In the hours after the 1 October shooting, an army of specially trained, local volunteers, rushed to area hospitals to help people deal with their emotional trauma.
“I was actually getting ready for bed, I had a really long day,” said Carol Navarro-Barclay, a trauma volunteer.
Navarro-Barclay said that all changed in a hurry. She received a text message after the shooting.
She was one of the first volunteers to rush to a local hospital.
"We were told, essentially. I remember the words, ‘we just need to work the room,’ everyone here is going to need some sort of support," explained Navarro-Barclay.
Navarro-Barclay is a member of the Trauma Intervention Program of Southern Nevada, or TIPS, for short. TIPS is a non-profit organization that trains and dispatched volunteers to deal with tragic situations, typically involving the sudden death of a loved one.
“When you heard the words just work the room, have you ever experienced the magnitude of something like this before?” Asked Reporter Joe Bartels
“No. There were people and patients everywhere,” said Navarro-Barclay.
Carol and 50 other volunteers went from room to room, person to person, to try and undo the emotional damage.
"Part of our training is to really just walk them through, telling us what happened. And the same story was for repeated over and over again, which was, ‘we were at the front of the crowd, and to the right of the stage and it sounded like firecrackers,” explained Navarro-Barclay.
TIPS volunteers go through hours of training and debriefing to handle their own emotions and grief.
Each much, volunteers console 800 people on average across Clark County. In the aftermath of the 1 October shooting, volunteers have contacted and consoled 2,500 people.
"We were prepared, we had all hands on deck and we were prepared, but we weren't ready,” said Jill Roberts, Chief Executive Officer of TIPS.
Roberts said no one was ready to see the devastation, the hurt and the tragedy Las Vegas endured.
Carol says if just one person felt comforted and knew they were not alone in their hour of need then her work was all worth it.
