A Prince Albert woman visiting Las Vegas last weekend said she was “full of fear” as she ran to escape the deadliest mass shooting in recent U.S. history.

Shaye Deschambeault was at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on Sunday, the night Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd full of people. She described a confused scene where no one knew where to run to escape the “terrifying” sound of gunfire.

“We didn’t know the shooting was coming from above,” she said. “We thought someone was running around in the venue.

“I had no clue. My body was just full of fear. Honestly it just feels blurry right now.”

Deschambeault lost track of her sister as Jason Aldean was playing his set. So she was alone in the crowd when the shooting broke out.

“I was just enjoying the music, watching him play, and all of a sudden that’s when we heard the shooting,” she said. “No one knew what was going on.”

She said “froze” at first. Some people in the audience thought the noise might be coming from firecrackers, she remembered. But she said she knew something was wrong when she saw Aldean rush off the stage. She watched others drop to the ground, and decided to follow their lead. The gunfire, she said, felt almost “continuous” – punctuated by short pauses.

“It would go on for a couple seconds at a time,” she said. “Everyone would drop, and then once it would stop we’d all get up and run, and then we’d hear it again and we’d just fall to the ground again.”

That pattern went on over and over. Deschambeault said it felt like the shooting went on for 15 minutes. She said she was confused and terrified. She didn’t know if there might be multiple shooters in every direction.

“The bullets were so loud,” she said. “I had no idea if it was close or far or if it was just echoing, but it sounded like it was right next to us.”

One thought kept flashing through her mind.

“All I could think about was where is my sister?”

For more on this story, see the Friday October 6 print or e-edition of the Daily Herald.