LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Three days after a gunman opened fire at a Las Vegas Athletic Club on Rainbow near Lake Mead, gym-goers filed back in for their morning workouts to start the week as the location reopened.
For some, it was difficult being inside the building so soon after the shooting.
“It made me sick,” Matt Devasthali told FOX5 in the gym’s parking lot. “I had to run outside, and I’m still trying to catch my breath because the feeling’s not the same.”
Devasthali ended his workout early.
“There’s a bad vibe,” he said. “There’s an energy that makes me unable to breathe.”
Others told FOX5 they felt it, too.
“Very quiet. Eerily quiet,” Keith Schipper described. “The music felt louder than usual because you didn’t hear all the weight clanking or the people talking. It was certainly unusual.”
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Some LVAC members have found a way to compartmentalize last Friday’s shooting.
“It’s just an incident that occurred – isolated, and I don’t feel like it has anything to do with the gym,” one member said. “You can’t control people. You can’t control guns. There are a lot of things going on nowadays in the world.”
Most who talked with FOX5 outside the gym, though, felt Friday’s events weighing on their morning workouts.
“It is jarring,” Schipper said.
“I couldn’t even focus on the music,” Devasthali recalled. “You just feel a presence in there and I can’t get back right now. We have got to shake this feeling, get this energy out of this room.”
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