions of The Strip near the MGM Grand and the Tropicana Las Vegas, about a half mile away.

“It is crazy quiet here, like you never imagine Las Vegas would be,” she said. “There’s no cars down there, not even people walking around. It’s nuts.”

From outside the Luxor, Toscano said she could see crews boarding up a broken window on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay. Shelly Comfort said her traveling party, after checking out of Delano, was escorted to their transportation outside the casino by SWAT members.

Slot machines and table games were empty. The casino, usually buzzing with people and noise and open 24 hours, was silent.

"Eerily quiet. Totally surreal," she said from an airplane, moments before her return flight home.

Canandaigua native Jeff Fargo, 47, and his family have lived in the Vegas suburb of Henderson for about five years. They are in Orlando, Florida, on vacation, but the news of what happened was still jarring.

"Something like this is horrific. It’s awful. Being a Las Vegas resident, you’re very aware that you’re a soft target. We’ve known it for years," said Fargo, a St. John Fisher College graduate who is a marketing executive for a real estate company.

By early Monday afternoon he was still trying to connect with friends who were at the concert. The Fargos are scheduled to fly to Vegas Saturday. 

"I don’t think it’s going to change tourism. I think people will still come to Vegas," he said. "I think the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department is one of the best in the world, some of the best trained in the world.

"I was just talking to my wife about (always feeling safe) and we said, ‘The only way it can change is if we never leave the house,’ and that’s not going to happen."

JDIVERON@Gannett.com

Includes reporting by staff writer Meaghan McDermott.

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