10 Heroes Of The Las Vegas Massacre

U.S. Army soldier Matthew Cobos was photographed lying on top of a young woman in an attempt to shield her from the barrage of bullets tearing through the air around them at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival. The duo ended up on the ground when panicked concert-goers tried to escape the deadly gunfire pounding down on them as the gunman fired from across the street while on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino.

Cobos also covered her eyes to stop her from seeing the carnage around her. Moments later, they got up and ran to safety behind a nearby car. Once Cobos knew the woman was safe, he then ran back to help others who had been injured and was seen using his belt as a tourniquet. He even put his finger in bullet holes of some who had been shot.

A young mom, Summer Clyburn, “took a bullet to the back by a rifle to save someone else's life,” according to the person who wrote the Facebook post about her, seemingly a close friend or family member named Lauren Harkins.

“She took the bullet for her fiancé,” the post read. “He was shot in his left temple, and he told her to run and instead she took off her flannel and wrapped his wound. She was putting another layer over him when she was then shot in her back. "

A photo shows Summer in what seems to be a hospital, carrying a young child. Although she is not seriously injured, Harkins explained that “the bullet is shattered inside of her and is unable to be removed.”

“Her fiancé is doing better and improving; we will find out more today,” she added. “He's a fighter. He's a police officer. His journey isn't over; he will be back in the field saving lives again someday soon.”

Mandalay Bay security guard Jesus Campos was armed with just a nightstick when he tried to open gunman Stephen Paddock's barricaded door on the hotel's 32nd floor.

Paddock, who had cameras looking outside his room, stopped shooting at the crowds below and fired through the door at Campos, blasting him in the right leg. He immediately called the casino’s dispatch and reported the shooter’s location.

When additional guards and cops arrived, they were then able to rush to the location and draw Paddock’s fire. “We would not have engaged this individual in the time lapse we did without [the security guard's] assistance,” Las Vegas Sheriff Joseph Lombardo later said.

Paddock ultimately turned his gun on himself and was found dead an hour later after a SWAT team stormed his room.

Mike Goguen and his wife, Jamie (Goguen) Stephenson, were among the crowd of 22,000 people when the bullets rained down. They were sitting near the stage on the right-hand side and almost immediately fled to safety, but decided instead to stay behind to help.

Goguen, the founder of Montana's Two Bear Air search and rescue program, has trained for a variety of emergency medical responses with the local sheriff’s department and has been involved in rescue events in his home state.

The couple helped one man who was crumpled up against a wall with an abdomen wound and carried him out to the street where they loaded him into a passing vehicle to be transported to the hospital. “We were carrying severely wounded victims who needed to be taken to the trauma center,” Goguen said. “We had several others trying to assist in carrying victims.”

This process went on until a full fleet of first responders arrived to handle the tragedy en masse. When it was over, both Goguen and Stephenson had blood stains on their clothes and blood on their hands.

Ex-Marine Taylor Winston went for cover as the bullets were coming closer, and then helped several people climb a fence to get away. That's when he "saw a field with a bunch of white trucks."

"I tested my luck to see if any of them had keys in it," Winston said. "First one we tried opening had keys sitting right there. I started looking for people to take to the hospital. There was just too many, and it was overwhelming how much blood was everywhere."

In the end, Winston used that truck to get as many as 30 victims to the ER.

The owner, Phelps Amesberg, was cool about the whole thing and later said in a text all he wanted was the key and that everything else was "water under the bridge." He asked Winston how the people he'd ferried to safety were doing.

"I don't know if they all made it," Winston texted in part, "Sorry about...all the blood."

Winston later said he wasn't any more of a hero than many others he saw. "There was a lot of bravery and courageous people out there. I'm glad that I could call them my country folk."

Off-duty British soldier Ross Woodward, 24, was vacationing in Vegas with fellow troops after a desert training exercise. He rushed to help injured victims in the massacre and has been hailed by his brother for "keeping America safe."

Woodward, a member of the 1st Queen's Dragoon Guards, turned towards danger as bullets rained down on the open-air concert. He and two other soldiers with whom he had been traveling helped tend to the wounded and lead festival-goers to safety. His friend, Trooper Stuart Finlay, 25, left his birthday celebration to also attend to the wounded.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed the three troopers, who are trained to treat battlefield wounds, provided first aid and medical assistance to victims until emergency services arrived.

Gabriel Velasquez, a custodian at Mandalay Bay, was "picking up trash inside a bathroom and he heard a bunch of screaming and firecrackers....he said there were bodies laying on the floor. There were people trying to help.” said his daughter, Jasman.

Velasquez didn’t run when he saw chaos—instead, he tried to direct people to shelter.

“He just saw people running away, and he saw a woman—he described her as bleeding from head to toe. He was trying to get people inside the bathroom and noticed that he had blood on his arm and didn’t know if it was his or someone else's and then he noticed it was coming from his arm.”

After the shooting finally stopped, Velasquez was able to find help and is now in the hospital. He's expected to make a full recovery from a bullet wound to his arm.

Some concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival were saved by a man they knew merely as the "hero in the red hat."

"[He] got our wives over the gate and under the stage to relative safety. He didn't follow the girls after tossing them over the gate because in the chaos he couldn't find his girlfriend," Larry Rorick wrote in a Facebook post that has been shared by hundreds. "He didn't follow them over because he had to find his own girl. Our wives eventually made it out the back of the stage and over a 15-foot fence with about 40 people of the 22,000. They never saw the red hat again."

With the help of those shares, that man has been identified as New Mexico native Anthony Chavez.

Chavez was standing in the front row with his girlfriend, Deia Torres, when the horrific scene unfolded. "Everybody had a delayed reaction. They didn't know if it was gunfire or fireworks. They hit the ground. I couldn't get down on the floor—there was nowhere for me to go. The gunfire was coming right over my shoulder."

He rallied those around him, including Rorick's wife, Danielle, and gave them a boost over the barrier before hopping it himself. He then ran across the street, encouraging those who were too tired or injured to continue following him. He stood in the middle of the road, directing people where to go—those with gunshot wounds he would send to a nearby triage area, and those who weren't injured he led to the Hooters Casino Hotel on Tropicana Avenue.

When called a hero, he said, "Honestly, I didn't do much. I helped people get to a point where they could get to safety. I had that mindset. With how chaotic it was, somebody just needed to be in charge."

30-year-old Jonathan Smith is responsible for saving at least 30 people's lives among the chaos, despite getting shot himself.

The father of three got shot in the neck while helping dozens of people trying to escape from the scene. He said that his initial intent was simply to push his three nieces—ages 17, 18 and 21—to safety. “Honestly, that was my main intention, was just to get them out of there,” he said.

Once they were in the clear, something made Smith turn back around. He saw numerous people falling, trampled in the stampede and running toward any exit available. “I basically helped most of them get up. There was one girl that was pinned down right at the exit—her and a couple of people were pinned down. I think she was just shell-shocked to move," he recalled. "I kind of basically just grabbed her and said, ‘We got to go.’”

Smith realized he had been shot after being shoved to the floor and realizing he couldn't get up because his arm had gone numb. He was aided by someone who identified himself as an off-duty San Diego police officer, who helped flag down a vehicle that took him to the hospital.

He doesn't see himself as a hero. “Everyone’s saying, dude you’re a hero, you’re this. I’m not a hero,” he said. “I'm just someone that just basically decided, you know what, I'll put someone's life before my own. “

Good Samaritan and bartender Heather Gooze was uninjured in the melee and was working inside a tent when she first heard the shots. Just outside, 23-year-old Jordan McIldoon from British Columbia, Canada, had become separated from his girlfriend and was shot in the stomach.

Gooze found him in his last moments of life. "His fingers were kind of wrapped on my hand—his hand like kind of squeezed a little bit, and then just, like, went loose," she said.

She stayed with his body for more than five hours, until police arrived and began evacuating survivors, and broke the tragic news to both his girlfriend and his mother. “I would never want myself or one of my family members to be left alone,” she stated. “I needed to make sure that they could identify him, that they knew who he was.”