Scott Kibby and his wife, Kari, were two of the approximate 22,000 people who attended the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas over the weekend. Scott, the principal of the new North Liberty High School, and Kari had stood next to the stage for a couple days. Sunday night, one of Scott's knees was feeling the stress. So, instead of standing near the stage for Jason Aldean's performance, the two grabbed bleacher seats. Those seats, thankfully, were around 100 yards from the stage.

Scott tells the Iowa City Press-Citizen that during Jason's performance,

Aldean was in the middle of a song, and all of a sudden I heard about half a dozen pops. I thought it sounded like firecrackers, but they were coming from above us. The big trigger was when he and the rest of the band sprinted offstage and they turned off the stage lights."

Then, they ran. Scott and Kari ran north, away from the gunfire, to the MGM Grand Hotel, a mile away. One thing that Scott remembers was the people they encountered as they ran:

We were all running like crazy for our lives to get away from the scene, and police and security are running toward what was happening. It was incredible bravery."

When the couple arrived at the MGM Grand, they hid behind a marble desk. Scott recalls,

Most of the people there had no idea what was going on, but as all of these people running from the venue started to show up, it was apparent something bad had happened."

 

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Hotel sirens would soon sound and the MGM Grand would go under a lockdown. Scott and Kari were eventually taken to a banquet room, where they stayed for nearly three hours until the lockdown ended. The couple is now back in eastern Iowa.

Just an hour before the insanity broke out on the Las Vegas strip, Big and Rich did what they did at the Great Jones County Fair this summer. They led a singalong of "God Bless America." It's always so beautiful to see and hear, but in this case, it's also so very sad. God bless all those people and may we, as a nation, find a way to come together the way we always do when that song is played.

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