Speaking on the first anniversary of the deadliest shooting in US history, Rosemarie Melanson, who has endured a year of surgery after her body was left ravaged with shrapnel, says she is "very happy" to finally be home
IT was a day husband Steve Melanson often never dared to hope for – finally walking his beloved wife Rosemarie out of hospital one year after she was savagely gunned down at an open-air concert.
Rosemarie was one of the first to be hit by mass killer Stephen Paddock’s indiscriminate gunfire as he fired more than 1,100 rounds into the 22,000-strong crowd at the Route 91 country concert crowd at the Mandalay Bay, killing 58 and wounding 851.
The bullet pierced her lung, oesophagus, spleen and liver, leaving her with life threatening wounds and her body ravaged with shrapnel.
Unconscious and unable to move, an off-duty firefighter told her two daughters Paige, 26, and Stephanie, 27, – one of who had also been hit – to run for their lives and promised to stay with their mother.
After the gunfire stopped, hero Don Matthews managed to pull Rosemarie on to a piece of broken fencing and drag her to safety and medical help.
Doctors said her injuries were so bad – she should have been dead.
But Rosemarie – affectionately nicknamed “the warrior” by her devoted family – kept fighting and miraculously survived months in intensive care, 12 experimental surgeries and countless life-threatening complications.
She was finally allowed home just days before the first anniversary of the worst shooting in US history – but still cannot eat, suffers excruciating pain from an open wound on her abdomen and has a long road of recovery ahead of her.
Yet incredibly, courageous Rosemarie, 54, and husband Steve, 60, bear no anger towards mass killer Paddock and say they “forgive him”.
Rosemarie told Sun Online: “I do forgive him. One day we all want to need to be forgiven for what we've done."
Steve added: “For as bad as it is. I just feel that once judgement day comes upon all of us, the shooter will have to be accountable just like all of us have to be.
“In the meantime I just felt that in order for us to be able to move on and get past this we have to forgive.
“You have to forgive otherwise he's the winner. He's going to bring our family down and I refused to let that happen. And the anger will fester and you can't live that way - I refuse to live that way.
"Of course it was difficult to get to this stage especially when you see the damage that was inflicted on Rosemarie, the damage that was inflicted on the 58 he killed and the hundreds of others he injured, whether it was physically or mentally.
"He did a lot of damage, but at the same time I just felt that in order for us to to survive this, we have to forgive, however tragic and horrifying, we have to forgive to move on. So that's what we've done.
"Now we're just focusing on today, then tomorrow and the next day and just looking to the future.
"Now it's the anniversary we're not looking back, for us this is a celebration of life, Rosemarie got through, she persevered and she inspired so many people."
Rosemarie, who was released from hospital just a few days ago, still struggles to speak for any length of time, but says her most vivid memory of the night was the realisation she had actually been shot.
"I was in shock that I was shot, literally shocked when I looked down and saw that I had been shot, I though not me," she said. "Not, not with all these people here."
"She told me, 'I remember hearing the gunshot but at first I just thought it was gunfire," tearful Steve recalls.
“Then she remembers being shot and going face down into the grass.
“Then she told me that shortly after that she remembers feeling herself rise above her body until she was looking down at herself.
“She could hear gunfire, screaming, running, and she could see our girls, then she said she left.
“I asked her where she went and she said she went to heaven and saw her dad, her two brothers and my uncle Art who had just died six months prior.
"She said she talked to everyone and thought how beautiful and peaceful it was and how she didn’t want to come back but they told her ‘Rosemarie it’s not your time’ .
"Then she remembers becoming conscious for 30-40 seconds and being put on a fence and dragged away - then that’s all she remembers for two months."
In an emotional interview, Steve relived his own horror from October 1st last year - from finding out his daughter and wife had been shot, to the excruciating wait to discover whether they had survived and where they had been taken.
Heartbreakingly, Rosemarie, who had been bought tickets to the concert as a Mother’s Day gift, had only texted husband Steve five minutes prior to the shooting to tell him what an amazing time she was having.
“I got a text from Rosemarie then Stephanie saying what a wonderful time they were having – Stephanie said they were just having a ball and mom was like a kid in the candy store.
“Shortly after 10, I got another one from my daughter saying, 'OMG' followed by 'there’s a shooting in front of us' and I thought 'oh my God'.
“The next text said, 'Mom’s hit, mom’s down'.
“It was surreal to even process that information. I just pulled my shoes on and just ran out - I didn't even know if I shut the door on the way out.
“Then Stephanie called me and all she did was cry and scream, ‘Daddy, I'm sorry Daddy, I'm sorry.
“And I knew exactly what she meant - she meant was she was sorry because she got her mom the tickets for Mother's Day, so she felt responsible.
“I told her, 'Stephanie, stay with mom, don't leave her. I'm on my way.'”
As the bullets rained down, Los Angeles firefighter Don told the girls to run to safety as he sheltered Rosemarie – actions which Steve said saved his wife’s and his daughters’ lives.
Steve tried to get to the concert venue by then the area had been cordoned off and cops directed him to the nearest hospital.
For the next several hours, Steve rushed between local hospitals and a staging area which had been set up searching frantically for his family.
He listened desperately as officials read out lists of the names of known survivors to anxiously waiting family members.
At one point he had no idea if Rosemarie or his daughters had survived: “I just felt so helpless – it was like everything was in slow motion” he recalls.
Steve was eventually reunited with his daughters – including Paige who suffered a gunshot wound to her arm.
But Rosemarie was still nowhere to be found.
Tearful Steve recalled: “At around 6am they read out the final list of survivors and Rosemarie’s name wasn’t on it. I turned to Stephanie and said ‘I don’t think mom made it’.”
The family refused to give up hope and finally – around 11 hours after the shooting – they found Rosemarie hooked up on a life support machine in one of the hospitals they had already visited.
Doctors told the family how the bullet had come through Rosemarie’s shoulder, punctured her lung, oesophagus, stomach, spleen and liver. She had lost about a third of her blood and her kidneys had gone into shock.
The bullet had exploded into tiny pieces of shrapnel which remain scattered throughout Rosemarie’s body.
Rosemarie remained in life support, sedated for two months before embarking on a painful journey of surgery after surgery.
“She was on life support for two months," Steve said. “One of the first things she did when she came out of sedation was start crying.
“I asked her 'What are you crying for?' – and at that point she was hardly able to speak – but she just said ‘how many?' meaning how many people died.
“I thought ‘how do I say anything?' I knew she was struggling, but I told her 58.
“And she asked how many injured and I told her. She just cried and cried. It was heartbreaking."
Rosemarie, who used to manage and run the family's dance school in Las Vegas, has since had to adapt to a life of hospital beds, surgeries and treatments.
Steve said: “It's not a textbook case injury. It's day by day. Everything's experimental. All her surgeries have been experimental.
“The surgeon has never seen a high powered assault rifle come in and do the damage it did ever.
“He wanted to write a piece for a medical journal on it just because it was such a unique case – it’s probably the worst place in the world that you can be hit.
“It’s a miracle she survived at all."
Despite 12 months in hospital, Rosemarie still has a huge open wound – from her last surgery – and is unable to eat.
She vomits repeatedly – due to the injury to her oesophagus and nearby nerves - and has to take a cocktail of medications to relieve the pain and keep her stable.
And as well as the physical pain – Rosemarie still has the mental scars from the night – suffering anxiety and flashbacks.
Througout it all Steve remained by her side – sleeping next to her in the hospital for about five months until he had to return to his job as a graffiti technician to make ends meet.
“She’s just had complication after complication, now that she's home now and she's still having complications, but they just thought it might be better for her mentally if she could be in her home environment, but she's still having a tough time." he said.
“She’s been through so much. There’s been days when the suffering has become too much for her and she just turns to me and says ‘Steve I can’t do this’ and I just get in bed next to her and tell her she has to keep fighting, that she can’t give up.”
The family say they have been overwhelmed by the kindness of the local community – who have held fundraisers and donated items.
But one source of frustration for their family was Paddock’s apparent lack of motive for the mass killing.
So far authorities have failed to come up with a motive and have come under fire for the lack of answers they been able to give the public.
“It’s been frustrating not knowing what the real motive is," Steve said. "You could say his motive was to kill. We all know that."
“We all know that it was not a sporadic event he didn’t just go crazy and just start shooting. That’s not the case at all. This was pre planned for months.
“The main question to me is how he got all those guns and ammo into the room – it boggles my mind how he got so many weapons through the hotel and security and up into the room.
“I think the main question is why did he want to do it? Everybody's still asking and I don't think we'll ever know for sure. I mean there may be some political beliefs involved but that's all speculation.
“There's a lot of unanswered questions and maybe there's a good reason as a maybe the authorities are still continuing investigation and we may never know.
"But to me it's irrelevant why he wanted to do it. All I know is he did do it and we're suffering the consequences.”
Rosemarie still has a long road to recovery ahead of her – and it’s unlikely she’ll ever be the same as she was before the events of October 1st, 2017.
She says as soon as she is feeling well enough, she would like to go on a cruise, but for now she and her family are just taking “one day at a time”.
"I'm very happy to be home," she said. "I'm happy to see something other than those four white walls every day - it feels good to be home."
