From savior to soulmate.
A California woman has fallen in love with and married the man who saved her life during the deadly October 2017 shooting at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas.
“I felt safe with him — I didn’t want to leave his side,” Chantal Melanson, 29, tells People about her instant connection to rescuer Austin Monfort during the Mandalay Bay shooting that killed 58 people and injured 800.
The two met at Gilley’s country bar 24 hours prior to the fateful day while in town for the Route 91 Harvest festival.
“I thought he was really nice, handsome and tall,” says Melanson, who initially rejected Monfort for “not wearing cowboy boots at a country bar.”
A second attempt proved successful, and the blossoming lovers danced the night away before exchanging numbers. “He was so easy to talk to, it felt like we knew each other forever,” she gushes.
The next day, tragedy struck.
Melanson and Monfort’s second date at the outdoor country festival on October 1 was cut short when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock fired shots from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel onto the 22,000 concertgoers below.
Both initially thought the sounds were fireworks, but started to panic when they realized that they were gunshots.
Feeling a responsibility for Melanson, a quick-thinking Monfort helped her take cover and then guided her through the panicking crowds and out of the concert space as bullets rained down around them.
Melanson says she remembers “laying on the ground just looking into Austin’s eyes, trying to make sense of everything. Next thing I knew, Austin was holding my hand and we were running through the entire grounds trying to make it to safety.”
They eventually escaped by getting into a taxi with a wounded concertgoer already inside, per Instagram.
After that, the shaken shooting survivors stayed by each other’s sides all night until parting ways the next morning with Monfort heading back to San Diego and Melanson to Canada.
Thankfully, the two kept in touch over the next few months as they processed the trauma. They eventually tied the knot in San Diego in March, as announced on their mutual Instagram page fittingly titled “tragedytolove.”
Unfortunately, like with many others in the time of the coronavirus, they had to put their May 8 marital festivities on ice to adhere to social-distancing precautions.
The couple is currently living together in California, sharing road trips and country concerts, and spending time in Laguna Beach (where Monfort proposed to her), according to their page on the Knot.
Melanson summed up her experience in an August 2019 Instagram post: “A weekend of what I expected to be filled with cowboy boots, country music and country boys turned into a weekend that would mark the rest of this wild journey I call life.”