Warren man hurt in Las Vegas massacre coping with help from other victims

(WJBK) - Lee Dorchak was wounded and survived the Las Vegas shooting massacre. Conspiracies have been swirling about that fateful night, so now Lee is talking about the attack and how other survivors are coping. 

"You don't realize how important it is to be able to walk until you can't," he says. That harsh realization was forced on him October 1 in Las Vegas. 

Before the shots were fired, he expected this to be just like a dozen other visits he had taken to the tourist town - an escape from every day but, this time, with a touch of country music.

Then at 10 p.m. Las Vegas time, The Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas strip violently ended. 

"When you see someone shot in front of you, it changes your thought process," Lee says. "I grabbed my best friend and I said we have to run; we have to think about our sons. And at that point, we turned and ran in the other direction. We got separated. I'm not exactly sure where.

"As I was running into the House of Blues, I felt a bullet go through my leg."

Dorchak told everyone there he was hit. He then picked up his cell phone and made a call. 

"My first phone call I made was to my mother," he says. "I called her and I let her know somebody is shooting up the venue. I don't know how bad or what's going on. I let her know I was shot. 

"At that point, I told her if I'm going to make it out of here I want one thing to be conveyed, I want you to let my son know that I love him."

An off-duty police officer grabbed him and stopped the bleeding. Lee stayed in touch with the officer along with three thousand others on a social media support group. He says members in that group get it more than anyone else. 

"It's nice to be able to talk to people that were in the moment, that felt the same terror that was going through you at the moment," he says. "Some people were wounded; some people weren't. People that passed away, their families were going through a different trauma than I'm experiencing, versus the people who weren't hurt physically at all. They are going through a different form of trauma, because they saw things that I didn't see."

Dorchak has heard the conspiracy theories; he still wants to know what happened. Why did gunman Stephen Paddock open fire on a crowd of 22,000? Lots of questions, including why anyone would hate this badly. 

"There is a hatred growing," Lee says. "The question is why. How do we solve it? Where does it start? Controlling a gun from someone is not the answer.

"You can't let the one incident stop you from doing what you want and but who you are. This is my 13th or 14th trip to Las Vegas. This one instance isn't going to keep me from going back."

Resilience and strength are hard to imagine in the aftermath of the worst shooting in the nation's modern history. 

Lee is ready to fight and step back into the life he knew before, and, one day, step back into the concert venue and hear the end of "When She Says Baby," the song that Jason Aldean was performing at the time of shooting.

FOX 2: "You're going to go to another country music concert as soon as you get better?"

"Absolutely," he said. "There's no doubt about it."