Las Vegas shooting survivor risked her life to stay at dying man's side: 'I promised his girlfriend that I would not leave him'
"Like you don't have to be a doctor to know," Bartender said of man's death.
— -- A bartender at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival sprang into action to help others, including a man who eventually died in her arms, as the mass shooting began Sunday night.
Hundreds of concertgoers had fled the scene, running toward the tent where Heather Gooze tended bar in a VIP fan section and seeking shelter from the incoming fire.
"You could hear everyone shouting, 'Shooter, shooter,'" Gooze told ABC News. "This was legitimate terror.
"There was a moment where you're like, 'I don't know what to do.' And then you're like, 'All right, go,'" she said of her own fight-or-flight reaction.
When a second large wave of people rushed the tent, Gooze said, many of them were covered in blood, including Jordan McIldoon, who had been shot in the stomach.
Gooze, 43, said she helped carry the 23-year-old man, using a maintenance ladder as a makeshift gurney.
"I put my hand on the arm of the guy that was laying there,” the Las Vegas resident said of McIldoon. “We brought him over to the sidewalk and we lay him down.”
When she reached down to grab McIldoon's hand, she said, it was too late. "The fingers kind of squeezed then just stopped. Like you don't have to be a doctor to know," she said of his death.
The young man's girlfriend, from whom he had been separated during the panic at the concert, called his cellphone, which Gooze answered.
"I promised his girlfriend that I would not leave him,” Goozen said. “That I would make sure that she knew where he was going to be going to. What was going to happen. That they knew who he was.”
"She said, ‘Is he hurt?’ And I said, 'Yes.' She said, 'Be honest with me, tell me, is he OK?' And I said, 'No.' I said, 'He's passed away; he's dead.'"
Gooze contacted McIldoon's family over the ensuing few hours, including his mother to his grandmother.
"I kept thinking about, 'If this was me would people stay with me? Would they make sure I was OK? Would they contact my family? I couldn't go," she said.