[ad_1]
IRVINE (CBSLA) – Country music star Jason Aldean played Saturday night in Irvine, nearly a year after a gunman opened fire at an Aldean concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and hundreds of wounded.
Aldean took the stage at 7:30 pm Saturday at the FivePoint Amphitheater as part of his High Noon Neon 2018 tour.
Jason Aldean performs on stage at the 2018 iHeartRadio Music Festival at T-Mobile Arena on September 21, 2018 in Las Vegas. (Getty Images)
On October 1, 2017, while Aldean was playing at the 91 Harvest Road Festival on the Las Vegas Strip, shooter Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 people in a hotel room at the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay hotel.
It was the most lethal mass shooting in US history.
According to the Orange County Registry, hundreds of survivors of the Route 91 shooting were attending Aldean's concert in Irvine.
RELATED: A mother in the area heals physically as the anniversary of the Las Vegas massacre looms
Aldean has already played in San Diego on September 20th and San Bernardino on September 22nd.
Melissa Coffey, a mother of two injured during the shooting in Las Vegas, attended the San Bernardino concert and planned to go Saturday night.
She says that the bullet that struck her missed her femoral artery by less than a centimeter. She spent time on crutches and in a wheelchair.
"I know how lucky I am," Coffey said Friday at CBS2. "I asked all the doctors I saw telling me how lucky I am to be alive."
Orange County Sheriff's Deputy Joe Owen, also injured in last year's massacre, celebrated his 30th birthday at Aldean's Glen Helen Amphitheater in San Bernardino.
He called it a healing moment, and he encouraged the other survivors to use the weekend event to pull himself together.
"It was a good time," said Owen. "There were times when he started playing certain songs at the time of filming and before and it was really an emotional moment for all of us. But we were happy that it happened without a hitch.
Owen helped keep his wife and friends safe, but to the dismay of his wife, he rushed to the line of fire to help others. He quickly realized, with another policeman on the scene, that even though they knew that the shot was coming from a building, they could not do anything to prevent that, they could only help the victims.
Owen put a survivor safe when he realized that he had been shot dead.
"Pulling it was like I was on fire, there was a burning sensation in my stomach," Owen said.
Then he felt a sharp pain in his right leg and his jeans were covered with blood.
Someone helped him to shelter and then pushed him over a wall, where two air force nurses helped him out. to put pressure on his wounds to stop the bleeding before he is taken to the hospital.
It took months and several surgeries, but he managed to get back to work. He has shrapnel in his legs that is too risky to withdraw, so he lives with that, and he said the bullets sometimes hurt him, a constant reminder of the shooting.
He said he believed that seeing Aldean complete a show could be therapeutic for survivors such as himself, and he encouraged others to attend the Irvine show.
(© Copyright 2018 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved The City News service contributed to this report.)
Source link
