Hero Marine Steals Truck In Vegas Chaos, Owner’s Cool About It

LAS VEGAS, NV — Thievery isn’t a behavior typically associated with Marines, but the owner of a truck that was stolen Sunday in Las Vegas says it’s all good as long as the keys are returned. To be clear, Iraq veteran Taylor Winston, 29, isn’t a thug — he commandeered a pickup truck to transport victims of the horrific massacre at the Route 91 Harvest music festival to the hospital.

As the staccato of gunfire rippled through the crowd on the Las Vegas Strip, Winston and his girlfriend, Jenn Lewis, fled the terrifying scene with thousands of others but found there was no quick way out of the cordoned-off concert venue. Winston threw several people over the fence before vaulting over it himself.

Winston, honorably discharged from the Marines as a sergeant in 2011, told CBS News he felt like he was back in a war zone as sniper Stephen Paddock fired hundreds of rounds of bullets into the crowd of 22,000 concertgoers, killing 58 of them and wounding more than 500. (For updates on the shooting and daily news from Las Vegas, sign up for the Patch morning newsletter and breaking news alerts.)

Once over the fence, Winston saw a field full of pickups. His decision to steal a truck to transport victims was easy; as a Marine, he had been trained to leave no one behind and to put others’ lives above his own.

“I saw a field with a bunch of white trucks,” he told CBS. “I tested my luck to see if any of them had keys in it, first one we tried 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.”

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He crammed victims, some of them critically wounded, into the bed and cab of the truck, took them to the hospital and then went back to the festival grounds to ferry more victims. When he returned to make a third trip, paramedics and emergency medical technicians were on the scene. Winston figures that before the terrible night was over, he had ferried between 20 and 30 injured concertgoers to the hospital.

The owner wasn’t angry and said Winston’s appropriation of the pickup was “water under the bridge” as long as the keys were returned, then inquired about the conditions of the people Winston had rescued.

The Marine told the owner where he and Lewis could be found, then said the truck had been “extremely important” in saving people’s lives.

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Like others who stepped up to assist complete strangers during the deadly rampage, Winston rejects the label of hero. “There was a lot of bravery and courageous people out there,” he said.

But, regardless of whether he wants praise for his actions, he is being celebrated on social media as one of the heroes of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Photo: Police and rescue personnel gather at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Ave. after a mass shooting at a country music festival nearby. Before ambulances arrived, civilians helped ferry victims to the hospital. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images News/Getty Images)