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The EDM festival Beyond Wonderland marked a number of firsts for Val Flores. The 22-year-old had been to raves before, but nothing of this scale. Scheduled to take place at Washington’s Gorge Amphitheatre on June 17 and 18, the event was her first full-blown weekend-festival outing. Artists including Dillon Francis, Kx5, Sub Focus, and Marshmello were scheduled to perform over the two days. But the event’s second day was canceled after a tragic incident took place, which marked another first for Flores: her first time being caught in a mass shooting.
“We didn’t know what we were going into. One of our friends went with us and he’s been raving for years. He’s been to tons of festivals, so we knew we were safe with him,” Flores, who attended the festival with her girlfriend, Lily Heller, tells Rolling Stone. “But when all of this happened, he was down in the amphitheater.” At around 8:23 p.m. PDT on Saturday, in the campground area outside of the venue, 26-year-old James M. Kelly — an active-duty member of the U.S. Army — allegedly opened fire. Two people were killed and three more were injured. Inside the festival, about 20 to 30 minutes away from the campground, the night raged on, with attendees oblivious to the shooting. Outside, where attendees pitched tents beside rows of cars, festivalgoers in the area crouched down and dodged bullets in hopes of making it out alive.
Police allege that a different Lily — 20-year-old Lily Luksich — attended the concert with Kelly and sustained two gunshot wounds to her lower body from him. Flores says she heard the gunman’s rage before she saw the danger, claiming she heard Kelly yell to Luksich, “Lily, get the fuck back, I want you back here.” The screaming rattled Flores and Heller, in their tent, enough to be on high alert. Still, being familiar with the rave scene, they wondered if he was just on some serious drugs. Even when a woman screamed “Run, he has a gun,” for a split moment they thought it might be a water gun. “I don’t know, it’s not something we would just think first thing at a rave,” Flores explains.
At 22, Flores is part of a generation for whom mass shootings and the persistent threat of encountering one is standard. Schools hold active-shooter scenarios as frequently as fire drills. Even the Beyond Wonderland shooting itself was one of nine incidents classified as mass shootings to occur in the country that day alone, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Some of the others left more people injured, but this one left the most dead.
And yet despite the frequency of these occurrences, Flores felt wholly unprepared. “Surprisingly enough, once you’re there, you forget everything [you learned]. Wherever you feel it coming from, you crouch and move. You just try to escape, or run the other way,” she explains. “We were crouching and getting into my car. That’s when we felt the bullets going right past us and we heard them right next to us.”
Another couple sought refuge in the car with them, including 27-year-old Ben Hazard, who urged everyone to run to a checkpoint away from the gunfire, where they would be safer. Minutes before the shooting began, Hazard and his girlfriend were changing clothes on the canopy-covered air mattress in the back of his pickup truck, where they had been camping. Like Flores, he assumed the first sound of gunfire was something else — it must be fireworks, he thought — until he heard screaming.
“He was just screaming, and then he’s also mumbling and kind of ranting to himself, like laughing to himself the entire time,” Hazard tells Rolling Stone of Kelly. He recalled hearing the shooter declare, “Lily, this is it. They’re coming for us.” (According to court documents obtained by Oregon Live when Kelly was arraigned on Wednesday, the alleged shooter told police that he was hallucinating on mushrooms and believed the world was going to end.)
Kelly made enough noise between his gunfire and screaming, Hazard says, for he and his girlfriend to pinpoint his general location. “I peeked over the top of the back of my canopy, but the back windows were tinted, so I thought I’d be OK,” he explains. “He was about 20 feet from us. I could see that he had a girl, you know, I’m pretty sure he had her in a headlock underneath his arm and the gun in his other hand.”
Beyond Wonderland marked Hazard’s first EDM festival as well, but it wasn’t his first run-in with a gun scare. At age 16, a burglar entered his home and robbed his father at gunpoint. Shortly after, Hazard began collecting firearms himself and training for self-defense. He never assumed he would need a weapon at a concert — “Who brings a gun to a music festival?” Hazard says — and when he saw the shooter standing a few feet away, he couldn’t understand why anyone else would.
It wouldn’t have been hard, though, to sneak a firearm in, he claims. “The security was so pointless,” Hazard says. “People were kind of cracking jokes after the fact, [about security asking], ‘Do you have anything?’ And they listed off a list of substances, and people were like, ‘No, I don’t,’ knowing full well they had basically all of that in their car.” (Festival organizers did not immediately reply to a request for comment.) The cars entering the festival did go through security checkpoints, with officers surveying vehicles with search dogs, according to Hazard and Flores. From Flores’ perspective, none of the cars were actually opened or thoroughly searched, even in one instance when a dog started barking at a man playing with a ball.
“There’s no way a dog is going to be able to smell an unfired gun buried under three feet of fabric, it’s just not going to happen,” Hazard says. “A short time after it happened, when I was talking to the cops and I was talking to event staff, they’re like, ‘Oh, the dogs are usually so good about this.’ I’m just like, ‘Give me a break, dude. Don’t act like that did anything.’” (A spokesperson for the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
It also remains unclear if Kelly drove directly onto the festival grounds or if he came in through an unauthorized entrance. Steve Adelman, an attorney focused on litigation and risk management, and the vice president of the Event Safety Alliance, says there may not have been a quick way to have prevented the shooting. “I don’t want to be alarmist in saying this, but there isn’t any easy solution beyond thoroughly checking every car that would come into the campgrounds,” Adelman tells Rolling Stone, positioning the situation as more of a gun-control issue than as a security issue.
“And cars have lots of nooks and crannies and storage spaces, and people bring coolers, bins, towels, and blankets. Everything would need to be checked through,” he adds. “It is possible, but with thousands of cars, that would be particularly time-consuming. I don’t think that’s what the fans want. It’s not what the festivals want either.”
Beyond Wonderland’s organizers didn’t inform attendees that there had been a shooting in the first place — the social media posts they shared only described a vague “incident that has been handled by local authorities.” “Many have questioned why the festival continued during and after the incident,” Pasquale Rotella, founder and CEO of the festival’s producer, Insomniac Events, shared in a statement. “We made the decision to keep the festival open at the request of law enforcement once it became evident that there was no ongoing threat to the safety of attendees. This was also done to ensure the majority of attendees stayed away from the campground area where the incident took place.”
The shooting took place at the farthest campsite from the amphitheater, so the communication blast sent out to attendees via social media urged them to “please avoid the Gorge Gate H campgrounds area,” and announced the closure of that particular camp. Still shaken up but assured by police that the shooter had been “dealt with,” Flores and her girlfriend returned to the festival. “At that point, we thought either they shot him or he shot himself,” she explains. “They never told us that anyone actually died. They told us that we could leave.”
It wasn’t until they returned to the campsite at around 2 a.m., following the conclusion of the festival, that they learned of the two fatalities. “We stood up all night. We ended up leaving at like seven in the morning just because we were staying feet away from where someone passed,” Flores says. “We couldn’t. It just didn’t feel right.” Hazard’s car, meanwhile, had been blocked off as part of the crime scene. He couldn’t leave, but staying meant trying to sleep and getting only 30 minutes between sudden night terrors and the flinch-inducing sound of car doors being slammed by other attendees.
Some of those who stayed after the event ended kept the party going, playing music from their car speakers well into the early morning, perhaps to make up for the second day being canceled. “I guess they had a completely different perspective,” Flores says. “They never heard anything. They never saw anything. They were still partying, and I get it, but we just — I’m still shaking.” She can still hear the gunfire. When her girlfriend left for work on Tuesday morning, Flores cried and wondered, “What if it happens again?” They both intend to take a step back from raving for a while as they come to terms with the violation of what once felt like a safe space.
“I don’t want to throw flowers at ourselves or anything, but we truly are people of love, and we go there to share that love and to visualize all those emotions with people. You just connect,” Flores says. “You go to raves to meet your friends and family that you haven’t met before. And it was heartbreaking seeing all that chaos and all that violence when so many people feel safe.… We can’t feel safe even in our own creative spot for this, you know?”
Rotella, who has been organizing events through Insomnia for three decades, echoed these sentiments in his statement, writing: “I hold a profound love for our community and deeply value the principles that define our culture. This incident stands in stark contrast to everything we stand for — it goes against the spirit of love, unity and respect we strive to foster within our community.”
The five victims of Kelly’s attack ranged in age from 20 to 61. The two individuals killed in the shooting, 29-year-old Brandy Escamilla and 26-year-old Josilyn Ruiz, were both fatally shot while walking through the campground where the incident took place. When day broke on Sunday, as some ravers came down from their highs and others caught up on the tragic events of the prior night, their communal spirit raged on. Attendees shared blankets, clothes, and welcomed people into their tents. Some exchanged contact information in case they needed someone to lean on even after they’ve parted ways — Hazard, for example, is saved in Flores’ phone as: “Ben Trauma Friend Hazard.” What else do you call someone who you cracked jokes with as a humorous coping mechanism while fearing for your lives in a huddle behind a car?
“There’s a large group of people there who stayed just to look out for one another. It’s hard to vilify people who stayed — yeah, people still did stay and party a bit, but they stayed to try to be a community and be there for each other,” Hazard explains, emphasizing that the only outlet that will help more than the community in the aftermath of the shooting is therapy. “I’m not OK, but the only reason I’m doing as good as I am is because I had complete strangers take care of me in a way that I didn’t think they would.”
