NEW ORLEANS- The soft jazz music at Louis Armstrong International Airport is a stark, but comforting difference from the sounds Holly and Tracy Pitre have been surrounded by for the past 24 hours.
"You can't even comprehend it. It was horrific," said Tracy Pitre, "The gunshots, it wouldn't stop. It was like it was following us."
The couple from Houma have been in Las Vegas all weekend for a large, multi-day country music festival. They spent most of Sunday close to the stage, but say divine intervention led them to the back of the crowd near the exit gates for the final performance of the night- Jason Aldean.
"Then all of a sudden I knew something wasn't right. Just from things you see on TV," said Holly Pitre. "You knew it was an automatic rifle. It just kept going off. It would not stop."
The Pitres say they were some of the first out of the venue, but quickly encountered an eight-foot security fence. They, along with dozens of others, had to climb it in order to escape the bullets raining down on the crowd.
The couple eventually made it to the airport to wait out the chaos. However even then, they felt far from safe.
"We ran into some people that were at the concert that actually ran to the airport," said Pitre. "They had people jumping barbed wire around the airport. Lost their shoes, lost their cell phones just trying to get out of there."
Now that they are safe back home in the New Orleans area. The Pitres say they're beyond blessed to be unharmed and are anxious to put the terrifying experience behind them.
"We're just so thankful to be alive," they said.
The couple, who has four children, says in the wake of the massacre, they're unsure if they'll attend large crowd events in the future.