Speaker 1: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 1: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
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Speaker 1: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 1: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 1: journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 2: On October one, twenty and seventeen, Mary Joe Vontillo's world
Speaker 2: changed forever. Her husband Kurt was killed in the Route
Speaker 2: ninety one Harvest Festival mass shooting in Las Vegas, the
Speaker 2: deadliest in US history in just eleven minutes, and the
Speaker 2: lives of thousands of others were shattered. But what followed
Speaker 2: was more than grief. Out of devastation came unexpected bonds
Speaker 2: with other survivors, advocates, and families who knew the same
Speaker 2: kind of loss. From a nine to eleven firefighter who
Speaker 2: turned his pain into kindness, to a victim's rights attorney
Speaker 2: who changed national law, to fellow widows and survivors who
Speaker 2: refused to give up. Mary Joe discovered what it means
Speaker 2: to carry tragedy together. The Las Vegas massacre connections is
Speaker 2: both a deeply personal account and a collective portrait of resilience.
Speaker 2: Through Mark Gray's in depth reporting and Marry Joe's courage
Speaker 2: to share her story, this book captures the enduring impact
Speaker 2: of Route ninety one and the human strength that rises
Speaker 2: after unimaginable loss. The book that were featuring this evening
Speaker 2: is them The Las Vegas Massacre Connections, Finding Strength through
Speaker 2: Tragedy after America's deadliest mass shooting with my special guest,
Speaker 2: journalist and author, Mark Gray. Welcome to the program, and
Speaker 2: thank you very much for this interview, Mark Gray.
Speaker 3: Hewy you doing, Dan, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, and congratulations on this extraordinary book,
Speaker 2: The Las Vegas Massacre Connections.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much. It was a labor of love
Speaker 3: a long time coming.
Speaker 2: You right that you've been published probably thousands of times
Speaker 2: via your work and entertainment journalism, writing for People Magazine,
Speaker 2: Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and many others. Tell us about
Speaker 2: the origins of this book project and your relationship you
Speaker 2: developed with Mary Joe von Tilo.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it all started, I was, I guess I
Speaker 4: could start from even prior to that was in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 4: I was hired by Rolling Stone to cover the Root ninety.
Speaker 3: One Harvest Festival.
Speaker 4: It was a three day festival, and the initial story
Speaker 4: was supposed to be the ten best things I saw
Speaker 4: this weekend at Route ninety one, and Jason Alden was
Speaker 4: the last act of the last day, so nine of
Speaker 4: those items were written. Of the ten best things I saw,
Speaker 4: of course, one space was being earmarked for a Jason
Speaker 4: Alden set, and of course the story drastically changed when
Speaker 4: we were you know, all twenty two thousands were shot at.
Speaker 4: So I went home that night and I didn't really
Speaker 4: know what I was supposed to do. There was no
Speaker 4: handbook for this kind of thing, and so I just
Speaker 4: decided to write my personal experience, which I rarely have
Speaker 4: ever done. I'm usually a pretty prototypical reporter, you know,
Speaker 4: you let the sources do the talking and things like that,
Speaker 4: and then let the interviews do the talking. But for
Speaker 4: this particular thing, I just did it from perspective and
Speaker 4: I sent it in. I didn't really know if it
Speaker 4: was any good or not.
Speaker 3: It was what. It was, very very raw, and it
Speaker 3: took off like a rocket ship. So did that.
Speaker 4: About four and a half years later, I was chatting
Speaker 4: with my editor at Rolling Stone and he had said,
Speaker 4: it's the five year anniversary coming up of Route ninety one.
Speaker 4: We want you to go out there and talk to
Speaker 4: a bunch of these victims and these survivors. Every single year,
Speaker 4: there was one. It sounds kind of crazy, but there's
Speaker 4: one Angels baseball game in Anaheim, California. There's one Angels
Speaker 4: game that a bunch of survivors go to, and they
Speaker 4: sent me out there. I was just tailgating basically with
Speaker 4: a bunch of these survivors and chatting and getting their stories.
Speaker 3: I ended up sitting right behind a woman named Mary Joe.
Speaker 4: Vontillo at the actual baseball game, who had no interest
Speaker 4: in speaking to me whatsoever. Initially, Thankfully, baseball is a
Speaker 4: very long game, and I wore her down, I think,
Speaker 4: is what happened, and I started speaking to her about
Speaker 4: her experience. Fast forward a year later and she calls
Speaker 4: me out of the blue and she says, Hey, you know,
Speaker 4: I read that story you wrote in Rolling Stone on
Speaker 4: the Fiber anniversary. I had this idea for a book,
Speaker 4: and I really want to talk to you about it.
Speaker 4: So I flew to her home in at the time
Speaker 4: southern California and we just got to talk and we
Speaker 4: spent all day with each other, and the dialogue continued for,
Speaker 4: you know, another two years or so between her and
Speaker 4: some of.
Speaker 3: These other victims. And that's kind of where it all started.
Speaker 4: So it's not really a it's not a Root ninety
Speaker 4: one book per se, but that is sort of the
Speaker 4: centerpiece of it. That's where it all sort of begins,
Speaker 4: is on October one, twenty seventeen, with the murder of
Speaker 4: her husband.
Speaker 2: You start this book with the von Tillo family and
Speaker 2: their annual pilgrimage to the Root ninety one Harvest Festival.
Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about what you found out
Speaker 2: about the family and the importance of this Route ninety
Speaker 2: one Harvest Festival.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the festival was on its fourth year when the
Speaker 4: shooting happened in twenty seventeen, and the Vontilla family had
Speaker 4: come every single year. Mom and Dad, Mary, Joe, and
Speaker 4: Kurt lived in at the time in Cameron Park, which
Speaker 4: is near Sacramento, California. Their son at the time lived
Speaker 4: in lives in South Carolina now, but he lived in
Speaker 4: the East Coast.
Speaker 3: Daughter lived in the East Coast as well.
Speaker 4: She lived in Connecticut at that point, and so they
Speaker 4: would all kind of come together in Vegas as a
Speaker 4: family and meet there. Just something they always look forward
Speaker 4: to every single year. They would book their tickets pretty much,
Speaker 4: you know, after the one would end that they would
Speaker 4: book for the next year already, and it was something
Speaker 4: they look forward to every single year. And they had
Speaker 4: their same exact spot they would stand in every single year.
Speaker 3: They knew exactly where they were going.
Speaker 4: They you know, they was sometimes they would their daughter
Speaker 4: might meet them a couple hours later. You knew exactly
Speaker 4: where to go because again, these people were they were
Speaker 4: diehards for this festival, and so they would go every
Speaker 4: single year, and that was it became an important pilgrimage
Speaker 4: for them because it almost became in a way a
Speaker 4: family reunion because just because of the distance that they
Speaker 4: all had as far as their living arrangements in their situations.
Speaker 2: Now you were at this festival as well. But now
Speaker 2: you've got the account for von Tillo from Mary Joe,
Speaker 2: tell us a little bit about just preceding this concert,
Speaker 2: what the family did and what happens at the concert.
Speaker 2: Like you say, at the fourth song of this performer
Speaker 2: named al Dean, Sure, the.
Speaker 4: Family had like I said that they came, you know,
Speaker 4: a few days before the festival, or a day before
Speaker 4: the actual festival started as a three day festival again,
Speaker 4: and they came and did their Vegas thing, you know,
Speaker 4: they they drank, they gambled. Kurt was a big, big,
Speaker 4: big beer drink or he loved his cores light. And
Speaker 4: in the lead up that day, it was a Sunday,
Speaker 4: they just decided, you know, to do a typical fall
Speaker 4: sun activity.
Speaker 3: So they woke up a little bit hungover, certainly from.
Speaker 4: The night's activities and went the sports book, gambled on
Speaker 4: a bunch of football games and things like that, and
Speaker 4: they all they all won actually that day. They they've
Speaker 4: all been very quick to telling me they won their
Speaker 4: bets that day. So eventually, you know, around five or so,
Speaker 4: they headed out to the Las Vegas Village, which was
Speaker 4: the location of the concert, and that was on the
Speaker 4: south end of the Las Vegas Strip, right across from
Speaker 4: Mandalay Bay. So Mandalay Bay is on the west side
Speaker 4: of Las Vegas Boulevard, more commonly known as the Strip,
Speaker 4: and the Las Vegas Village was on the east side
Speaker 4: of Las Vegas Boulevard. So they went there in the
Speaker 4: you know, around you know, five o'clock or so five thirty.
Speaker 4: I think the concert started with you know, a lot
Speaker 4: of the smaller acts, of course, start earlier in the day,
Speaker 4: and they worked their way up I remember correctly. I
Speaker 4: believe the concert started around three thirty or four o'clock.
Speaker 4: So they were there for certainly the good majority of
Speaker 4: the day. So as the night goes on, the Montilla
Speaker 4: family was hanging out. They would typically hang out on
Speaker 4: the west side of the concert venue, you know, probably
Speaker 4: around twenty yards from.
Speaker 3: The stage or so.
Speaker 4: Every now and again they'd work their way up get closer.
Speaker 4: And this is one of those festivals where you could
Speaker 4: do that. This wasn't like a Coachella situation where you're
Speaker 4: packed in like sardines. Now, this festival got very very busy.
Speaker 4: Certainly it was twenty two thousand people, but you could
Speaker 4: move around, and so sometimes they'd move close, sometimes they
Speaker 4: move back, but they kind of really settled into their
Speaker 4: spot more often than not, which would say about twenty
Speaker 4: yards from the stage on the west side. It's pretty
Speaker 4: close to the west side VIP area. There was a
Speaker 4: kind of a bunch of risers over there, so they
Speaker 4: were there. They'd planned to leave early that next morning
Speaker 4: at the six am flight. Mary Joe knew this was
Speaker 4: never going to happen, but Kurt was adamant that we're
Speaker 4: gonna get on that flight. Of course, you know, probably
Speaker 4: around eight o'clock that night or so, Kurt is having
Speaker 4: a good time, The whole family's having a good time,
Speaker 4: and Kurt says, change our flights.
Speaker 3: We're not leaving at six.
Speaker 4: Mary Joe was, of course, she was a little bit
Speaker 4: annoyed because she said, Kurt, this always happens.
Speaker 3: I knew this is gonna happen. We should have booked
Speaker 3: that later flight anyway.
Speaker 4: So she's on her phone changing their Southwest flight from
Speaker 4: Las Vegas back to Sacramento, you know, and they get
Speaker 4: that handled and so then around you know, ten o'clock
Speaker 4: rolls around, and were waiting for Jason Aldeine to come on,
Speaker 4: or he's actually he went on right before ten o'clock,
Speaker 4: but you know, waiting around waiting for Alden to come on.
Speaker 4: He finally gets on stage, performs a couple of songs,
Speaker 4: and all was well, everything was great. He was you know,
Speaker 4: he'd played I believe the first Route ninety one festival
Speaker 4: in year one, so everyone kind of had an idea
Speaker 4: of what they were gonna get with him, and he's
Speaker 4: a great performer. They were there and by the fourth song,
Speaker 4: you know, probably about twenty or thirty seconds into that
Speaker 4: fourth song, there are three pops you know, pop pop pop,
Speaker 4: and no one thought much about it, you know, myself,
Speaker 4: I was there. I thought it was I thought someone
Speaker 4: brought fireworks into the concert venue. And I kind of
Speaker 4: thought to myself, what kind of jerk brings fireworks into
Speaker 4: a concert?
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: Now, there was a woman who was probably twenty five
Speaker 4: feet to my left and I did not know her,
Speaker 4: but she started shrieking, just screaming, and I think she
Speaker 4: was hit. Now again, I didn't know what it was.
Speaker 4: I thought maybe a bottle rocket hitter or something like that.
Speaker 4: So there were three pops and then a pause. There
Speaker 4: were three pops again, and then another pause, and then
Speaker 4: that's when the bombardment of bullets started happening. So, you know,
Speaker 4: I retreated back to, you know, the area where I
Speaker 4: felt was safe. Now marry Joe again, who I did
Speaker 4: not know at that point in time. They were on
Speaker 4: the opposite side of the venue that I was. I
Speaker 4: was towards the east side. They were on the west side.
Speaker 4: There's no way of knowing this, but Curvontillo may have
Speaker 4: been the first person fatally shot. If he wasn't, he
Speaker 4: was certainly among them. They know this because al Den
Speaker 4: was still on stage singing when Kurt went down, so
Speaker 4: they were there. You know, Kurt gets you know, gets shot.
Speaker 4: He got shot in the collarbone, and then the bullet
Speaker 4: proceeded directly to his heart and he was dead instantly.
Speaker 4: He was down, based down on the ground.
Speaker 2: Turned.
Speaker 4: In fact, Mary Joe was standing there. She heard these
Speaker 4: popping noises. She turned to look at Kurt to ask,
Speaker 4: you know, is that are those gunshots?
Speaker 3: Or what is that?
Speaker 4: And there was no Kurt when she turned around, because
Speaker 4: he was already on the ground. So it's pretty devastating
Speaker 4: obviously to think about, and for her certainly, And so
Speaker 4: they knew immediately that was gunn fire. They the whole
Speaker 4: family got on the ground with Kurt, rolled him over.
Speaker 4: His eyes were still open. He certainly wasn't breathing anymore,
Speaker 4: and they could see blood already starting to trickle out
Speaker 4: from his body. And this was so early on in
Speaker 4: the shooting lasted eleven minutes, so you know, for you know,
Speaker 4: ten minutes and let's call it thirty five seconds or so.
Speaker 4: You know, they know this man is gone, and they
Speaker 4: are just kind of trying to fight for their lives
Speaker 4: and dodge bullets like the rest of us, while also
Speaker 4: tending to you know, her fallen husband and Jessica's fallen
Speaker 4: father and all this kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Not only was Kurt shot, that Kurt's sister was shot
Speaker 2: as well.
Speaker 3: Correct, Yeah, Kurt's sister and Kurt's niece, they were both shot.
Speaker 3: One was shot in the ankle or they both had
Speaker 3: lower body injuries and both survived. They both went into
Speaker 3: they both got transported really quickly. So in the chaos
Speaker 3: of all this, what was happening was people were very
Speaker 3: much fending for themselves.
Speaker 4: Among the chaos of this thing. People were taking you know, wheelchairs,
Speaker 4: people were taking beer carts to transport victims. There were
Speaker 4: there was a a merchandise area towards the back of
Speaker 4: this venue, and there were decorative wheelbarrows that had been
Speaker 4: set up just to sort of showcase a bunch of
Speaker 4: the merchandise. People were taking the wheelbarrows and putting people
Speaker 4: in wheelbarrows and taking them, you know, out of the venue.
Speaker 4: To say to say, for places, and so Dianne and Arana,
Speaker 4: the niece, and the sister in law, Kurt sister, Mary
Speaker 4: Joe's sister in law.
Speaker 3: They were taken really quickly out now, But.
Speaker 4: When they were on the ground nursing their injuries, Jessica,
Speaker 4: who is Kurt and Mary Joe's daughter, pull a cell
Speaker 4: phone cord out of her purse and create a tourniquet
Speaker 4: for Arania. So there were little acts of heroism that
Speaker 4: happened all over the place that night, that being certainly
Speaker 4: one of them. You know, something as simple as you know,
Speaker 4: telling someone stand over here, or you know, I remember
Speaker 4: specifically telling one woman to breathe, and she found me
Speaker 4: on Facebook a few about a week or so later
Speaker 4: and told me how much that meant to her. And
Speaker 4: I said, I didn't do anything. All I told you
Speaker 4: was to breathe. But there were things like that that
Speaker 4: really meant a lot to certain people. And Jessica was
Speaker 4: certainly one of those people who they created tourniquet. And
Speaker 4: I don't know, she certainly saved her, you know, her
Speaker 4: cousin's life, but certainly didn't hurt that's for sure.
Speaker 2: You have a dramatic and very vivid scene though that
Speaker 2: Mary Jove does not want to leave Kurt on that asphalt,
Speaker 2: but she's convinced that at least she should move and
Speaker 2: she could still see Kurt. Now, somebody thinking that was
Speaker 2: a great idea, thought, maybe I'll drag this husband to
Speaker 2: their family so that they could see him. And meanwhile,
Speaker 2: maybe you can tell us why this was such a
Speaker 2: bad idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Mary Joe still, she's still to this day haunted
Speaker 4: by that moment. What happened was Kurt was down, and
Speaker 4: you know, we're in the midst of the shooting, and
Speaker 4: the whole family is on the ground and they they thought,
Speaker 4: like I thought also, that there were multiple gunmen and
Speaker 4: they were all in the festival. None of us knew
Speaker 4: this person was at Mandela at Bay across the street.
Speaker 4: But the bullets are coming, and these this family decides
Speaker 4: our best best chance right now is survival, is to
Speaker 4: play dead.
Speaker 3: So they did.
Speaker 4: They just played dead, and they were just on the ground,
Speaker 4: staying for a very long time, and bullets are hitting
Speaker 4: the pavement all around them. Mary Joe still speaks about
Speaker 4: there's a swath of kind of fake grass of fake
Speaker 4: turf there, and she said she could still feel the
Speaker 4: grass hitting her legs from the bullets hitting the grass
Speaker 4: and bouncing up onto her. But so she was there
Speaker 4: and everyone kept saying, Okay, we got a move, we
Speaker 4: gotta move, we gotta move. She kept saying, I'm not leaving.
Speaker 4: I'm not leaving Kurt. I'm not going to Eventually, an
Speaker 4: off duty police officer runs out to her, and this
Speaker 4: guy was there just attending the concert. He runs up
Speaker 4: to her and he said, you're the only ones alive
Speaker 4: still out here. You have to move or else you're
Speaker 4: going to be shot and you're going to die as well.
Speaker 3: She refused to move.
Speaker 4: He finally convinced her to move just a little bit
Speaker 4: to the west and under a couple of bleachers for
Speaker 4: some sort of protection. And in that way she was protected,
Speaker 4: but she could still see Kurt, and that was her
Speaker 4: very important to her, was I still want to be
Speaker 4: able to see my husband.
Speaker 3: And she refused to do these. She refused to not.
Speaker 4: She had to see him, It just wasn't that wasn't
Speaker 4: up for debate, and so she did so. Stefani moved
Speaker 4: to this area where she could see the husband and
Speaker 4: get a little protection, and she was hysterical, and someone
Speaker 4: decided I'm going to help this woman out, and I'm
Speaker 4: going to bring her husband to her. So this person,
Speaker 4: who Mary Joe does not know, goes out and brings
Speaker 4: this man to her and says, you know, basically a corpse.
Speaker 4: Essentially brings this corpse to her and says, here you go. Now,
Speaker 4: this man brought to Mary Joe was not her husband.
Speaker 4: So here she was looking another dead man, not her husband,
Speaker 4: in the eye, and she is haunted by this moment.
Speaker 4: She didn't know who it was. She later found out
Speaker 4: who it was. And there's a side story of this man.
Speaker 4: His wife survived. They were there celebrating their wedding anniversary.
Speaker 4: They were from the East Coast as well. They were
Speaker 4: there celebrating the anniversary. This woman, realizing that her husband
Speaker 4: was gone, left the venue in the midst of the
Speaker 4: shooting and then decided, I need to go back for him.
Speaker 4: So she came back and her husband wasn't there, and
Speaker 4: she didn't know why, And of course she immediately got hopeful,
Speaker 4: thinking maybe he crawled, you know, maybe he wasn't dead,
Speaker 4: and maybe he crawled the safety because he's definitely not
Speaker 4: where he was laying down a minute ago. Couldn't figure
Speaker 4: it out, and then it turned out, of course he
Speaker 4: was dead, and for weeks she had no idea how
Speaker 4: her husband moved. And finally Mary Joe got kind of
Speaker 4: information about this woman and her confusion, and Mary Joe
Speaker 4: reached out to her and told her this is why
Speaker 4: he was moved, you know, through no fault of her own.
Speaker 4: But you know you had two grieving widows here. You know,
Speaker 4: Mary Joe's certainly trying to trying to see her husband
Speaker 4: and sees someone else, and this other woman over here
Speaker 4: goes back to her husband who's not there, and then
Speaker 4: has this mean can you imagine this moment of hope
Speaker 4: where oh my god, he must have made it out
Speaker 4: and it turns out he didn't, and find out why
Speaker 4: because someone actually moved the body.
Speaker 2: That Jesus has an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Speaker 2: Now you say they marry Joe and her family. Mary
Speaker 2: Joe's in shock when she's taken to the hospital, so
Speaker 2: she's touch and go in a lot of ways. But
Speaker 2: later they the whole family watches television, watches the news
Speaker 2: coverage on the various television stations. But then they look
Speaker 2: to themselves and marry Joe inside to say, what do
Speaker 2: we do next? They had no practical experience whatsoever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no idea. They had no idea. You know.
Speaker 4: Number one, they weren't they were on vacation. They weren't home.
Speaker 4: You know, what do you do when you're on vacation
Speaker 4: your husband is murdery or just even dies for that matter,
Speaker 4: even of natural causes. Let's say this certainly was not
Speaker 4: natural causes. They didn't know what to do. And you're right,
Speaker 4: they you know, when they went to the hospital, you know,
Speaker 4: they had to leave Kurt eventually, and Mary Joe went
Speaker 4: to the Tropic Cana Hotel, which is no longer there,
Speaker 4: but they moved her down there into the base of
Speaker 4: the Tropic Hana with her. Her daughter was there, at
Speaker 4: which point her niece and sister in law had already
Speaker 4: been transported to a local hospital. And so they're all,
Speaker 4: you know, she's there with her daughter. They're making their
Speaker 4: phone calls, they're trying to figure out what's going on,
Speaker 4: and Mary Joe is in shock, so much so that
Speaker 4: she actually gets transported to the hospital as well. And
Speaker 4: they had called family members and very close friends to
Speaker 4: tell them kind of what had happened. And they see,
Speaker 4: know Kurt's gone. Mary Joe is certainly alive, but she's
Speaker 4: not doing well understandably, and.
Speaker 3: So yeah, they go to the hospital. Everything.
Speaker 4: They kind of settle down a little bit and eventually
Speaker 4: make their way to Caesar's Palace, which is where they
Speaker 4: were staying. They got to Caesar's around seven in the morning.
Speaker 4: They went to their hotel room, and that was the
Speaker 4: first time they found out they realized the scope of this.
Speaker 4: It was also the first time they found out the
Speaker 4: shooting was coming from Mandalay Bay. They had up until
Speaker 4: then they assumed people were on the ground, which of
Speaker 4: course only fuels the conspiracy theories. But that was where
Speaker 4: they found out everything and where a lot of victims
Speaker 4: who have spoken to said they wanted to avoid everything.
Speaker 4: Mary Joe was the exact opposite. She wanted to know everything.
Speaker 4: She was consumed by it watching. She was, you know,
Speaker 4: flipping through every news station she could imagine, you know,
Speaker 4: local news, national news, international news, you know, Twitter, every
Speaker 4: kind of sort of social media she could think of.
Speaker 4: She was looking at it because she really wanted to
Speaker 4: find out what happened, what was I just a part
Speaker 4: of and what took my husband from me? And then
Speaker 4: what's the next step on top of that, because there
Speaker 4: was they just didn't know what to do. And Mary
Speaker 4: Joe had called the police and said, explain what had happened,
Speaker 4: and they told her to file a missing person's report.
Speaker 4: Her response was, well, he's not missing. I know where
Speaker 4: he is.
Speaker 3: You know, I know exactly where he is. He's not missing,
Speaker 3: So what do we do now?
Speaker 4: And so they end up going to the Convention Center
Speaker 4: in Las Vegas, which is they would very quickly turned
Speaker 4: into an area where all the the all the victims
Speaker 4: and survivors went to kind of identify, you know, loved
Speaker 4: ones and maybe pick up loss and found items and
Speaker 4: things like that. Eventually they kind of figured out how
Speaker 4: to manage the situation, and they found Kurt in the
Speaker 4: coroner's office. They found him there. She was Mary Joe
Speaker 4: was on the phone with the corner's office frequently, very
Speaker 4: very frequently, and developed a relationship actually with the Las
Speaker 4: Vegas corner, the Clark County corner. And her whole thing was,
Speaker 4: she said, you know, I don't want him out there
Speaker 4: in the baking sun, just his body laying there on
Speaker 4: this you know, dark pavement in the baking sun. Is
Speaker 4: there a way to you know, where is he in
Speaker 4: the corner assured her and said, okay, what happened was
Speaker 4: around three or four in the morning, they had a
Speaker 4: refrigerated truck came out and picked up all the bodies.
Speaker 4: So they said, he's he was not his He's not
Speaker 4: out there now, he's been long gone. He's in our facility.
Speaker 4: And the irony is Kurt was a trucker and he
Speaker 4: actually drove refrigerated trucks as well towards the end. So
Speaker 4: Mary Joe kind of thought it was rather fitting that
Speaker 4: he went out, you know, the way he went out
Speaker 4: was in a refrigerated truck, which is what he loved.
Speaker 3: He was a trucker.
Speaker 4: He loved the trucking industry. So in her eyes, he
Speaker 4: was kind of fitting. It was sort of the perfect
Speaker 4: way to go. If there was any perfect way to go,
Speaker 4: that was the one for him.
Speaker 2: You're right that trying to move forward, she was invited.
Speaker 2: Mary Joe was invited to attend the Country Music Awards
Speaker 2: in Nashville and the Breeders Cup in Kentucky, and she
Speaker 2: was also asked to speak at conventions, including one in
Speaker 2: Florida for victims of crime. Tell Us about this evolving
Speaker 2: work that she began doing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Mary Joe, you know, this kind of goes back
Speaker 4: to very similar to when she was in Las Vegas
Speaker 4: in the hotel room, not knowing what to do. Once
Speaker 4: she got home, she still didn't know what to do.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Her you know, she had she was a very prominent
Speaker 4: she had a very prominent job with Bank of America.
Speaker 4: But she also her life was devoted to her husband
Speaker 4: and her kids. And so she got home and everything
Speaker 4: was just she was so lonely. Now her daughter stayed
Speaker 4: with her for quite a while, but eventually, you know,
Speaker 4: her daughter had her own children, had children of her own,
Speaker 4: or she had to go home to the East Coast.
Speaker 4: And so Mary Joe just didn't want to sit around
Speaker 4: and there was no she didn't know the right way
Speaker 4: or the wrong way to do anything. So she just decided,
Speaker 4: I'm going to leave. So she started traveling a lot
Speaker 4: and going through these different things, and she was invited,
Speaker 4: like you say, to the Country Musical War, and they
Speaker 4: did that particularly year, they did a big tribute to
Speaker 4: all the fifty eight victims of the shooting, and so
Speaker 4: she was there. A bunch of the families of the
Speaker 4: other fifty eight were also there, which is where she
Speaker 4: connected with Tony Burditis, who was also featured in this book.
Speaker 4: And then she got invited to you know, some of
Speaker 4: these other things like say the Breeders' Cup in the
Speaker 4: in the Seminar for mass Victims for mass violence, and
Speaker 4: so that was sort of the beginning of her healing journey,
Speaker 4: was leaving and speaking to other people who have experienced
Speaker 4: sort of shared trauma. And she did this for quite
Speaker 4: a while. You know, her I spoke with her children
Speaker 4: quite a bit about this, and they said, you know,
Speaker 4: this is not how we would do it, but that's
Speaker 4: how she did it. And you know, there Kurt would
Speaker 4: have wanted her to continue living her life. That was
Speaker 4: what they've all said, and they all maintained that, and
Speaker 4: that's kind of what she did. And she did that
Speaker 4: for quite a while, and that was kind of where
Speaker 4: this book started in some ways, because that's where she
Speaker 4: met a lot of these people.
Speaker 3: Was on these travels.
Speaker 4: She met Tommy maher doing this, She met Tony Burditis
Speaker 4: doing this, you know, and in terms, she met Dean
Speaker 4: Green doing this as some of these others. She met
Speaker 4: Lindsay Lawler when she was in Nashville for the CMA Awards.
Speaker 4: So it was very much kind of the beginning of
Speaker 4: her journey, her post Kurt life.
Speaker 2: You mentioned Tommy Mayer and September eleventh, two thousand and
Speaker 2: one and his sorry introduction into activism. He was a
Speaker 2: sanitation worker and he heard a loud low and noise
Speaker 2: at that September eleventh, and a fellow firefighter. He found
Speaker 2: out much later childhood friend had perished in the attack,
Speaker 2: which propelled them into activism. Tell us what that Tommy
Speaker 2: Mayer's activism manifests itself into.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So Tommy was he's, like say, a sanitation worker,
Speaker 4: and he was also a fire commissioner, a volunteer fire
Speaker 4: commissioner at the time in Long Island. He had a
Speaker 4: childhood friend named Joe Hunter, and Joe was a just
Speaker 4: a real badass of a firefighter and he was he
Speaker 4: went to you know, on nine to eleven, he went
Speaker 4: to the towers and you know, he was in there
Speaker 4: when the towers fell and they never found him. They
Speaker 4: found his helmet eventually. Tommy was just obviously heartbroken. This
Speaker 4: was his childhood friend and adult friend also, and you know,
Speaker 4: Tommy went down there, he was helping during the covery efforts.
Speaker 4: He was there when George Bush did his famous speech
Speaker 4: in the Bullhorn, and he would always think about Joe
Speaker 4: Hunter and he wanted to find a way to honor Joe,
Speaker 4: but he could never figure out how. Twenty years later,
Speaker 4: you know, after Vegas happens, Tommy had an epiphany. And
Speaker 4: Tommy was he had he was not a Vegas guy necessarily,
Speaker 4: he lived in New York. He'd had you know, he
Speaker 4: had no sort of you know, strong feelings towards Vegas
Speaker 4: or negative feelings either way, and he had an epiphany.
Speaker 3: It's like, I'm going to.
Speaker 4: Go to I'm going to go to the hometown of
Speaker 4: every victim of Las Vegas and do a random act
Speaker 4: of kindness in their name on my own dime. And
Speaker 4: that's gonna be my way of honoring Joe as well.
Speaker 4: So at the time, Tommy had a van. He still
Speaker 4: has that same van. He calls her Bessie, and he said,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna take Bessie around all the hometowns.
Speaker 3: Are these places, he told his wife.
Speaker 4: His wife thought he was crazy, but she supported him,
Speaker 4: and he just decided to a few weeks later, he
Speaker 4: got a gun in the van, drove to Pennsylvania, went
Speaker 4: to his first first stop, and he eventually started going
Speaker 4: to these different hometowns and he'd learn about the victims
Speaker 4: and what they were, what their interests were, and he
Speaker 4: if he if let's say they were into coffee, for instance,
Speaker 4: he'd go to Starbucks and he would go buy the
Speaker 4: next twenty people their coffee. But he always made notes
Speaker 4: as well, and the note was, you know, this coffee
Speaker 4: or this bicycle or whatever it is, is brought to
Speaker 4: you by and he'd say the victim's name, a victim
Speaker 4: of the Route ninety one shooting in Las Vegas. So
Speaker 4: he'd always give you he'd make these little cards, little
Speaker 4: pieces of paper and give him to everyone who received
Speaker 4: his gifts, so they knew that this is why this
Speaker 4: is happening. And he eventually worked his way through the
Speaker 4: country and ended up in Vegas. Certainly after that he
Speaker 4: really kind of found his calling and started doing it
Speaker 4: for a lot of the other mass incidents in the
Speaker 4: United States. You know, he went to Pittsburgh after the
Speaker 4: synagogue shooting, he went to El Paso after that shooting
Speaker 4: at the Walmart, but all around the country doing this
Speaker 4: kind of stuff ever since Vegas.
Speaker 3: You write that.
Speaker 2: In April two thousand and eight, Mary Joe heard through
Speaker 2: a cousin that to somebody was using Kurt's photo and
Speaker 2: doing these random acts of kindness. So eventually she connected
Speaker 2: with him and within ten minutes felt that he was
Speaker 2: a genuine person and was honorable in his intentions.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she wasn't really sure what was going on because
Speaker 4: she had heard this, and that was one of Tommy's
Speaker 4: things was Tommy never contacted the family because he didn't
Speaker 4: He wasn't in it for the glory, he wasn't in
Speaker 4: it for the pat on the back. He just wanted
Speaker 4: to do it because he felt like it was the
Speaker 4: right thing to do, and so he and eventually when
Speaker 4: he was going to some of these towns, people would
Speaker 4: figure out after a while, they figure out who he
Speaker 4: was and what he was doing. And Mary Joe found
Speaker 4: out through her cousin, you know, this guy is coming
Speaker 4: around and he's using Kurt's name and photo for these things.
Speaker 4: And Mary Joe immediately thought, you know, this guy must
Speaker 4: be a scam artist of some kind, and what does
Speaker 4: he want. He's looking for money because she had gotten
Speaker 4: hit up a lot by these scam artists who were
Speaker 4: you know, you know, Kurt was you know, people would
Speaker 4: call her and say, Kurt was investing in this company,
Speaker 4: we just need the last thirty thousand dollars or something
Speaker 4: like that. And she always knew this is all scam
Speaker 4: and in Tommy's case, she thought this might be just
Speaker 4: another scam artist, but there was something about him that
Speaker 4: was different, and she kind of thought, maybe this guy's
Speaker 4: legit and he just has a good heart. So she
Speaker 4: was going to be in the East Coast. Tommy lives
Speaker 4: in New York. She was going to be in the
Speaker 4: East Coast, and she decided, let's just meet this guy.
Speaker 4: So she reached out to him and they met in
Speaker 4: Central Park at a little restaurant there, and or not
Speaker 4: Si to Park, one of the parts of New York,
Speaker 4: at a restaurant there, and within ten minutes she realized
Speaker 4: this guy's legit, and he's everything that.
Speaker 3: We wish the world was.
Speaker 4: This guy who is not in it for the glory.
Speaker 4: He just ready to do the right thing and honor
Speaker 4: his buddy. They've become fierce friends to this day. In fact,
Speaker 4: we're recording this on October eighth, eighth anniversary of the
Speaker 4: October for shooting. Was just a week ago to the day,
Speaker 4: and Tommy Marr came out to Las Vegas and met
Speaker 4: up with Mary Joe just last week.
Speaker 2: You also say that in twenty nineteen, Mary Joe met
Speaker 2: Dion Green his father, Derek Fudge, and they had went
Speaker 2: out at night and a mask them and opened fire
Speaker 2: and killed them. So she was hesitant to meet Dion Green,
Speaker 2: but she did meet with him and it was a
Speaker 2: successful relationship developed, isn't it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Deon Green was. He's a fascinating story too. Dion
Speaker 4: Green was a He was a former drug dealer, he
Speaker 4: makes no bones about that. And he was in prison.
Speaker 4: He went to prison for several years for he was
Speaker 4: arrested on rico charges, which is you know what they
Speaker 4: usually get the mobsters for. But you know, he and
Speaker 4: he reformed and all that kind of thing, and he
Speaker 4: got out, got out of prison, and he was just
Speaker 4: living his life, doing his thing and turned his life around.
Speaker 4: And it was on Memorial Day of twenty nineteen he
Speaker 4: was in his home and a tornado came through Dayton,
Speaker 4: Ohio and just really tore his home to shreds, to
Speaker 4: the point that it was almost unlivable, and to the
Speaker 4: point that it later did become unlivable. Dion was really
Speaker 4: his life was kind of almost in shambles in a
Speaker 4: way literally because of this home. And he'd spent you know,
Speaker 4: several weeks just trying to clean up and clean up
Speaker 4: and clean up. And he finally decided, I need a
Speaker 4: day off from this life. And so he called his dad,
Speaker 4: Derek Fudge, and he said, Dad, let's go. Do you
Speaker 4: want to go drinks tonight in the Organ district in Dayton, Ohio.
Speaker 4: It's a very popular district out there, you know, restaurants
Speaker 4: and bars and coffee shops and things like that. It's
Speaker 4: kind of where the area you go if you want to,
Speaker 4: you know, have some drinks in the evening in Dayton, Ohio.
Speaker 4: So he went out there, you know, really just kind
Speaker 4: of take his mind off of the tornado that had
Speaker 4: essentially leveled his house. And there with his dad there leaving,
Speaker 4: they're actually standing outside the bar just waiting for his
Speaker 4: sister to see if she's gonna come out or not,
Speaker 4: or if she wants to stay. And next thing you know,
Speaker 4: a gunman comes around the corner and starts shooting people,
Speaker 4: and Derek Fudge is one of the people's shop that night,
Speaker 4: he actually died in Dion's arms. And so Dion was
Speaker 4: a you know, within I think it was about eleven weeks.
Speaker 4: He lost his home to a tornado and his father
Speaker 4: to a mass shooting, all in that in that three
Speaker 4: month span. So Dion had actually heard of Tommy Maher
Speaker 4: and so Tommy, and so he reached out to Tommy
Speaker 4: and so I'd like to meet you. And Tommy was,
Speaker 4: you know, passing through it, because again this has become
Speaker 4: his life, was these you know, helping out people in
Speaker 4: these mass casualty incidents. And so Mary Joe at the
Speaker 4: time had been traveling with Tommy because again she just
Speaker 4: didn't know what to do or how to act, and
Speaker 4: so she just went around and Tommy invited her on
Speaker 4: some of these trips, so she did so when they
Speaker 4: were in Dayton, Ohio, Tommy had said, I want you
Speaker 4: to meet this I got to meet this guy, Dion.
Speaker 3: I want you to meet him. Now.
Speaker 4: Mary Joe said, I have nothing in common with this guy.
Speaker 4: She said, you know, I'm you know, I'm in my fifties.
Speaker 4: This kid is in his you know, late twenties. He's
Speaker 4: I'm a I'm a white woman from California. He's a
Speaker 4: black kid from Middle America, Ohio. You know, I'm a conservative,
Speaker 4: he's a liberal. We have nothing in common. And she said,
Speaker 4: I don't really want to meet with him, not that
Speaker 4: I'm sure he's a fine human being, but we have
Speaker 4: nothing in common. Tommy convinced her and said, listen, just
Speaker 4: meet with him for a second. If you don't want
Speaker 4: to talk anymore, just say, just just use the restroom
Speaker 4: and just don't come back, you know, the.
Speaker 3: Old Irish goodbye as they call it. She was planning on.
Speaker 4: She was very much planning on getting up and using
Speaker 4: the restroom and not coming back. And Tommy just sat
Speaker 4: back and watched as these two mets for the next
Speaker 4: you know, hour and a half two hours, there was
Speaker 4: not a break in the conversation. Mary Joe and Dion
Speaker 4: related very quickly through again, shared trauma in a lot
Speaker 4: of ways. Mary Joe at this point had been through
Speaker 4: a lot of what Dion was experiencing with, you know,
Speaker 4: scam artists coming around looking for money, family members coming around,
Speaker 4: you know, long lost family members looking for money, who
Speaker 4: hasn't spoken to in you know, decades. Mary Joe went
Speaker 4: through the same thing, and so she was able to
Speaker 4: sort of help guide Dion through you know, this initial
Speaker 4: the days after the initial shooting, essentially so and they
Speaker 4: became fast friends.
Speaker 3: To this day.
Speaker 4: They still check on each other. They send Christmas cards
Speaker 4: to each other, the whole, the whole gambit.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear
Speaker 2: these messages. One very very fascinating part of this story
Speaker 2: is that when you talk about Bessie, this vehicle, this
Speaker 2: fifteen passenger vehicle that they used on these what would
Speaker 2: become the Honor Network, on these Honor Network trips, one
Speaker 2: day he felt with the mounting bills, the donations really
Speaker 2: weren't sufficient to cover all of their expenses whatsoever. He said,
Speaker 2: he did something unusual, but he prayed before he went
Speaker 2: into the casino, tell us about this very interesting one
Speaker 2: hundred dollars bet.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So Tommy he was, you know, the money was
Speaker 4: drying up. Like I said, it was very much drying up.
Speaker 4: And because he was doing this all in his own dime.
Speaker 4: Now he had created a nonprofit. But you know, like
Speaker 4: many nonprofits, there wasn't a huge influx of cash coming
Speaker 4: out at that time. And so Tommy had decided him
Speaker 4: and a bunch of firefighters decided to go to Atlantic
Speaker 4: City to honor another firefighter who had died on the
Speaker 4: line of duty just recently at that point. So it
Speaker 4: wasn't Joe Hunter. It was a different person altogether. But
Speaker 4: they decided, we're gonna go to Atlantic City and honor
Speaker 4: this guy. So they were there just planning on going
Speaker 4: for the weekend. It was Tommy's wife's birthday, actually, and
Speaker 4: she was more than happy to let him leave. He said,
Speaker 4: I think the birthday gift was space at that point.
Speaker 4: So Tommy went to Atlantic City with his buddies and
Speaker 4: he just wanted to smoke a cigar, that's all he wanted.
Speaker 4: He was, you know, they'd done their gambling. He was,
Speaker 4: you know, pretty much broke broken even for the most
Speaker 4: part throughout the day of gambling and you know, having
Speaker 4: a couple of cocktails and things like that, and he
Speaker 4: just really wanted a cigar. But he at that particular causino,
Speaker 4: you couldn't smoke anywhere. He knew, however, that you could
Speaker 4: smoke cigars in the high limit area. So he said,
Speaker 4: I'm gonna go there just so I can light up
Speaker 4: a cigar.
Speaker 3: That's it. He sat down at a Wheel.
Speaker 4: Of Fortune machine you know, lit up his little stogy
Speaker 4: there and decided, you know, I was gonna put a
Speaker 4: hundred bucks in, just because I'm sitting here taking up
Speaker 4: space in the high limit area. He put the hundred
Speaker 4: bucks in, you know, hit the button and nothing happened.
Speaker 4: Hitting the button, nothing happened. And then by the third
Speaker 4: spin he hits and the machine starts screaming, and he,
Speaker 4: you know, he's looking at it. He doesn't have his
Speaker 4: glasses on, and he knows he's won some money, but
Speaker 4: he doesn't really know how much. And he's excited because
Speaker 4: you know, the machine is talking to him obviously, and
Speaker 4: he's looking up and he thinks he's one, you know,
Speaker 4: you know, a couple of thousand bucks. He's not sure,
Speaker 4: but he's happy's certainly about the couple thousand dollars. And
Speaker 4: another guy comes behind him because he of course here's
Speaker 4: the machine going as well.
Speaker 3: This is a random person.
Speaker 4: That random guy walks up and he's looking on the machine,
Speaker 4: looks look at the look at the looks at Tommy
Speaker 4: looks at the reels and says, no, you didn't. You
Speaker 4: didn't win a couple of thousand, you went over a
Speaker 4: million dollars. So this man, he hit. He hit a
Speaker 4: will of fortune. I don't say, I guess a jackpot. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I was gonna say lottery. It's not the lottery.
Speaker 3: But he won. He won the jackpot and the will
Speaker 3: of fortune for over a million bucks.
Speaker 4: What a what a boon for this guy who was,
Speaker 4: you know, doing all these things at the goodness of
Speaker 4: his heart and going broke doing it to suddenly, you know,
Speaker 4: have just this influx of money. Now he's not touched
Speaker 4: that money to this day. It's uh, he's used it
Speaker 4: for his kid's education. That's going into a fund for
Speaker 4: all them. Yeah, in fact, they still He called and
Speaker 4: he called his wife. I think this was around midnight,
Speaker 4: one o'clock or so East Coast time when this happened.
Speaker 4: And he called his wife, Cindy, and she was asleep,
Speaker 4: and she woke up very annoyed, wondering why Tommy was
Speaker 4: calling her, and of course she kind of thought, Tommy's
Speaker 4: probably drunk or something like this and calling me. And
Speaker 4: you know, Tommy can barely speak because he's so excited,
Speaker 4: and he says, you know, you'll never guess what happened.
Speaker 4: I just you know, I just one, you know, just
Speaker 4: hit the jackpop and she says, Tommy, you don't know
Speaker 4: what you're talking about. You know how much of you
Speaker 4: had to drink. You know, you're a you know, this
Speaker 4: is this, This can't be right. So he, uh, he says,
Speaker 4: FaceTime me so I can see. So Tommy hangs up facetimes.
Speaker 4: His wife shows the machine and sure enough it's legit.
Speaker 4: And at that point a bunch of the casino workers
Speaker 4: are coming by to of course protect Tommy, and they
Speaker 4: make him fill out the paperwork for the irs and
Speaker 4: things like that because he did indeed win. You know what,
Speaker 4: it's an incredible silver lining for someone like that.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, that's an amusing story. But let's get to a
Speaker 2: very important person in this story, Jeff Dion and his sister,
Speaker 2: Paulette Dion. She's at the She was attending the University
Speaker 2: of North Carolina in Greensboro. She had a degree in communications,
Speaker 2: but she wound up working sort of a managerial position
Speaker 2: at Arby's Restaurant and they wanted her to relocate to Atlanta.
Speaker 2: Tell us what happens when she moves into an apartment
Speaker 2: and the laundry room. April seventeenth, nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so she moved to like say, she moved to Atlanta's,
Speaker 4: a suburb of Atlanta, and to work in an Rby's.
Speaker 3: And she really she liked the job. She was really
Speaker 3: on the fast track there.
Speaker 4: And it was a one of those apartment buildings where
Speaker 4: the apartments themselves didn't have their own washer and dryer.
Speaker 4: So he went down to a laundry mat. It was
Speaker 4: inside the building, but it was downstairs. So Paultte went
Speaker 4: down there one day to do her laundry, and there
Speaker 4: was a room, kind of a storage room, off to
Speaker 4: the side, and she saw that there was a man
Speaker 4: in there. Now, typically this storage room is always locked
Speaker 4: and closed and you didn't really notice it. But on
Speaker 4: this particular day, she sees a man in there. And
Speaker 4: the man looked really just unkempt. He had, you know, dirty,
Speaker 4: dirty close and crooked teeth and things like this, and
Speaker 4: you know, certainly hadn't seen a shower in a long time.
Speaker 4: She you know, told the guy, hey, you know, you're
Speaker 4: not supposed to be here. He didn't really say anything
Speaker 4: to her, and she didn't really follow up. She just
Speaker 4: kind of told him that and went about her business.
Speaker 4: And she put her laundry into the machine and went
Speaker 4: back to her apartment, you know, of course about you know,
Speaker 4: forty five minutes later, she goes back down to check
Speaker 4: on her laundry, and she is hoping that the man
Speaker 4: is gone.
Speaker 3: And she gets down there. The man is not gone.
Speaker 3: She's also the only one down there.
Speaker 4: Very quickly, this gentleman attacks her eventually kills her, he
Speaker 4: you know, and then he he carved the He also
Speaker 4: took out a little hit a pocket knife. After he
Speaker 4: killed her, he pulled his pocket knife out and carved
Speaker 4: the date into her body.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 4: And then he also, you know, not to get too graphic,
Speaker 4: but he took his pants off and then ejaculated on
Speaker 4: her as well. And then he just left the left
Speaker 4: the building, went into the night. It wasn't until a
Speaker 4: a neighbor found her found Paulat's body down there a
Speaker 4: little bit later and called the cops and all that.
Speaker 3: Kind of thing. And so Jeff d On the time.
Speaker 4: Was just a teenager and he, you know, he was
Speaker 4: actually working at an Italian a church festival, I think
Speaker 4: it was an Italian festival sponsored by the church at
Speaker 4: the time, when his father came through and said, I
Speaker 4: had bad news and told him about his sister.
Speaker 3: So Jeff was just distraught, like the entire family was.
Speaker 3: I mean, he adored his older.
Speaker 4: Sister and he kind of was trying to figure out
Speaker 4: as much as he could about the situation. His parents
Speaker 4: were very much trying to shield him from the facts
Speaker 4: of the case because they are pretty gruesome, but Jeff
Speaker 4: was adamant about finding out as much as he could,
Speaker 4: and which was again not there was not much info
Speaker 4: to go on. So he started, you know, not cold calling,
Speaker 4: but he would send letters to the police department, so
Speaker 4: cold cold lettering, if you will, the police department, trying
Speaker 4: to ask for info, and he wasn't getting anything. And
Speaker 4: in his mind he said, you know, you know, I
Speaker 4: wasn't stabbed or you know, or assaulted, but I'm a
Speaker 4: victim too. My entire family, we're all victims of this.
Speaker 4: And so he decided to because of that moment, that
Speaker 4: inspired him to basically become a victim's rights lawyer, and
Speaker 4: he still does that to this day. All all spurned
Speaker 4: by this. And then it turned out, you know, as
Speaker 4: time went on, they couldn't, you know, they couldn't figure.
Speaker 3: Out who did this to Paul Atte.
Speaker 4: Eventually, however, and arrest was made Jeff was got picked
Speaker 4: up from school. His mother picked him up from school
Speaker 4: on his way to an orthodonist appointment, and she broke
Speaker 4: the news to him in the car and said, hey,
Speaker 4: you know, they found Paulett's killer and you'll never guess
Speaker 4: who it is.
Speaker 3: Now. Jeff was terrified at this statement because he thought, please,
Speaker 3: don't tell me. It's somebody that I know. And it wasn't.
Speaker 4: But Jeff had heard of the person and what it
Speaker 4: was was his mother said it was Tool, and he
Speaker 4: thought for a second, whose tool?
Speaker 3: Otis? Tool? Otis? Tool was at the time.
Speaker 4: A notorious serial killer who was most known for killing
Speaker 4: Adam Walsh, the son of John Walsh from America's Most
Speaker 4: Wanted Yes. Jeff grew up in Hollywood, Florida, which is
Speaker 4: where Adam was taken from that mall. Jeff remembers riding
Speaker 4: his bike around constantly, you know, the teenager, seeing you know,
Speaker 4: missing posters of little Adam Walsh all over the place.
Speaker 4: So he just never would have guessed that the same
Speaker 4: person who you know took Adam Walsh's life also took
Speaker 4: a life of his sister.
Speaker 2: You're right that his sister had a degree in communications,
Speaker 2: but she had written something very profound, and he reread this.
Speaker 2: At some point she wrote that everyone has the right
Speaker 2: to dream, everyone has the duty to aid mankind, and
Speaker 2: everyone has the opportunity to change the world. I think
Speaker 2: these words are part of the inspiration for Jeff Dionna
Speaker 2: and his work as an attorney very much.
Speaker 4: And he was he was in school, and his sister
Speaker 4: was always just a whiz when it came to her words,
Speaker 4: much more better than certainly I am, that's for sure.
Speaker 4: But she was wonderful at debating, and so Jeff really
Speaker 4: it's not that he wanted to follow in her footsteps,
Speaker 4: but he certainly admired what she did.
Speaker 3: And so he took this class.
Speaker 4: And there was one notorious professor or teacher at that
Speaker 4: point at at.
Speaker 3: The high school.
Speaker 4: And and the kind of the the big project every
Speaker 4: year was this, you had to come up with the
Speaker 4: teacher would give you a topic and you had to
Speaker 4: do this speech about it, essentially for the whole class.
Speaker 4: And that and it changed every single year. And so
Speaker 4: Jeff was always waiting for waiting for his moment for
Speaker 4: what his was. And after his sister had passed, he
Speaker 4: was all right, So he let me back back track.
Speaker 4: So he got his he got his assignment, and he
Speaker 4: did his assignment. He did it really well. I think
Speaker 4: he got an A minus on it and his Uh,
Speaker 4: he called his sister very excited, saying, Hey, you'll never
Speaker 4: guess what happened. I got you know, I got an
Speaker 4: an on my on the on the contest. His sister
Speaker 4: was very proud of him. She didn't have the heart
Speaker 4: to tell him that she got an A, but uh,
Speaker 4: that's just kind of the woman she was, Jeff. After
Speaker 4: her passing, he went through a bunch of her her
Speaker 4: items in the room, you know, things like hair brushes,
Speaker 4: you know, he found a box of a bunch of items,
Speaker 4: things like hair brushes and you know, just some schoolwork.
Speaker 4: And he found her paper for that for that assignment,
Speaker 4: and he read those words. He kind of felt that
Speaker 4: that was a lasting gift to him. And he read
Speaker 4: those words over and over and over again, and to
Speaker 4: this day he can, he can recite them verbatim because
Speaker 4: that was He feels as though those were left for
Speaker 4: him by his sister to really help guide him through
Speaker 4: through life in general. But he sees that as the last,
Speaker 4: the lasting gift of his sister.
Speaker 2: You say that he decided the best way to honor
Speaker 2: his sister was to become a victim's rights lawyer and
Speaker 2: support those who suffered the worst kind of loss. And
Speaker 2: he also established the nonprofit Mass Violence Survivor's Fund, a
Speaker 2: mechanism for distributing charitable donations in the aftermath of mass violence.
Speaker 2: Tell us about Jeff and his team and the incredible
Speaker 2: strides that they made in this effort.
Speaker 4: Sure, and this is where and this is where Mary
Speaker 4: Joke ties into the story too, is so Jeff, through
Speaker 4: that project, he is the person who essentially the the
Speaker 4: local governments go to after a mass casualty event. So
Speaker 4: what happens often with these things is go fundmes get
Speaker 4: set up. Some of these local governments don't really know
Speaker 4: how to you know, give you out the money for this,
Speaker 4: or the best way to do it and the best
Speaker 4: way to split it up and all these kind of things.
Speaker 4: And that's where Jeff comes into place. So they hired
Speaker 4: Jeff essentially to do this. So Jeff takes over the
Speaker 4: go fundme accounts and it's almost like a turnkey situation
Speaker 4: at this point because they've done so many of them.
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, So in Vegas, for instance, he.
Speaker 4: Did a big meeting with all the families of the victims,
Speaker 4: and that's where Mary Joe met him, and he was discussing, Okay, like,
Speaker 4: you know, we have this process set up where if
Speaker 4: you you know, lost.
Speaker 3: Someone, you're on this this tier.
Speaker 4: If you got shot, you're this tier, and so on
Speaker 4: and so forth, and it's broken down very eloquently and
Speaker 4: you know, very detailed, so you know exactly where you stand.
Speaker 4: There's probably nobody who's more trauma informed in this world
Speaker 4: than Jeff Dan, to be honest with you, because he
Speaker 4: has done this so many times and so many events.
Speaker 4: He did it for Vegas, He's done you know, he
Speaker 4: was the go fund me distributor for.
Speaker 3: The Orlando Pulse nightclub.
Speaker 4: He was the distributor for Uvalde Elementary School after that
Speaker 4: one in Texas.
Speaker 3: He's done this all over the place.
Speaker 4: And he goes and he meets the victims, he reads
Speaker 4: all their letters and he kind of figures, he kind
Speaker 4: of figures it all out on who, you know, who
Speaker 4: should get what. And he's also done something that a
Speaker 4: lot of people haven't really tapped into is Jeff takes
Speaker 4: into account psychological trauma and no one had really ever
Speaker 4: put a price on that until Jeoff Dion came around
Speaker 4: and he said, you know, no, there is there is
Speaker 4: such a thing as psychological trauma, and these people are
Speaker 4: also living with it too. Now they might not have
Speaker 4: been shot, necessarily are stabbed or whatever the case is,
Speaker 4: but they're living with, you know, this trauma that they've
Speaker 4: been through through no fault of their own. And so
Speaker 4: Jeff is he's kind of yeah, he's turned this sort
Speaker 4: of this entire operation into just an incredible, incredible organization
Speaker 4: that helps victims. That's their entire purpose is to help victims,
Speaker 4: and he's done an incredible job with it. In fact,
Speaker 4: I spoke with a couple people who he's helped, you know,
Speaker 4: one certain Mary Joe being one of them, and another
Speaker 4: one being this woman from Uvall Day School who she
Speaker 4: was actually the person who was I don't know if
Speaker 4: you remember back, but she was one of people who
Speaker 4: was initially blamed for allowing that gunman into the s
Speaker 4: now It video later cleared her. She was adamant that
Speaker 4: I did not do this, she said, you know, she
Speaker 4: was the whole community looked down on her, and Jeff
Speaker 4: was the one who came to her rescue and said no,
Speaker 4: like you've you've experienced something, You've experienced not only psychological
Speaker 4: but also physical trauma from this woman was crouched down
Speaker 4: under her desk for hours on her toes and now
Speaker 4: she has a hard time walking. She can't hear loud sounds,
Speaker 4: loud noises, things like that. And so this man is
Speaker 4: he really is a godsend to a lot of the
Speaker 4: victims of mass violence.
Speaker 2: You're right that late twenty twenty three, Jeff set up
Speaker 2: a new victims fund, the Mass Violent Survivor's Fund, and
Speaker 2: he's also the CEO of Zero Abuse Project. Can you
Speaker 2: tell us about those victims of abuse and what kind
Speaker 2: of litigation? And he dropped it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Jeff is h Yeah, so he's the he's
Speaker 4: involved in the CEO of the Zero Abuse Project, which
Speaker 4: the which aims to sort of eradicate sexual abuse of minors.
Speaker 3: Now, Jeff was abused as a miner as well from.
Speaker 4: A Scout leader. He didn't come clean until many many
Speaker 4: years later because.
Speaker 3: He he just thought, you know, this is.
Speaker 4: Uh, this person who did this to me is he's
Speaker 4: older now. But then eventually Jeff realized, you know, sexual
Speaker 4: predators never retire, and so he decided to come Clain
Speaker 4: with his come forward with his claims. Now because of
Speaker 4: what happened to him, he decided to start the or
Speaker 4: become a part of the Zero Abuse Project, and he
Speaker 4: has since taken on sexual predators through litigation and things
Speaker 4: like that for to kind of get not not settlements,
Speaker 4: but to you know, help put these people away or
Speaker 4: to make things easier for sexual beast victims. So whether
Speaker 4: that's changing the statute limitations, which he's done in several
Speaker 4: states to allow for a longer time, because he realizes
Speaker 4: like himself, that people don't come out and admit these
Speaker 4: things the day of or the next day of the
Speaker 4: week of. Sometimes it takes years or decades, like in
Speaker 4: his case, but he has changed laws in multiple states
Speaker 4: to help with this, and in fact, his work was
Speaker 4: changing the setual limitations and a lot of these things
Speaker 4: is what helped actually take down a lot of the
Speaker 4: Boy Scout leaders of America when that whole scandal happened,
Speaker 4: and also some of the Catholic Church when that happened,
Speaker 4: with some of the priests and things like that. He
Speaker 4: also technically, in a roundabout way, that work also was
Speaker 4: what allowed for some of Jeffrey Epstein's victims to come
Speaker 4: forward too. Because of the statue limitation was changed and
Speaker 4: made it so you could have a longer runway to
Speaker 4: come clean.
Speaker 2: Let's use this as an opportunity. Need to stop to
Speaker 2: hear these messages. Now you introduce you mentioned before Lindsay
Speaker 2: Lawler and her fiance Seamus Frawley and their wedding day
Speaker 2: September twenty twenty three. But you talk about her her
Speaker 2: music career and the intersection with Mary Joe and the
Speaker 2: fifty eight Survivors and Country Music Awards. Can you tell
Speaker 2: us about that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Lindsay Lawler is what she's a saint of a
Speaker 4: human being, is what she is. Lindsay Lallata. She got
Speaker 4: married in a during a national a actual certified national
Speaker 4: disaster in Texas. And her husband actually is works in
Speaker 4: the TV world, and he was one of the sound
Speaker 4: guys for Jackass some of that and Wild Boys. Wild
Speaker 4: Boys was a spin off of Jackass and things like that.
Speaker 4: So a bunch of those sort of guys were at
Speaker 4: the wedding, and when the wedding ended up being just
Speaker 4: an absolute disaster because of weather, a bunch of the
Speaker 4: Jackass guys actually put on headsets and started basically producing
Speaker 4: the wedding. It's kind of a fun little tidbit just
Speaker 4: how you know, her life with Seamus started. She was
Speaker 4: a she's a singer songwriter in Nashville, and she started
Speaker 4: and she works very very closely with the trucking industry.
Speaker 4: She has a serious XM radio show which is a
Speaker 4: listened to my very popular in the trucking community. And
Speaker 4: so she was at her home in Nashville one day
Speaker 4: reading about the Vegas shooting and you know, reading some
Speaker 4: of the victims, and she came across Kurt Bontillo's name.
Speaker 3: And she realized he's a trucker.
Speaker 4: So she thought, you know, this man is you know,
Speaker 4: he's near and dear to her already because of that,
Speaker 4: because of his profession. So she reached out to Marry
Speaker 4: Joe saying, hey, you know I'm doing I do a
Speaker 4: bunch of stuff for the trucking industry. I'd like to
Speaker 4: honor him at this you know, annual gathering this of truckers.
Speaker 4: And again, like you know, Mary Joe thought might be
Speaker 4: a scam artist or something who was trying to, you know,
Speaker 4: weasel some money out of me. But she was in
Speaker 4: Nashville for the Country music Awards already, so she said,
Speaker 4: I'll meet with this woman and Mary and Mary Joe
Speaker 4: had her family with her also, So there was a
Speaker 4: bunch of people that vet out Lindsay to see if
Speaker 4: this person was legit. And they met with Lindsay and
Speaker 4: sure enough they found out this woman is everything she
Speaker 4: said she was. And so she meets Mary Joe and
Speaker 4: the family and very quickly they develop an incredible bond.
Speaker 4: They honored Lindsay set up so they were able to
Speaker 4: honor Kurt at this trucking expo and they gave him,
Speaker 4: you know, an award Mary of course, and the whole
Speaker 4: family accepted it. She has really kind of become a
Speaker 4: just someone to lean on for this family. She you know,
Speaker 4: they always talk about how she's she's not blood, but
Speaker 4: she's family. Lindsay has gone to help spread Kurt's ashes
Speaker 4: having never met the man.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Lindsay also not just because her wedding was quite traumatic actually,
Speaker 4: but she's been through trauma of her own. I'm sure
Speaker 4: we're probably gonna talk about, but she has not dealt with,
Speaker 4: you know, murder such you know, which in the case
Speaker 4: of some of these others like Jeff Dion or Mary
Speaker 4: Joe or Dian Green type of thing. But she's had
Speaker 4: her own sort of trauma in her life too. She
Speaker 4: was sexually assaulted by a She's a singer songwriter in
Speaker 4: Nashville and she was sexually assaulted by a record executive
Speaker 4: one day. Now she refuses to name who that was.
Speaker 4: She will not say who it is. That's kind of
Speaker 4: where her trauma lize too, is that, and she'd found
Speaker 4: a way to take that, turn it on its head,
Speaker 4: and you know, kind of find her own sort of
Speaker 4: happiness and her own path.
Speaker 3: Similar to Mary Joe.
Speaker 2: You introduce Tony berdidas Special Forces in Iraq. Tell us
Speaker 2: about the meeting with Mary Joe and Tony Brudidas.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, Mary Joe and Tony met actually in Nashville
Speaker 4: at the Country Music Awards for the first time, and
Speaker 4: they become Titus can be because they actually have a
Speaker 4: lot of shared Their situations are very very similar. Tony
Speaker 4: was attending the Route ninety one festival with his wife Denise,
Speaker 4: and they had come I think it was their first
Speaker 4: year coming to this particular one, but they would always
Speaker 4: find different festivals to go to. Tony was Army Special Forces.
Speaker 4: He was basically John Wayne. This guy was just an absolute,
Speaker 4: just a certified badass. So he had been in the
Speaker 4: military for a very very long time, decided it was
Speaker 4: his time to retire, and so him and Denise decided,
Speaker 4: you know, they kind of moved to West Virginia, which
Speaker 4: is where they're from, and they came to Vegas for
Speaker 4: the Route ninety one festival. Prior year, they stayed at
Speaker 4: the Luxore, which is across the street from where the
Speaker 4: shooting happened. This particular year, they were in Bally's which
Speaker 4: is Center Strip of Las Vegas. They were there and
Speaker 4: Denise had right before the shooting, right around when Genna
Speaker 4: study was starting, she started feeling not great and she said,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm not really feeling it. And Tony had
Speaker 4: told her, let's maybe we should go, and she no,
Speaker 4: let's and Denise told him, no, let's give it a minute.
Speaker 3: Let's give it a little bit longer, and I'm sure
Speaker 3: I'll work my.
Speaker 4: Way through it and maybe it's just a little bug
Speaker 4: or something. And so they stayed and then the shooting
Speaker 4: started happening. And Tony, he still kicks himself over it
Speaker 4: is he didn't recognize that it was gunfire immediately. Now
Speaker 4: he knew pretty quickly, but not immediately, and in fact,
Speaker 4: Denise had asked him, was that gunfire? And he said no,
Speaker 4: And then when it became pretty clear that it was,
Speaker 4: he said, we got to get out of here.
Speaker 3: So he started leading Denise through the crowd on the
Speaker 3: way out of the festival.
Speaker 4: There were anyone festival, and Denise was wearing flip flops,
Speaker 4: which she never did, but she did that day anyway,
Speaker 4: and so he's leading her through there and he tried
Speaker 4: to look to ask if she was okay, and as
Speaker 4: soon as he looked back, he saw her take a
Speaker 4: bullet to the head and she went down. Tony, being
Speaker 4: in the military and being in many a war zone
Speaker 4: over the over his years his career, he knew it
Speaker 4: was pretty dire immediately, and he got down on the
Speaker 4: ground with her and he was talking to her.
Speaker 3: He couldn't.
Speaker 4: He was just begging, please, you know, you gotta stay
Speaker 4: with me, You gotta stay with me. He finally after
Speaker 4: a while, they were just on the ground for what
Speaker 4: felt like an eternity, and Tony was saying, you know,
Speaker 4: you can take me. I'm fine, go ahead and shoot
Speaker 4: me to Hi'm good. At one point he thought people
Speaker 4: were on the He thought people were in the festival
Speaker 4: like a lot of us did, and he, a police officer,
Speaker 4: got on the ground with them. Is his female, and
Speaker 4: he kept looking at her gun, and he started thinking,
Speaker 4: you know about the exit plan, thinking, you know, if
Speaker 4: I leave here, maybe more gunmen are going to come
Speaker 4: in through this gate over here, and I'm going to
Speaker 4: take this one's gun and I can end this thing
Speaker 4: right now, because this guy is again you know, this dude,
Speaker 4: is this is this is a this is a man
Speaker 4: here that we're talking about. He never did take the gun,
Speaker 4: but he eventually got Denise out of there the help
Speaker 4: of someone else. But by then there were no ambulances
Speaker 4: to be found. You couldn't go anywhere. Just then a
Speaker 4: these two women in a truck pull up and they
Speaker 4: knew the situation very quickly, and they told him put
Speaker 4: her in the back. We'll get her to the hospital.
Speaker 4: Tony had never seen these two women in his life,
Speaker 4: didn't know their names, didn't know anything. But he thought,
Speaker 4: you know, this is good. This is the best of
Speaker 4: a bad situation. So he got in the back of
Speaker 4: a truck with his wife. A nursing student also jumped
Speaker 4: in with them. As well, who he also didn't know,
Speaker 4: and this woman starts just flying through the streets of
Speaker 4: Las Vegas, trying to get them to the hospital as
Speaker 4: fast as possible. And it was actually on the freeway
Speaker 4: getting to the hospital where Tony realized that Denise's her
Speaker 4: heart had stopped, so she technically died. Even though she's
Speaker 4: pronounced dead in the hospital, she actually really died on
Speaker 4: the freeway in the back of this woman's truck. They
Speaker 4: were stuck in a traffic jam because the whole city
Speaker 4: was in chaos. So the woman, actually the driver of
Speaker 4: the truck, got out. She had a blanket in the
Speaker 4: cabin for truck, and she pulled a blanket, put it
Speaker 4: over Denise and Tony and said, let's give her some privacy.
Speaker 4: And so Tony went the rest of the drive to
Speaker 4: the hospital under this blanket with his wife who had
Speaker 4: just passed. And he's very similar to marry Joe, and
Speaker 4: that their age is very close. They'd been married roughly
Speaker 4: the same amount of years. They both had, you know,
Speaker 4: grandkids around the same age. They had kids around the
Speaker 4: same age as well. And some of I talked to
Speaker 4: a bunch of Tony's lifelong friends and Denise's lifelong friends,
Speaker 4: and they even say that Mary Joe reminds them.
Speaker 3: Of Denise, and they even think they look alike a
Speaker 3: little bit.
Speaker 4: So there is a very strong connection between these two,
Speaker 4: between Mary Joe and Tony, and Tony is outside of
Speaker 4: Mary Joe. Tony's story probably touches me the most of
Speaker 4: all the people featured in this book, only because it's
Speaker 4: similar to mine, because I was there at root anyone
Speaker 4: as well. But also, I mean when I met Tony,
Speaker 4: we actually met the very first time in Las Vegas.
Speaker 4: He was here on vacation when I met him, and
Speaker 4: I sat with him for probably four or five hours,
Speaker 4: and this man was just this, you know, this man
Speaker 4: who has seen the worst of the world in war zones,
Speaker 4: and you know it's a Army special Forces and this
Speaker 4: man was reduced to a puddle of tears almost through
Speaker 4: half of the half of the chat. I mean, this
Speaker 4: is a man who absolutely loved his wife and adored
Speaker 4: his wife. So his story really touches me in a
Speaker 4: lot of ways.
Speaker 2: You have one more heartbreaking story of Ronald Benjamin and
Speaker 2: Amy franco H. Can you tell us briefly about this
Speaker 2: incredible story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this is a This is an interesting tie in,
Speaker 4: and you know what we wanted to do with is
Speaker 4: what we wanted to do with this book was, you know,
Speaker 4: highlight different people that have come into Marry Joe's life
Speaker 4: because of Route ninety one, because of that awful day,
Speaker 4: and things that have happened because of that awful day
Speaker 4: that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Speaker 3: Now, Ronald, you know, oh, Ronnie.
Speaker 4: Ronnie is a he's a machinist who lives in the
Speaker 4: Boston area and he went to the doctor one day
Speaker 4: and they said, you know, you have you have cancer
Speaker 4: and it's not looking good for you. And you know,
Speaker 4: he didn't know what to think.
Speaker 3: He had.
Speaker 4: It was a stage four cancer. It went it went
Speaker 4: to his liver, and they gave him months to live.
Speaker 4: He actually got an actual death sentence and they kind
Speaker 4: of hit him and his wife tried to find They
Speaker 4: tried everything they possibly could to to work this out.
Speaker 4: They could never find the right thing to do. They
Speaker 4: were going to different doctors who gave them bad advice.
Speaker 4: They finally went to one doctor who said, you know,
Speaker 4: there's a couple of things we can do, and he
Speaker 4: said there's one last resort, but this is way in
Speaker 4: the way out a left field, and it's a live
Speaker 4: liver transplant.
Speaker 3: But you have to to do that.
Speaker 4: You have to find someone with the same blood type
Speaker 4: as you, and someone who's living, and someone who is
Speaker 4: willing to donate their liver to you or a portion
Speaker 4: of their liver. Because on all these you know donation
Speaker 4: lists that we you know, we all hear about these
Speaker 4: donation lists when people you know pass in that you know,
Speaker 4: whatever it be, whether car accidents or natural causes or whatever,
Speaker 4: and you can donate you know, livers and kidneys and
Speaker 4: eyes and things like this. If it's a live liver,
Speaker 4: those lists, I should say, are very very long, and
Speaker 4: they take years to get through. If it's a live
Speaker 4: liver transplant, that you get moved to the front of
Speaker 4: the list basically because someone is willing to give their
Speaker 4: liver to you. They're not just willing to give their
Speaker 4: liver to some random person. And so Ronnie and his
Speaker 4: wife Amy, they were desperately looking for someone to kind
Speaker 4: of bequeath part of their liver to them, and they
Speaker 4: couldn't figure they couldn't find it, and it's a it's
Speaker 4: a big ask. Obviously, Tommy had had an old but
Speaker 4: a golf buddy of his. Tim Tim had a was
Speaker 4: dating this girl who has you know, they've been together
Speaker 4: for a few years, about two years or so, and
Speaker 4: Tim and away. Tim had talked about Ronnie with his
Speaker 4: girlfriend Jessica quite a bit and he said, oh, this guy,
Speaker 4: you know, and what a sad situation he is.
Speaker 3: You know, he's got these two these young kids, and he's.
Speaker 4: Got stage four cancer and it's not really working out well,
Speaker 4: and you know, he needs a live liver transplant. And
Speaker 4: Jessica said, I didn't even know what that was, you know,
Speaker 4: and she meets she end up meets meeting Ronnie one
Speaker 4: day at a bar, and uh, and Ronnie's telling her
Speaker 4: everything and she said, I didn't know you could actually
Speaker 4: donate a liver as from a life human being to another.
Speaker 3: And then Ronnie explained to her. He said, yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I had to do a crash course on it myself,
Speaker 3: but it's possible. You can do this kind of thing.
Speaker 4: And you know, you have to get cleared, and there's
Speaker 4: such a process to go through. You have to get
Speaker 4: tested for every single thing there is, you know, every
Speaker 4: kind of blood test you can imagine. You have to
Speaker 4: do and it all has to work out, every every
Speaker 4: box has to get checked. And Jessica told him I'm
Speaker 4: going to I'm gonna be your donor. She knew her
Speaker 4: blood type and she knew it mattch Ronnie's and Ronnie.
Speaker 4: So I appreciate that. But you know, I they think
Speaker 4: this went over. It's a you know, I'm not asking
Speaker 4: for this you offered, but you know, think this one
Speaker 4: over because this is this is something just not to
Speaker 4: you know, do overnight here. So Jessica spoke with her
Speaker 4: boyfriend about it, and her boyfriend was very much against
Speaker 4: it initially, and spoke with her mother about it. Her
Speaker 4: mother was very much against it initially as well. And
Speaker 4: now you're thinking yourself, where is where's the tie in
Speaker 4: with you know, Mary Joe? Where's the time of rout
Speaker 4: ninety one? Jessica is Mary Joe's daughter. Jessica was the
Speaker 4: one who was there ninety one that night. She's the
Speaker 4: one who had the cell phone cord to create the
Speaker 4: turnic it. And she always said, had my father not
Speaker 4: passed that day, I never would have done something like this.
Speaker 4: Now she looked at Ronnie the way that in the
Speaker 4: same light that she looked at her own father of
Speaker 4: this man who's just a wonderful human being who has
Speaker 4: young children who you know, and she says, you know,
Speaker 4: I lost my dad at a young age too. Now
Speaker 4: Jessica was in her thirties at that point, but she said,
Speaker 4: you know, I lost my dad in my thirties and
Speaker 4: it really sucks, and these kids are going to grow
Speaker 4: up without a father if I don't do this. And
Speaker 4: so Jessica went through. She eventually convinced her mom and
Speaker 4: her boyfriend and the whole family that she was going
Speaker 4: to do this. And when Jessica sets her mind to something,
Speaker 4: there is pretty much no talking her out of it.
Speaker 4: She's a very strong woman. And so she decided to
Speaker 4: go through with it. And you know, they did all
Speaker 4: the tests and everything like that and all matched, and
Speaker 4: sure enough, she decided, let's make it happen. So they
Speaker 4: found a hospital and the right doctors to make this happen.
Speaker 4: And it was near Buffalo where the went to the
Speaker 4: hospital one day, and sure enough, they did a live
Speaker 4: liver transplant. Jessica gave thirty five, thirty five or sixty
Speaker 4: five percent of her liver. I can't remember.
Speaker 3: One of them gets sixty five.
Speaker 4: I think Ronnie gets sixty five Jessica keeps thirty five percent,
Speaker 4: and the liver can obviously grow back.
Speaker 3: So and all these.
Speaker 4: Years later, they're both happy and healthy and Ronnie is
Speaker 4: alive today because of Jessica, who again would not have
Speaker 4: done this had it not been for ninety one.
Speaker 3: You're right in the end.
Speaker 2: March twenty twenty five, Mary Joe receives a Christmas card.
Speaker 2: Tell us about that Christmas card and its message.
Speaker 4: Mary Joe was around this time in life. She's now
Speaker 4: dating a new man and he's wonderful and he lives
Speaker 4: in Florida, and Mary Joe's now retired. So Mary Joe
Speaker 4: spends a lot of her time and she actually just
Speaker 4: moved to Florida recently, but she at that time, she's
Speaker 4: spending a lot of her time in Florida with Hit,
Speaker 4: with her boyf friend, and a lot of time in Connecticut,
Speaker 4: which is where Jessica lives, and her son lives now
Speaker 4: in South Carolina, so she was out there as well.
Speaker 4: So she was really spending a ton of time on
Speaker 4: the East Coast. And even though her home was in
Speaker 4: Newport Beach, California, and so she was when she would
Speaker 4: come home she would just have three months of mail
Speaker 4: stacked up. So she got home one day and it
Speaker 4: was it was in March, like you say, you know,
Speaker 4: three months after Christmas, and she's going through old Christmas cards.
Speaker 4: In fact, there was one from me in there, but
Speaker 4: there was a there was a Christmas card from the
Speaker 4: Benjamin family and there was a picture of the entire
Speaker 4: family there, all looking happy and healthy, and you know,
Speaker 4: it said Merry Christmas from the Benjamins.
Speaker 3: She flipped the card over.
Speaker 4: And there was a hashtag on the bottom and it
Speaker 4: said hashtag bank you jess And that moment just melted
Speaker 4: Mary Joe because you know, this card would not have
Speaker 4: been it certainly would not have featured that whole family,
Speaker 4: the whole bench and family, had it not been for
Speaker 4: Mary Joe's daughter Jessica and that live liver transplant. And
Speaker 4: so that was one of those things where it just
Speaker 4: really kind of tied a bow on this whole experience
Speaker 4: of you know, of trauma and and how one one moment, one.
Speaker 3: Night can have a lasting impact on so many people.
Speaker 4: And I think, you know, and Ronnie's life is really
Speaker 4: been saved because of kind.
Speaker 3: Of Root ninety one and in a roundabout way.
Speaker 4: You know, Jessica's is she she blatantly says, I would
Speaker 4: not have done this had it not been for Route
Speaker 4: ninety one and my father. But she felt like this
Speaker 4: was the perfect way to honor her father. You know,
Speaker 4: she was was questioning how her mother went about her
Speaker 4: business after Root ninety one and traveling and meeting all
Speaker 4: kinds of people, and you know, Mary Joe was speaking
Speaker 4: at h conferences like we mentioned, and she was talking
Speaker 4: to newspapers and things like that, and that just wasn't
Speaker 4: Jessica's thing. She said, that's not how I want to
Speaker 4: honor my father. And she went years trying to figure
Speaker 4: out how to do it. And when she met Ronnie Benjamin,
Speaker 4: that was when she knew, this is how I honor
Speaker 4: my dad.
Speaker 3: I saved the life of another human being.
Speaker 2: This has been an extraordinary, real victim story of survival.
Speaker 2: I want to thank you so much for coming on
Speaker 2: and talking about this incredible book, The Las Vegas Massacre
Speaker 2: Connections Finding Strength through Tragedy after America's deadliest mass shooting.
Speaker 2: For those people that might want to find out more
Speaker 2: about this book, can you tell us about a website
Speaker 2: or any social media you.
Speaker 3: Do yeah, it'll be available.
Speaker 4: It goes out for wide release on October fourteenth on
Speaker 4: Amazon and wherever books are sold. But Amazon is really
Speaker 4: kind of the I guess we live in an Amazon world,
Speaker 4: don't we. So yes, but yeah, October fourteenth, right, and
Speaker 4: it's currently available on pre order on Kindle, but on
Speaker 4: the fourteenth it goes wide with hardcover, paperback audio ebook.
Speaker 4: The Whole Kitten, Kaboodle and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.
Speaker 4: Could find out more about me on my personal instagram,
Speaker 4: which is Instagram at the Mark Gray and Gray is
Speaker 4: g r a Y.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Mark Gray for the Las Vegas
Speaker 2: massacre connections. Thank you so much for this interview, and
Speaker 2: you have a great evening and good night, Thanks Dan.
Speaker 2: Thank you