He lost his wife in Strip shooting, now has 2 guardian angels
Sue Ann Cornwell couldn’t stop speeding. The recently retired Clark County school bus driver, still wearing her cowboy hat, leaned on the horn. Her blue 1994 Ford Ranger weaved through traffic.
She barrelled away from the horror of the Route 91 Harvest festival grounds and onto Interstate 15. She needed to get to a hospital.
Cornwell had her sister in the passenger seat, along with a woman in the bed of her pickup truck fighting for her life. The gunshot victim’s husband held her while another woman, a 22-year-old nurse who graduated just weeks earlier, did her best to tend to the wound.
Then came the words Cornwell will never forget.
“You can slow down,” the nurse told her.
Cornwell knew Denise Burditus, a 50-year-old wife, mother and grandmother from Martinsburg, West Virginia, had died.
Her heart sank. She felt helpless. And now they were stonewalled on I-15. Each car was bumper to bumper. Getting out of her truck, Cornwell took a sheet from her toolbox.
“I want to give her some respect,” she said. She covered Burditus and her husband, Tony. Over and over, he told his wife he loved her.
“Can she hear me?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” she said. “God makes it possible.”
He didn’t care if they ever moved. He knew once they got to the hospital, he would have to say goodbye after 32 years. He didn’t want to do it.
‘Better every day’
In that pickup truck Oct. 1, a man watched his wife die. In his devastation, he found two “angels” willing to do whatever they could to save her.
Tony and Denise married at 18. They already had their first child, Joshua. The high school sweethearts from Hedgesville, West Virginia, had known each other since middle school, but it wasn’t until a cold fall night in 1984 that they went out for the first time.
Over the years they had a daughter, Mallorie, and four grandchildren, with another on the way. Tony’s nearly 27-year career in the Army took them to places such as Japan, Washington state, Arizona and Virginia. In the summer, they would take their grandchildren on road trips in their recreational vehicle.
“It just got better every day,” Tony, 51, said. “That’s a great deal of growing, and we loved one another more.”
Tony describes his wife’s infectious smile, her zest for life and her love for travel. She was quick and witty, sarcastic at times. Sometimes when she cooked, she’d put unlikely items together. But they always tasted good, he said.
When Tony went away on business, she sent him a selfie every day, a photo with her thumb up, grinning ear to ear.
The former bank teller was going back to school at Blue Ridge Community College and recently decided she wanted to study sports fitness and nutrition.
This year was the couple’s second year attending the Route 91 Harvest festival. That Sunday they spent the day by the pool at Bally’s. Denise was already making plans for their next trip to Las Vegas, determined to bring their friends to the festival next year.
That night, when the first volley hit, Denise looked at Tony. He told her it wasn’t gunfire. But when he heard the second, the shots were distinct. They were heading to the exit when he turned around. He saw as a bullet struck the back of her head.
‘Not dying tonight’
The weekend of the festival was a girls’ night out for Cornwell and her sister, Billie Jo LaCount. LaCount was visiting for a few months from Wisconsin.
It was their second year at the festival. The two sisters, eight years apart, had grown up listening to country music in Oconto Falls, Wisconsin. They played Dolly Parton, George Jones, Hank Williams Jr.
But that night, they were there for Big & Rich and, mostly, Jason Aldean. Cornwell, 52, wore her cowboy hat over her gray mullet.
She collects guitar picks; she already had Eric Church’s. On that Sunday, John Rich looked right at her and threw her a black one. The whole crowd sang “God Bless America,” their phone lights illuminating the desert sky. The band’s DJ invited the sisters to an after-party at Redneck Riviera.
That’s where they thought they were going that night, before they heard the shots.
After the first pops, they strained their ears to hear. Cornwell saw the speaker on the right side of the stage smoking. They got down to hide from the gunfire, and she lay on her younger sister, shielding her.
“You can’t have your blood sugar drop,” she told her sister, who is a diabetic. “If anyone’s going to get shot, it’s me.”
A woman close to them, 30 weeks pregnant, was alone. The sisters grabbed her, moving her farther away from the shots. They ran behind a concession stand.
“This baby is not dying tonight,” LaCount told the pregnant woman. Cornwell led them to safety through a knocked-down fence. She told LaCount to find her truck.
Cornwell knew she had to go back.
Inside the venue, she saw a woman frantically attempt chest compressions on a man. Another man in his mid-20s walked by, his girlfriend draped over his shoulder. She couldn’t be helped. A little boy hid under a chair. She picked him up and carried him on her back.
“Close your eyes,” she said. “Hang on like Batman.”
Walking around the site, she used hats, shirts, anything she could find, to cover the faces of the dead.
‘Angels one and two’
After that night, Tony looked for “guardian angels one and two.” A couple of days later, he received a message on Facebook.
“I am the one that drove the truck trying to get Denise help. I want you to know my heart is broken. We did all we could. You are an awesome husband,” it read.
He met up with Cornwell and LaCount at Bally’s on Oct. 5. As soon as they connected eyes, he recognized them. He told them about Denise.
“I never spoke a word to her,” Cornwell said. “But I know her.”
She and LaCount still wear the purple Route 91 bands given out at the concert. They got matching tattoos on their calves with the 91 sign. With their legs pressed together, it reads in cursive “Forever Sisters, Sisters Forever.”
But they’ve done more to honor Denise.
On the back of the blue pickup truck is a “Route 91 Festival” bumper sticker, and another with angel wings. Under them, in white: Denise Salmon Burditus.
A lighthouse memorial built on Cornwell’s lawn stands to honor family members who died. She added Denise’s name.
“They’re always gonna be with us,” LaCount said of Tony and Denise. “They’re family.”
Each day the sisters try to send Tony a selfie, as Denise would.
“We call it the Selfie Movement,” Cornwell said. “He reminds me if I don’t.”
At the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden, the sisters decorated one of the 58 trees with a collage of pictures for her. They placed blue plastic butterflies for her grandkids, with the words “I love G-ma.” That’s what they called her.
Cornwell also filled a pair of old boots with flowers, writing the words “50 years of boot-iful.”
“Relationships have been formed,” Cornwell said of that fateful night.
“But at the same time, relationships have been lost.”
Contact Briana Erickson at berickson@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5244. Follow @brianarerick on Twitter.
