Photo: Courtesy Chantal Melanson and Austin Monfort
It was the last night of the2017 Route 91 Harvestfestival in Las Vegas, and Austin Monfort and Chantal Melanson were pushing toward the stage to catch a glimpse of the night’s final act,Jason Aldean.
The pair crossed paths the night before at a Vegas bar, but Chantal, 27, a prison administrator visiting from Canada, and Austin, a 22-year-old college student from California, were still trying to figure out if they were into each other.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” she recalls. “At a festival, there’s always some pyrotechnic stuff onstage.”
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Austin knew it was something more. A man standing in front of them got shot in the shoulder.
“I could see blood from the bullet hole,” he says.
Immediately, the pair dropped to the ground, but they knew they needed to run for cover if they were going to survive.
Courtesy Chantal Melanson and Austin Monfort
The chaos was overwhelming, with people fleeing in all directions, some of them getting trampled, some being shot as they ran. Chantal started to hyperventilate.
“She was understandably shocked and crying,” Austin says. “I think her freaking out a little bit helped keep me calm. I grabbed her face, and I said, ‘You’ve got to calm down, or else we’re not going to get out of here.’ And out of nowhere, I kissed her.”
A calmed Chantal followed Austin out of the fairgrounds where 58 people would die and more than 850 would be injured in the country’s deadliest mass shooting.
But for them, it was the start of a journey that took them from the darkest moment of their lives to the San Diego home they share as husband and wife with their 4-month-old daughter Addison.
“It would have been easy to focus on the negative sometimes, but if you do, it kind of drags you down,” says Austin, whose wife has documented their journey on their Instagram@tragedytolove. “There were definitely a lot of struggles we had to overcome, but it looks good now. Life couldn’t be any better.”
To read more about the Monforts' journey, pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday.
source: people.com
