Police investigate shooting at Mount Charleston campground

Officials are investigating a shooting at a Mount Charleston campground from early Sunday.

Metropolitan Police Department spokeswoman Alejandra Zambrano said Monday that officers responded but that the U.S. Forest Service is leading the investigation. However, Forest Service spokeswoman Erica Hupp said police are leading the investigation.

Hupp said 911 wasn’t called until a couple of hours after the shooting.

“Someone needed to call 911,” she said.

Zambrano said shell casings were recovered from the area and turned over to federal officials.

James Farrell, a Route 91 Harvest festival shooting survivor who was staying at the Champion Road campsites on Sunday morning, said he was terrified.

“I was shaking,” he said. “I thought they were going campsite to campsite massacring people.”

Farrell said there was no cell service at the campsite, so campers had no way to call for help. By the time he left at 7 a.m., he said, there was no law enforcement response.

Farrell said he woke up to the sound of gunshots at 3:30 a.m. and that the shooting continued in spurts for about 15 minutes. He said it reminded him of the Route 91 shooting, when he was running the spotlight for country star Jason Aldean.

“He sprayed rounds across my platform and hit my spotlight, and they told me I couldn’t come down,” Farrell said of the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting, which left 58 people dead. “I just remember sitting up there watching it all until I just couldn’t look no more. But this time I couldn’t see; I didn’t know where it was coming from.”

Farrell said he’s been in Las Vegas since 1982 and has never heard of anything like this at Mount Charleston. He said there were signs at the entrance to the campground that explicitly said “No shooting.”

“I just feel bad for the people there who have never been through anything like this before,” he said. “We always have a good time up there, but now they’re going to have some PTSD for sure.”

Another camper, Summar Thompson, said the campers didn’t know what to do since they couldn’t get service to call for help.

“How do people leave a campsite with only one way in and one way out when there’s bullets being showered from the entrance?” she said in an email Monday evening. “With no service, how do we call for help? We called when we got service.”

Thompson and Farrell agreed that there needs to be more surveillance near the campsites in case of emergencies.

“We had several rangers come to our campsite during the day but not one came to our rescue when we truly needed them,” Thompson said in the email. “Not one.”

https://www.facebook.com/DJMiKEMiKEY/posts/3527457777265276

A Facebook user posted about the incident on Sunday. He said he woke up at 3:30 a.m. to the sound of gunshots and multiple bullets hitting his campsite and “heard a girl and guy laughing,” according to the post.

When the sun came up, the user said he found 173 shell casings near the campsite.

“No park ranger, no cops NOTHING,” the post read. “Just us and what we had.”

Contact Alexis Ford at aford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0335. Follow @alexisdford on Twitter. Review-Journal staff writer Glenn Puit contributed to this report.