Trauma unit chief recounts night of the deadly Las Vegas Strip crash

“We have a mass casualty incident,” an urgent voice on the other end of the line told Ryan, the head of University Medical Center’s trauma emergency department. “We’ve already had quite a few patients, and we could have at least 20 more.”

She didn’t know it yet, but the incoming injured were mostly tourists. A man from Montreal celebrating his 21st birthday. Two college wrestling teams in town for a tournament. All caught by surprise when Holloway steered onto the sidewalk in front of the Planet Hollywood Resort on Dec. 20, barreling into most people from behind as those who could see her tried to lunge out of the way.

With a shattered windshield, Holloway kept driving, her 3-year-old daughter belted down in the back.

MORE PATIENTS THAN ROOMS

Ryan hung up and took off for the hospital, where a constant flow of victims had started arriving. And when she walked in, her team was already in motion.

On spare gurneys, the wounded lined the walls of the main hall because there were more patients than rooms.

Practitioners from all over the hospital converged to help. Day and night staff worked as one, because out of sheer luck the 7 p.m. crash happened just before change of shift.

“It was perfect timing for something like this, if there’s such a thing as perfect timing,” Ryan said.

And everyone was talking. Nurses were updating other nurses. CT scans and X-rays were underway. Families were trying to find loved ones, and social workers were trying to help.

“When you get that many people at once, all these necessary conversations are happening at once,” Ryan said. “The trauma department is not very big. And so it’s not loud in the sense of a concert loud, but it was loud.”

The spectrum of wounds was wide: bruises and abrasions, fractured bones, internal injuries and critical head injuries. Though UMC did not receive all the patients from the crash, the hospital houses the state’s only Level 1 trauma center so it was sent the brunt of cases, Ryan said.

Jessica Valenzuela, a 32-year-old mother of three, died as Ryan’s trauma surgeons tried to save her. Many more were in the intensive care unit.

CALMING FRANTIC FAMILIES

Her department saw nearly 20 patients that night, only one of whom is still in the hospital. But everyone who showed up from the scene was “shook up emotionally.”

“Imagine you’re walking down a street that’s inevitably like Disneyland for adults — that you think is safe and fun and a party-type atmosphere — and it turns into this,” she said. “When something traumatic happens that’s unexpected, people have very, very interesting and stressed questions.”

She remembered people asking how long relatives would be in treatment — “Our vacation is only for this amount of time; I didn’t bring any money with me to get back to the hotel.”

The shock takes awhile to shake off.

The youngest patient was 11 years old, and “we took the little one upstairs,” she said. There, away from the chaos of the trauma ward, the child was seen and cleared from the pediatric emergency room, where there were games to play while the family waited in quiet.

At least one Canadian family had a few relatives in treatment, and Ryan said one of her nurses was able to translate for them in fluent French, their native language, as everything unfolded.

“I think the coolest thing is that whenever it gets really busy in the trauma center and there’s a huge influx of patients, one of the first things we do is limit visitors to make sure everything is accounted for,” she said. “But that night, the minute everybody had been seen and it was safe, we got groups as close together as we could so their visitors could see that they were OK.”

“Usually there’s five to six feet between each gurney,” she said. “They were close enough so that they could hold each other’s hands.”

A significant number of people were discharged later that night, Ryan said. A handful were stabilized, then kept for observation. The person still in the hospital suffered a head injury.

“It certainly wasn’t organized by any stretch of the imagination,” she said. “But we train for this, and my team handled it beautifully.”

Holloway made her first court appearance last week, and after the two-minute hearing her public defense attorneys Joseph Abood and Scott Coffee described her as “distraught.” She has been charged with one count each of murder with a deadly weapon; child abuse, neglect, or endangerment; and leaving the scene of an accident.

Her daughter was taken into state custody that night. On Wednesday, the Clark County district attorney’s office said Holloway tested positive for marijuana at the time of the crash.

Reverberations from the wreck were felt internationally. Local news stories in Quebec, Montreal and Mexico and states such as Oregon, Pennsylvania and Florida mention a few victims each.

A statement from Delaware Valley University’s wrestling team let people know the five student athletes and head coach who were hit are on the mend. Their schedule for the Las Vegas tournament still says “canceled” online.

“We need to feel blessed,” head coach Steve Cantrell said in the statement, but added his wrestlers “have gone through something emotional and they are processing what they witnessed.”

SOME WOUNDS NEVER HEAL

The morning after the crash, the brother of the woman who died posted on Facebook.

“There are absolutely no words to express how devastating and shocking this loss is,” Bryan Roessler said of Valenzuela. “She will be missed dearly, and that couldn’t be more of an understatement.”

Contact Rachel Crosby at rcrosby@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290. Find her on Twitter: @rachelacrosby