Milltown’s Megan O’Donnell Clements was singing along with friends to Jason Aldean’s “When She Says Baby” when she heard a helicopter hovering above Las Vegas’ Route 91 Harvest country music festival.
After looking up and not seeing anything in the sky, she assumed the “pop-pop-pop” sounds had to be from fireworks going off somewhere in the City of Lights, but that didn’t turn out to be the case either.
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“Then the music stopped. And the the stage lights went out. Time really stopped right then, too. Although I didn’t quite realize it yet, it was the last moment I lived in life before everything changed,” Clements writes in her new book “Grief, Grace & Gratitude: How One Night Gave Me a Second Chance.”
On this night in 2017, she was experiencing the first moments of what remains as the deadliest mass shooting in American history when a 64-year-old opened fire from his 32nd floor room at Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino high above the Vegas Strip.
The crowd of 22,000 music fans ran for their lives as the gunman, who later committed suicide, fired more than 1,000 rounds in 10 minutes leaving 60 dead and more than 860 injured.
A wave of nausea washed over Clements when she slowly realized that the festival was under attack.
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“…You still can’t convince yourself to believe it. You can’t force yourself to think that this is reality, so you cling to the idea that this must be something else,” she writes. “I felt the fear, the panic, the horror bubble up slowly, but powerfully until I could taste it in my mouth and I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
“We were being shot at. And it wasn’t stopping.”
Ripping through a fence to escape
The entire crowd began running away from the sound of the gunfire, in the direction of Clements and her friend Andie Caputo. Clad in flip-flops, they were soon overwhelmed by the human stampede.
In her book, Clements describes the feeling of being trampled as the same feeling of being underwater and needing to come up for air.
“Except there’s no way to pop up when people’s feet push you further into the gravel. Right then, on the ground under people’s feet, I knew that was my last moment,” she writes.
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But she clawed her way up with help from Caputo’s outstretched hand, keeping her mind set on survival. Her focus was set on returning to her husband Ron and twin daughters Carmela and Rylee, who were 11 at the time and are now seniors at Delaware Military Academy.
As they ran, Clements and Caputo felt the bullets shaking the ground, gravel kicking up all around them.
When they got to the festival’s perimeter, they were met by a 10-foot chain-link security fence, which surrounded the grounds to keep out music fans without tickets. Now it was keeping in ticketholders as a madman was trying to kill as many of them as he could.
Clements, Caputo and the rest of the crowd tore a small hole in the fence with their bare hands, allowing for an escape route.
After running for a mile, they ended up in a private jet hangar at the nearby McCarran International Airport, renamed Harry Reid International Airport in 2021, with about 30 other concertgoers.
“All you could hear in those first minutes was breathing and sobbing,” Clements writes. “Other than that, it was stone cold silent. And it was the loudest silence I had ever heard.”
Writing the book…in secret
Earlier this year, Clements was in between jobs and reflecting on the shooting and her journey toward recovery, leaning on concepts such as gratitude and mindfulness to break through the pain and depression.
She had played with the idea of writing a book for the past three years and decided it was time, even though she had misgivings.
“It’s kind of terrifying to put yourself out there and be that vulnerable. It’s pretty intense,” she says of the 114-page self-published book, available in print ($8.98) or Kindle ($3.95) on Amazon. “I turn 40 in March and made that my deadline. I made it ahead of time.”
It took Clements four months to write “Grief, Grace & Gratitude,” usually typing away on her laptop while sitting on a living room couch with a television on in the background.
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And since it was such a big and personal project, she decided from the beginning to keep her work on it secret.
No one knew what she was up to. Not her husband, children or best friends.
“My family and friends are incredibly supportive, but sometimes when you let in those outside voices and you’re already feeling a little bit out of your league, it gets a little more overwhelming,” she says.
Ron Clements says he was shocked when she asked him if he wanted to proofread her book.
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“I don’t know how she did it,” he says, detailing her busy schedule raising a family and volunteering.
Caputo, a Wilmington native who now lives in Quarryville, Pa., was just as flabbergasted. She ended up reading the book in a single day, taking in Clements’ story, which mirrors her own as a fellow Route 91 Harvest survivor.
“It was almost surreal to read because a lot of it was the same experience I had,” Caputo says. “But it was rough to read. That night was so traumatic. Those feelings don’t come up that often anymore now that it’s been six years, but reading that, it still really hits you.”
The aftermath
When she got home to Delaware and reunited with her family, Clements writes that she never wanted to leave her couch for the rest of the day ― “or maybe even the rest of my life.”
The whirlwind of the days immediately after the shooting kept her from spending too much time with her thoughts. She went straight from the jet hangar to her hotel room to gather her things and flew home, speaking with reporters both at the airport and in her home, recalling the evil she had faced.
But once her husband went back to work and her daughters returned to school, the silence she heard that night in the jet hangar returned, as did the sights and sounds of the massacre ― things she can never unsee or unhear. Each day was harder than the one before as she sat with the grief, sadness and guilt.
“I feel like I spent every second of the day reliving the horror of that night,” she writes. “I would try to do chores around the house and couldn’t even focus on what I was doing because all I could hear are the gunshots.
“There wasn’t anything that felt normal to me anymore. Everything ― and I mean everything ― had changed.”
One of Clements’ most vulnerable moments in the book is recalling how loud noises would spark her post-traumatic stress disorder, including one day when she was alone in her living room with her children.
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A car backfired in front of her house and without flinching, Clements ran up the stairs alone to her bedroom, closed the door, sat in a corner and cried.
“Let that sink in for a second. I want you to read what I just wrote and be horrified by it because I am,” she writes about the moment. “What kind of a mother leaves her children when she thinks that there are gunshots?”
Looking back, she now knows the logical part of her brain knew it wasn’t a shooting, but the emotional part triggered an automatic reaction.
“It still sickens me and it is a hard thing for me to accept, but I have,” Clements says of her reaction that day. “Sitting, writing it down and owning it was a little tough to swallow. And that’s where some of the vulnerability comes in, thinking, ‘I’m going to sound terrible.’ But it was such a changing moment for me.”
After being a shell of herself for three months ― describing herself as a “bad employee, an even worse wife and uninterested mother” ― that moment changed her. Instead of seeking therapy, which she says in retrospect probably would have been a great help, she found her own way by focusing on positivity and gratefulness.
“Healing is messy. It’s ugly. It’s downright painful,” she writes.
Replacing fear & depression with gratitude & mindfulness
After running from the backfiring car, Clements devoted herself to leaving fear, anger and depression behind. No longer was she going to languish in the pain. Instead, she was going to turn towards healing and love.
It all really boiled down to a single, simple thought: happy people don’t kill complete strangers. Her mission was now to spread joy and positivity.
She quit her job as an operations manager at Capital One, where she worked up to 60 hours a week and launched her own brand called The Loved Life (thelovedlife.com), focusing on living well in mind, body and soul.
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Clements, 39, is now a certified personal trainer and practitioner of both Yin yoga and reiki, dedicating herself to guiding clients toward finding mindfulness.
She also practices her new mantra at her job, working at Practice Without Pressure in Pike Creek, a medical, dental and personal care office for people with disabilities.
Clements leads holiday food drives, clothing drives and makes about 30 lasagnas a year as a volunteer for the national non-profit Lasagna Love, which pairs fresh lasagna meals with those in need in each community.
Flooding the world with love, acceptance, forgiveness and grace is her “happy hippie” way of overcoming the overwhelming pain that was caused that warm night October, 1, 2017 in Las Vegas.
“I stopped focusing on the parts that hurt so much,” she writes. “I stopped allowing the anger, the fear and the hurt write the narrative of life for me.”
Have a story idea? Contact Ryan Cormier of Delaware Online/The News Journal at rcormier@delawareonline.com or (302) 324-2863. Follow him on Facebook (@ryancormier) and X (@ryancormier).
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