Former Homewood Man Describes Terror After Las Vegas Shooting

LAS VEGAS, NV — A former Homewood man who has lived in Las Vegas for the past 10 years thought a plane had crashed when he saw that there were no planes taking off or landing at McCarran International Airport, unaware of the carnage happening on the famous Las Vegas strip. Jerry Hicks moved to the desert city 10 years ago to take a job at Wynn Las Vegas Hotel. Now retired, Hicks works part- time for a real estate appraiser and continues playing and creating music.

Hicks had just finished having dinner with a woman friend shortly before 10 p.m. local time Sunday when the shooting began. They had planned to go to Bellagio for a nightcap, but his friend called it an early evening so she could get home and help her son with some homework.

“We left the strip about 20 minutes before [the shooting] happened,” Hicks said. “I went to go visit a friend in Chinatown. When I left his house, it took me an hour and a half to get back home to the other side of the strip, a ride that would normally take me about 10 minutes.”

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As he was tooling down Las Vegas Boulevard to go home, he noticed that “traffic was a nightmare.”

“At first I thought there had been a car accident,” he said. “Then I saw there were no planes landing or taking off at the airport. I thought maybe a plane had crashed.”

When he saw hundreds of people milling around the airport where they would not normally be, he knew something more had happened. He called his brother and told him to turn on the local TV news station.

“I saw more police cars and ambulances than I had ever seen in my life racing down the strip,” Hicks said. “There were hundreds of people running toward the airport from Mandalay Bay. Finally I turned on the CNN radio station and heard there was an active shooter at Mandalay.”

Hicks said Mandalay Bay Casino and Resort is the very last hotel on the southern end of Las Vegas Boulevard near the airport, where police were shepherding concertgoers after the shootings. He describes the event center where the Route 91 Harvest Festival as a large, open asphalt area where concerts and rodeos are held.

“It wasn’t a big local event,” he said. “About three-quarters of the people there were tourists.”

Hicks lives with his brother a few blocks off Las Vegas Boulevard in a gated community behind the Wynn Hotel, a mile or so from Mandalay. The only gate in and out of his neighborhood leads to Sunrise Hospital, the Level Two Trauma Center where the shooting victims were being transported.

“It was just solid ambulances and sirens,” Hicks said. "You couldn't get out of the gate."

As for life in Las Vegas, Hicks calls it the “wild West," where people are allowed to openly carry firearms under Nevada law. It’s not unusual to see someone carrying a gun strapped on their hip while eating a burger at Wendy’s.

Although Las Vegas schools were open Monday, a lot of residents kept their kids home, he said. Cirque du Soleil and Blue Man Group canceled their evening shows, but the casinos, including Mandalay Bay, had reopened by the mid-afternoon. Traffic was still bad in town, and except for talking to his stunned neighbors and family and friends from Chicago checking to see that he was OK, Hicks said he hadn’t left the house all day.

“We can’t pull ourselves away from the TV,” he said. “Nobody wants to go to the strip.”

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