Survived A Mass Shooting, Killed At Another

It is like a bad script from a horror movie. You find yourself at a mass shooting, survive that tragic event, and then die in another one.

Sounds like urban folklore. But it has happened. And it has occurred again. Recently.

Telemachus Orfanos, 27, was a Navy veteran who survived the Las Vegas massacre on October 1, 2017. But then he was shot and died on November 7, 2018. After Orfanos was killed in the Thousand Oaks' Borderline Bar and Grill massacre, his mother demanded actions, not words.

"I don't want prayers. I don't want thoughts. I want gun control," Susan Orfanos said. "I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers. I want gun control."

On June 2, 2012, one person was killed and seven others injured in a shooting at the Eaton Centre in Toronto. That was at a food court. One of the witnesses Jessica Ghawi (a/k/a Jessica Redfield) was a sports writer. She experienced a “feeling” and left the food court at the Eaton Center right before the shootings.

Redfield/Ghawi wrote three days after the Toronto shooting:

I can’t get this odd feeling out of my chest. This empty, almost sickening feeling won’t go away. I noticed this feeling when I was in the Eaton Center in Toronto just seconds before someone opened fire in the food court. An odd feeling which led me to go outside and unknowingly out of harm‘s way. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around how a weird feeling saved me from being in the middle of a deadly shooting. Source.

She wrote: "My receipt shows my purchase was made at 6:20 pm....The gunshots rung out at 6:23. Had I not gone outside, I would’ve been in the midst of gunfire."

Jessica Ghawi was later killed in the Aurora Colorado shooting, during The Dark Knight Rises screening, on July 20, 2012.

Back to the Las Vegas shooting of 2017....where 22,000 people in the crowd did survive.

There has been a good deal of "conspiracy theories" about this shooting, and some of it has involved the death of survivors. A good deal of this has been greatly exaggerated, however.

One factual story is of  Dennis and Lorraine Carver (pictured above).

Lorraine Carver allegedly wrote on social media that her husband protected her from “shooters.” According to their daughter, Brooke Carver, the two were line-dancing to Jason Aldean just moments prior to realizing that someone was shooting into the crowd
But then, Carver and her husband Dennis were killed on October 16, 2017 in a car accident near their home in Murrieta, California, when their car veered off a curve in a road and catching fire. Investigators say that the Las Vegas shooting survivors somehow crashed their vehicle into a metal gate at 10:50 p.m. The gate reportedly separated the Carvers’ community from the outside world, and the fire spawned by the crash was so hot and virulent that it took the Riverside County Fire Department nearly an hour to get it under control. Both were pronounced dead at the scene.

Survivor Kymberley Suchomel died in her sleep of reportedly natural causes just a week after the shooting. She was 28-years-old and had publicly claimed to have witnessed multiple shooters at the Route 91 concert before her death.

Danny Contreras, another survivor of the Las Vegas mass shooting who described multiple shooters was also found dead earlier this week. As YourNewsWire reports, the 35-year-old took to social media days after the Route 91 shooting to tell a tale of multiple shooters at the venue. He was reportedly found shot multiple times and deceased in a vacant Las Vegas area home on October 28, after having tweeted out his claims of two shooters just days after surviving the Las Vegas mass shooting. His tweet was retweeted hundreds of times.

Meanwhile, Snopes is skeptical. The Snopes site called some of it misinformation in "Did Seven ‘Key Witnesses’ to Las Vegas Shooting Die Under ‘Suspicious Circumstances’?"

Las Vegas survivor deaths = misinformation?

Whatever is occurring, it does appear that some "survivors" feel "star-crossed."

Viva Las Vegan and 91

On October 1, 2017, a gunman shot at the Route 91 Harvest Festival country music concert - with 22,000 audience members - in Las Vegas. The death toll was 58 people killed, over 500 injured, plus the suicide of the gunman. Police report the shooter, Stephen Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada, who was holded up on the 32th floor in the Mandalay Hotel, died by suicide. The setting was bizarre, next to the Luxor Casino and Hotel, with its Sphinx and Pyramid in plain view.

As of mid-January 2018, the event is still discussed, and syncs are being revealed as they come into people's awareness.

As some have noted, Blade Runner 2049, which was released widely in the US on October 6, 2017, the Las Vegas shooting impacted earlier openings. Blade Runner 2049 premiered on October 3, 2017 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, although following the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting, the red carpet events were cancelled prior to the screening.

One of the surprises of Blade Runner 2049 is that the character Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is not in the wilderness of the North, but instead is living in the ruins of Las Vegas, after a nuclear event. He is tracked there by agent K.

Another movie, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which came out around the same time as Blade Runner 2049 had a Las Vegas link too.

During the movie [Kingsman: The Golden Circle] they were at a concert/festival with a pyramid in the background. Source

20th Century Fox originally scheduled Kingsman: The Golden Circle for a summer release date of June 16, 2017 but pushed the film back to October 6, 2017. The film was then moved up to September 20 in the United Kingdom and September 22, 2017 in the United States likely to avoid competition with Blade Runner 2049. The film had an IMAX release.

The code the drug dealer gives the Kingsman at the end of the movie, to save the millions of infected people was: "Viva Las Vegan." Source

‘Viva Las Vegas’ celebarates Vegas, a place of pleasure, where, commonly, you will find a lot of drug and alcohol use, strippers and gluttonous behaviour. All these things are unhealthy and can be dangerous. By using the phrase ‘Viva Las Vegan’ Poppy presents a juxtapositon, as veganism is associated with celebrating healthy eating, being anti -hypocritcal and compassionate. Therefore, perhaps Poppy’s message was that we celebrate the wrong things in society and we should be focussing on being less hypocritcal with our actions. After all, her life ended on a high and this could be owing to the fact she accepted her own hypocracy.
...it was actually the phrase ‘viva las vegan’ that saved humanity. Coincidence? I THINK NOT. Source.

The expression "Viva Las Vegan" is associated with Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn, as noted in this 2010 articles, here and here.

Near the end of the movie I noticed the number 91 on the black bowling ball. It reminded me of the 91 logo on the Vegas Route 91 festival signs. Source.

The trivia is intriguing:

During the final fight between Eggsy and Charlie, Charlie picks up a bowling ball numbered '91,' which references 1991 as the fictional birth year of Eggsy.

Both Julianne Moore and Emily Watson starred in a movie about Hannibal Lecter. Moore starred in Hannibal (2001) as Detective Clarice Starling and Watson starred in Red Dragon (2002) as Reba McClane.

Poppy's compound features a bowling alley. Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges appeared together in The Big Lebowski (1998), in which Bridges's character frequents a bowling alley.  Source.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) Soundtrack – Viva Las Vegan by Henry Jackman and Matthew Margeson

Sources, 1, 2, 3, 4.