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When Diane Hutchinson watches videos of last year's horrendous mass shooting in Las Vegas, her stomach tightens and she wants to throw up. Her ears are ringing and she's bursting with sweat. She starts crying uncontrollably until she can not breathe.
"I was listening to videos with my eyes closed – it was hard to watch," said Hutchinson of British Columbia, Canada, at CBS News. When she finally looked with her eyes open, "a piece of my soul is dead."
Hutchinson is one of thousands of shootout survivors battling an unprecedented form of trauma: she has survived not only the most lethal shootout in US history, but also the most prevalent.
The rampage of 1 October 2017 – in which 58 people were killed and more than 800 injured – happened at an outdoor country music festival with a crowd of over 22,000 people on the Las Vegas Strip. A year later, hundreds of videos from filming are readily available online, including images of police cameras, surveillance videos, mobile phone clips and social media publications from terrified viewers. Many videos show victims shot dead or lying on the festival site as thousands of panicked customers flee.
No other mass shootings have been described in so many publicly available videos, and extensive footage is an obstacle to recovery for some survivors. Some were unable to stop watching the videos. Others have endured online harassment after users began forensically analyzing the videos to find evidence of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.
There are YouTube accounts dedicated to filming footage in Las Vegas and, despite the platform's policies against some portrayals of real-life violence, new videos always appear every two or three days. Shooting seems destined to live online as a horror that can be experienced from every angle in a few clicks.
In about ten minutes, 64-year-old shooter Stephen Paddock threw more than 1,100 balls into the crowd below his suite on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. He shot himself and committed suicide before the police entered his room.
Hutchison, the survivor, said she and her boyfriend had played dead during the shootings because they could not know where the bullets came from. They waited 45 minutes before leaving the site of the harvest festival of Route 91.
She was "obsessed" by watching videos of the attack when she returned home after the attack. Sometimes the clips were helpful while she was trying to understand the chaos of that night.
"Watching the videos helped me understand what other people's experiences might have been," she said.
But at other times, especially as we approached the first birthday, it only hurt.
"Sometimes I look to remember what I have survived," she said. "Sometimes I look because I feel dead and want to go back to the night to see if I can come back to life Sometimes I just look for pain, so I know I'm still alive."
Mike Cronk, a survivor from Tok, Alaska, said he had done his best to avoid the videos. "I know what I've lived, I know what happened … I want to move on," he told CBS News. But they have always become a part of his life.
He saw a video that was filmed just after one of his friends was wounded by gunshots and the sound of gunshots brought him back at that time. He saw other people recognize the people he saw during the three days of the festival and ended up being killed.
After Cronk did TV interviews about his experience that night, he found himself subject to conspiracy theory videos blaming him for being a "crisis actor" in a hoax. A year after the shooting, the authorities did not determine the shooter's mobile, which spawned a sub-culture of unsubstantial speculating videos that there was a second shooter or a wider plot behind the Attack, or that everything was sort of organized. (The latest report from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department on the shootings indicates that the shooter acted alone and had no connection with political or religious organizations.The FBI continues its investigation and said it would issue its report here the end of the year.)
"It was not fair that I was confronted with that," said Cronk about videos of conspiracy theory. He has trouble accepting the number of remaining online videos.
"I do not know how to limit that," he said. "Freedoms are freedoms, but boy, there's a moment when you wonder if things like that should be there."
YouTube's rules for videos showing violence in the real world allow "balanced content with context and additional information". Some reports from Las Vegas have been broadcast, but the essential – including graphic videos of slain victims – lives on independent accounts, some of which are devoted to spreading conspiracy theories about what's happened past.
YouTube, owned by Google, did not respond directly to CBS News' video questions. The company said in a statement: "YouTube has clear policies that define acceptable content to publish, we quickly remove videos that violate these rules when our users post them, and we allow videos that are shown for educational or Youtube documentaries. "
One year after the shooting, recently updated filming videos still appear online. A YouTube account called "Las Vegas Shooting Archive" is the most complete collection, with nearly 600 videos representing or related to the shoot.
The account is run by a Las Vegas resident who identified himself as S. Ramirez and stated that he was not present at the concert. He told CBS News that he became so obsessed with the shooting investigation that his girlfriend said he could not talk about it at the weekend.
Ramirez said that he is constantly finding new images on social networks, direct advice and lots of videos on camcorders released by the Las Vegas Police Department. He added that other survivors have arrived at a point where they feel comfortable sharing their own pictures of the night and he estimates that hundreds of additional videos will one day appear on the internet.
Ramirez stated that he had avoided displaying the most violent videos that he had obtained, and he began the chain "almost accepting the fact that it would be deleted at some point ". But he said that he had "no interaction" with YouTube employees since the account was created nearly 10 months ago.
He said that he had heard survivors and that most of them had "completely approved" his efforts to show people the enormity of the tragedy.
If anyone complained about his collection of videos, he said that he would direct them to the survivors "who called me up and said," This is not traumatic for me personally, it helps me ".
"Everyone is crying differently," he said.
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