Mom gives birth days after surviving Las Vegas shooting
A pregnant woman who was overdue by a week decided to attend the three-day Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas to help move things along.
“We decided, ‘Oh, we’ll go. Maybe it will help (my baby) come out’ and we were just there having fun,” Markie Coffer told Fox 5 in Vegas.
Coffer, her boyfriend, Travis Matheson, and Coffer’s brother Cody attended all three nights of the event. On Saturday, the couple even took their three kids.
The following day, the adults returned to see the headliner perform.
“We were really excited to see Jason Aldean, the main guy, so we definitely stayed to the end, and then towards the end it got crazy,” she said.
The festive atmosphere turned into a living hell when bullets began raining down on the crowd of 22,000, leaving 58 of them dead and about 500 injured.
Matheson, a US Army veteran, turned to his training to escape the hellacious attack.
“I told her, ‘We got to get to safety and find somewhere to hide,’” he said.
Matheson, Coffer and Cody crawled across the killing field. One of the bullets struck Cody in the shoulder, but the group kept going and eventually made it to safety.
“One of my brother’s friends picked us up and brought us straight (to the hospital). It was chaotic down there,” Coffer said.
Two days later, baby Wyatt was born.
“He’s been unique since the beginning,” she said.
“(He is) a light at the end of the tunnel,” Matheson said. “I’m thankful nothing happened worse to any one of us … and we couldn’t be here for him. It was perfect timing for him.”
Coffer and little Wyatt were discharged from the hospital Wednesday. Cody is expected to fully recover.