Jason Aldean was onstage performing when Stephen Paddock, 64, opened fire on a crowd of 22,000 people in Las Vegas on Oct. 1. The country superstar was able race off the stage and escape the chaos, but the 500+ people who were injured and more than 50 people who were left dead weren’t as lucky. This terrifying event became the largest mass killing in United States history, and, unfortunately, isn’t the first time tragedy has struck a Jason Aldean concert. Of course, nothing that has happened in the past is even close to being on the scale of the Las Vegas massacre, but there are some other very heartbreaking stories of deaths at Jason’s shows throughout the years.
In 2013, a man walked across an Indiana highway and was hit and killed by Jason’s tour bus while the singer was on-board. The driver was not found to be at fault. Then, throughout the summer of 2014, various tragic events took place during and after some of Jason’s shows. In May of that year, an unidentified man committed suicide by hanging himself with a belt in the bathroom of the Lakewood Amphitheater in Atlanta on the night Jason was performing. In July, a fan, Cory Barron, 22, disappeared from the 40-year-old’s concert at Cleveland’s Progressive Field, and his dead body was found in a nearby landfill five days later. His cause of death was undetermined, but it’s presumed that he fell down a trash chute at the baseball field. That same summer, a drunk driver hit and injured a police officer after Jason’s Connecticut concert.
Of course, Jason was devastated by all of these events, and he has been especially rocked to the core by what happened in Vegas. “I truly don’t understand why a person would want to take the life of another,” he wrote on Instagram. “Something has changed in this country and in this world lately that is scary to see. This world is becoming the kind of place I am afraid to raise my children in.” His tour is expected to continue in Los Angeles on Oct. 6.
HollywoodLifers, leave your thoughts for the victims of all these tragedies in the comments section below.