NBC

Vegas Gunshot Victim Reunites With Stranger Who Helped Save His Life

“He kept me from bleeding out,” Tom McIntosh said of the man who saved him. “I would’ve died"

Tom McIntosh had an emotional reunion Tuesday morning with the man who helped save his life during the chaos of the Las Vegas concert shooting.

McIntosh was shot in the leg when a gunman opened fire at a country music festival Sunday evening, claiming at least 58 lives and injuring more than 500.

Another man, James Lawson, fixed a tourniquet on McIntosh's leg and helped drop him off at the emergency room the evening of the shooting.

On Tuesday, McIntosh appeared on NBC's "Today" show. He told anchor Savannah Guthrie that he wanted to thank the stranger who helped him, and that's when Lawson showed up to surprise him. 

“Oh wow,” McIntosh said. When he saw Lawson, he hugged him.

“Thanks, buddy,” he said. “Appreciate it.”

Lawson was getting away from the scene when he came across McIntosh in the bed of a pickup truck.

“There’s a belt, kind of a makeshift tourniquet, it was around his knee,” Lawson said. “Completely wrong spot. I walked up there and he was actively bleeding so I adjusted the belt. Got it up where it should be. Tightened it up. We stopped the bleeding.”

Lawson said he waited with McIntosh for 10 or 15 minutes until someone came along with a pickup truck and gave them a ride to the hospital.

“He kept me from bleeding out,” McIntosh said in a separate interview on MSNBC. “I would’ve died.

McIntosh and his wife had just gone out to dinner and got to the concert in time to catch the end of the opening act, Jake Owen, with his wife's sister and cousin, he said. McIntosh lives in Las Vegas, but he and his wife were having what he called a "staycation" at the Luxor Las Vegas hotel.

When the shooting started, McIntosh at first thought it was fireworks.

McIntosh and his wife began running and lost contact with their family members. People were falling all around them, he said, and he didn't know whether they were tripping or getting shot. They came to an iron fence and McIntosh's wife said it would be too difficult to climb over, he said.

"So we went around it to a brick wall and I helped her up over the brick wall, and then there was another woman who needed help so I helped her over the brick wall," McIntosh said. "And then at that point that's when I got shot."

On the "Today" show, McIntosh thanked Lawson again before they parted ways, shaking his hand.

“Of course,” Lawson said. 

Contact Us