For Kansan, a relaxing weekend in Las Vegas ended in a nightmare

When she heard the first few bangs, Ryan Ulmen-Kyler looked at the sky above where country singer Jason Aldean played his guitar, expecting to see fireworks.

But they never came. And the bangs didn’t stop. And people started to panic.

“I grabbed my friend and pushed her to the ground,” Ulmen-Kyler said, somber. “I said, ‘Those are gunshots.’ And we just laid on the ground. We didn’t know where it was coming from.”

She and her friend wouldn’t know where the gunshots came from for at least five hours. They wouldn’t have answers to many of their questions until much later.

But Ulmen-Kyler knew one thing.

Someone was shooting into a crowd of concertgoers and she was going to make it home alive to her 8-year-old son.

A relaxing weekend away

Ulmen-Kyler, 34, and her friend Wendy Shuster, from California, met in Las Vegas last weekend for the Route 91 Harvest festival.

“We’re both single moms, so we just decided to take a relaxing weekend away and just have fun together,” Ulmen-Kyler said Thursday. “And it turned very chaotic.”

It’s been several days since a 64-year-old man opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino just after 10 p.m. on Sunday — he pointed his guns toward a crowd of 22,000. Fifty-eight people were killed. Fifty-eight are still in critical condition. More than 500 were injured.

Ulmen-Kyler got back to Lindsborg on Monday afternoon and was met at the airport by her family and son.

She debated whether or not to tell him what happened. How do you tell a child about something so evil?

“I decided it was just too big not to tell him,” she said. “He’d go to school and probably hear about it there.”

So at dinner that night, she broke it down the best she could.

“I just told him, ‘You know, honey, where mommy was, at that concert, there was a bad man and he did bad things. People got hurt, some people died,’” she said. “I told him, ‘I don’t want you to worry because mommy is OK, mommy is here and Wendy is at home with her son. We’re OK.”

But he had questions. It was difficult to give him answers.

“I was kind of hesitant,” she said. “But I said, ‘There was a shooting. There was a bad man and he shot guns and hurt a lot of people.’”

Since her return home, Ulmen-Kyler has told the story of what she witnessed over and over.

But it’s helped her cope.

“People need to know what really happened,” she said. “There’s still so many questions, but I feel like if you hear what happened from someone who was there firsthand, it’s different than what you see on the news.”

The challenge now is figuring out how to move on.

She’s set up an appointment with a counselor and she started watching videos taken of the massacre.

“I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing,” she said.

Her doctor cleared her to go back to work Friday — she’s the bar manager for Hilton Hotels and Resorts.

“I’m excited, but I’m not ready for the barrage of questions,” she said. “I don’t know what to expect, but I guess only time will tell what’s going to happen for me.”

She doesn’t see any concerts or large events on her immediate future. And she has a message.

“I just want people to remember, there is still a lot of good in people,” she said. “Everybody came together so quickly. People gave people their shirts, they let people use their cellphones. In all the bad that happened, there was a lot of good. Don’t ever give up hope, just because there’s one bad person doesn’t mean they’re all bad.”

What really happened in Las Vegas

After Ulmen-Kyler pulled Shuster to the ground, bullets flew above their heads.

People ran past them. Some people got shot and fell just feet from where they were.

She and Shuster held onto each other. They began to pray.

They were able to move under a table that held liquor. The bottles shattered. They grabbed other people and huddled in tightly.

They still didn’t know in what direction the bullets were coming, so when there was a break in the bangs, they ran. They made it about 10 feet to a food truck and hid under it. The breaks in the gunshots were few and far between, and they didn’t last longer than a few seconds.

On the outside, Ulmen-Kyler stayed calm and helped direct people to a safe spot behind the food truck.

On the inside, she was screaming.

They continued to lie under the food truck. Her mind stayed clear and focused. She kept telling herself she wasn’t going to die and that she’d soon be back in Kansas to hold her son.

Finally, the bullets stopped flying. At around 1 a.m., the police rounded up those who were still in the stage area and whisked them into a nearby hotel.

At 3 a.m., the SWAT team confirmed they were safe and Ulmen-Kyler knew she was making it home.

This story was originally published October 6, 2017 at 4:32 PM with the headline "For Kansan, a relaxing weekend in Las Vegas ended in a nightmare."