Telemachus Orfanos, 27, survived the shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas in October 2017, but was among the 12 killed on Wednesday at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California.
'My son was in Las Vegas with a lot of his friends and he came home. He didn't come home last night,' said Orfanos' mother, Susan Schmidt-Orfanos, in an interview with KABC.
'And I don't want prayers, I don't want thoughts, I want gun control,' Schmidt-Orfanos said with raw emotion in her voice. 'And I hope to God nobody else sends me any more prayers. I want gun control. No more guns!'
The gunman in Thousand Oaks, ex-Marine Ian David Long, 28, turned the gun on himself after storming through the bar fatally shooting patrons, employees, and one sheriff's deputy.
Orfanos, an Eagle Scout and Navy veteran, attended the local Thousand Oaks High School and Moorepark College.
He worked at Borderline Bar, as well as at Infiniti of Thousand Oaks, where he was reportedly a concierge and product specialist in the customer relations department.
In a cruel twist of fate, the Borderline Bar was a regular gathering place and safe haven for dozens of survivors of the Las Vegas shooting, where 58 were killed at a country music festival on October 1, 2017.
On Wednesday night, some of those survivors found themselves in a terrifyingly familiar scene, when bullets began flying once again
Brendan Kelly, 22-year-old Marine, was one of them.
'I already didn't wish it on anybody to begin with for the first time,' Kelly said Thursday outside his Thousand Oaks home. 'The second time around doesn't get any easier.'
Kelly, a Marine, said he heard 'pop, pop' and instantly knew it was gunfire.
'The chills go up your spine. You don't think it's real - again,' he said.
Kelly said he threw two of his friends to the floor and covered them with his body. Then he got a look at the shooter and the terror unfolding and decided they needed to escape.
Kelly said he dragged one woman out a back emergency exit and then, using his belt, T-shirt and Marine training, applied a tourniquet to his friend's bleeding arm.
After the shooting was over, Kelly said he and another Marine friend of his helped victims alongside first responders. Two of his friends were among those killed.
Chandler Gunn, 23, told The Los Angeles Times that a friend who survived the Vegas shooting works at the bar. When Gunn learned about the shooting, he rushed to Borderline.
Gunn said his friend, whose name he didn't provide, escaped safely out the back.
'There's people that live a whole lifetime without seeing this, and then there's people that have seen it twice,' he said.
In social media posts, Molly Mauer said she was at Borderline and also survived Vegas.
'I can't believe I'm saying this again. I'm alive and home safe,' she said on Facebook.
In both Las Vegas and Thousand Oaks, country music fans were the victims.
Borderline features country music, and Wednesday was 'college night' and many young people crowded into the bar. The Last Vegas shooter targeted a crowd of country music fans gathered for the Route 91 Harvest Festival.
The Las Vegas shooter, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, used more than 20 high-powered semi-automatic rifles. Long, the California shooter, used a single Glock 21 .45-caliber semi-auto handgun. Both gunmen purchased the weapons legally.
Police said they were unable to determine a motive in the Vegas shooting. Investigators are just now probing the motives of Long, a combat veteran who neighbors said was emotionally volatile and police said may have had PTSD.
Kelly has a large tattoo on his left arm memorializing the Las Vegas shooting, which left 58 dead. On his other arm Thursday, he still had his wristband from the bar.
When the Las Vegas gunman opened fire from a 32nd-floor hotel room, Kelly said he threw a friend to the ground before helping get her out of the area and into a room.
Armed with a knife in case an attacker came in, he hunkered down and waited with 40 other people for four hours.
He said living through Vegas changed his life. He doesn't know how a second mass shooting will affect him down the road.
'Everywhere I go, everything I do is affected,' he said. 'I don't sit in a room with my back to the door. You're always picking up on social cues. You're always overanalyzing people trying to figure out if something were to go down, 'What would I do?''
Kelly said the Borderline had become a safe haven for dozens of Vegas survivors.
'It is our home,' he said.
A few weeks after the Vegas shooting, Borderline held a benefit concert for five people from the area who were killed, and now-eerie social media posts show a number of survivors holding up a 'Route 91' sign inside the bar at a six-month anniversary event.
Kelly said he'll be looking to God for comfort in the coming weeks and months.
'I know that, being a religious person, that God is never going to give me anything more than I can handle,' he said. 'I'm here for a reason.
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