A woman who escaped the mass shooting in Las Vegas two weeks ago came home to Santa Rosa only to barely escape the flames there, and lose the house she was sharing with her parents to the Tubbs Fire.
As the Sacramento Bee reports, 51-year-old Michella Flores had been watching Jason Aldean perform on the night of October 1 on the Las Vegas Strip when the shooting began. She was standing outside the fence of the festival grounds, and she ran with everyone else as chaos and bullets rained down on the crowd, taking shelter with other survivors in a casino conference room.
She was staying in a hotel with a view of the shooting site, and had to return to work for several days and then to training at the Oakland Airport, where she had been last Sunday night, October 8, before driving back to Santa Rosa, where she's been living temporarily.
Flores told KTVU that she has been a firefighter and first responder in her past, and she knew that an ominous orange glow over the hillside near her parents' house was cause for concern. She told them to pack their bags, but then took her dog for a walk, not sure whether the threat was imminent. Within minutes, the family would be fleeing the neighborhood, but Flores stayed behind to help firefighters protect the house, spraying it down with a garden hose until 4:30 a.m.
She spent a sleepless few hours in an evacuation center and then returned to Oakland for her training. But when she came back to Santa Rosa later that day, Monday, the house was gone. A fire truck was still on site after some trees behind the house had caught fire. "The fire crews were just mopping up," she tells KTVU.
Flores says she lost "Almost everything I own... My bed, my bike, my clothes, my flight attendant uniforms."
On a GoFundMe campaign started by Flores's sister, Krista Flores, has raised over $18,000 despite a $10,000 goal, to help the Flores family get back on their feet.
"It has not been a good few weeks for her," Krista Flores writes of her sister.
