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These are some of the accounts from the tragedy, ranging from horror to heroism:

'It just didn't sound right'

An person among the crowd of more than 22,000 during a Jason Aldean concert at the Route 91 Harvest Festival told CNN, like many at the show, at she believed the shots sounded like "firecrackers," but quickly people realized they were gunshots. The witness said she could hear the shots start and stop, like the shooter was changing weapons.

"My boyfriend had me hide behind a building, because it just didn't sound right. We hid behind the building because it just didn't sound right. About 10 minutes later the police came and then blocked off all the streets. Just very overwhelming and very scary."

A man talked to a Fox News reporter at the scene. He stayed in the concert venue behind a table until people cleared and SWAT arrived.

"There were a couple bodies there, and (I) started loading them into a truck. ... I don't know if they were dead or not. One of them looked like she was probably dead. The other two, I'm not sure."

'One guy ended up dying in my arms'

Talking with a reporter from ABC News, a man described his friend saying "I just got hit" and was hit three times. People dived for the ground as chaos erupted. he said they hid under the stage before getting him over a fence and getting four people in his truck. They found an ambulance, but one of the victims "ending up dying in my arms, because he was bleeding." Three more people got in the ambulance, but his friend survived.

A witness described acts of heroism during the shooting and in the immediate aftermath in an interview with NBC: "It was everywhere. Thank God it was a country concert. You saw a lot of ex-military jumping into gear. I saw guys plugging bullet holes with their fingers. I saw police officers, while everyone else was crouching, police officers standing up as targets, just trying to direct people to tell them where to go. The amount of bravery I saw, words can't describe what it was like."

Taylor Benge didn't know where the bullets were coming from. All he saw were the bodies.

No matter what place you went for cover, there was two to three bodies to accompany that and really I just didn't know," he told CNN. "I was very uncertain (for my life), just because I didn't know (the shooter) had that vantage point and seeing all those corpses around me in every tiny spot of cover. I can't imagine what the actual number is."

'We stepped over the bodies'

In an interview with CNN, media personality Storme Warren described the shooting as a "war movie":

"We're just trying to put into words what we just experienced, and we can't. We can't come up with it, he said. "You can't. It's like watching a war movie that you feel like you live through, and you were witnessing something that was fictional and that it didn't really happen but it did. We stepped over the bodies, we saw the people, we saw the heart-wrenching sadness from relatives grabbing hold of their loved ones, and you saw the chaos and the disbelief and complete stress and ... disbelief is the word. It's the only word you can come up with."

Warren, however, said "if there is a silver lining," it is that people were helping people in the aftermath.

'Owe my life' to metro officer

A woman with her husband told CBS they were running by concession booths when a police officer, "who I owe my life to," beckoned them into one. He said "Come here, come here, get in here, get in here!" Another two women were there.

"The officer actually covered me up to protect me from being shot. ... It was like you could hear the shots, just going back and forth and ricocheting, and then it would stop, and then we thought, 'OK, it's over, it's over. Then it would start again."

Musician Bryan Hopkins told CNN "23 to 30" people crammed into a trailer which turned out to be a freezer. When the gunfire didn't stop, he knew they couldn't stay.

"I turned to a couple of the guys that are in there behind me and said, 'We gotta leave. If there's people running around with guns, they're gonna find us.'" he told CNN.

"The thing I'll always remember is a police officer who ran towards me and said, 'This way,' pointed to where to run, and then ran towards the gunfire."

Truck helps mother, daughter escape, picks up wounded victims

Jenn Salazar, an Albuquerque resident, was attending the show with her daughter. She said Jason Aldean was "maybe into the third song" of his set when the shots rang out. "We didn't think much at first" until the seriousness of the situation dawned on the crowd. She said they ran as fast as they could to the parking lot. They saw two people in a truck. Looking for a way out, she said "please, please, please," and the people in the truck allowed them in. Salazar added that the truck also picked up two wounded people in the bed of the truck.

A female witness described to CNN the chaotic and bloody scene that unfolded as she tried to help victims:

"They yelled me over, they said 'we need your help, we need you to hold this jacket on this guy's head, he's been shot in the back of the head.' I said okay. And I'm standing there and I'm holding it, and the blood is dripping down and you can feel the hole in the back of his head. And they said 'his name is Chris that's all we know,'" she recalled. "My hand was on his shoulder and...I don't know. I don't think he made it, because his chest wasn't moving anymore."

She helped several people move a victim on a maintenance ladder.

"I grabbed the corner of the ladder, and I had my hand on the guy's arm," she said. "As those guys were walking back, I felt his fingers kind of tighten, and just kind of loosen."

The woman describes answering the man's phone and telling the caller that he had died: