Jason Aldean recalled emotional, terrifying details of the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival tragedy as its five-year anniversary approaches next month.
Aldean was performing when a 64-year-old gunman opened fire on the crowd from his 32nd-floor room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel on October 1, 2017. Dozens of people — including the shooter — died, and more than 800 were injured. It became the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, per multiple news outlets.
“Vegas was always one of the shows for me that I always looked forward to,” Aldean said in a trailer for 11 Minutes, the Paramount+ docuserires that got its name from the amount of time the devastating event took that night. The four-part documentary will feature Aldean’s first in-depth interview about the shooting, according to the announcement from Paramount+ on Monday (September 12). The streaming platform states that the series “takes viewers inside the heart-stopping stories of terror and survival experienced by those who were at the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas.”
“When I turned around, my bass player was just looking at me like a deer in the headlights,” Aldean, who admitted his struggles with survivor’s guilt, remembered. “And my security guy was on stage at that point, telling me to get down, waving me off the stage.”
11 Minutes will include first-person accounts from Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers, Sunrise Hospital trauma teams, concertgoers and others. It also includes police body cam footage and cell phone video that has never been seen before, as well as extraordinary survival stories, according to Paramount+. (Ret) SWAT officer Billy Marx deemed the tragedy “probably the highest level of intensity that I’ve ever been in.” Josh Haynes, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police detective, added: “People stood up at that moment and they did what needed to be done at that time to take care of those on their left and right. Those stories should be told.”
11 Minutes will premiere on September 27. Watch the trailer below (warning: this trailer contains sensitive content that may be disturbing to some viewers).