Tiffany Huizar was shot in the stomach and elbow during the Las Vegas massacre on Sunday, Oct. 1, in which 58 people were killed and hundreds injured.
She was rushed to a hospital where doctors performed a surgery to remove the bullet the next morning.
On Wednesday, Oct. 4, President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump were at Huizar’s bedside. She said she was surprised at how nice the president was—a far different picture from what she was shown on social media.
“He was super nice. He wasn’t who we see on social media,“ she said. ”He was much more comforting. I don’t know his tone of voice and the way he was.”
Huizar, 18, is from Santa Anna, California. Although she is recovering, her vitals are unstable, since she had to wait overnight for the bullet to be removed from her abdomen, according to a GoFundMe page set up to aid with her recovery.
Huizar is a senior at the Segerstorm High School. She faces a long recovery, but her family plans to be by her side along the way.
President Trump also visited other patients at the hospital and later met with law enforcement officers.
“We know that your sorrow feels endless,” Trump said at the meeting with police. “We stand together to help you carry your pain. You’re not alone. We will never leave your side.”
On Wednesday, the girlfriend of the Las Vegas gunman who killed 58 people, and then himself, in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, was questioned by the FBI and said she had no idea he was “planning violence against anyone.”
Marilou Danley, who returned late on Tuesday from a family visit to the Philippines and is regarded by investigators as a “person of interest,” said through a lawyer that the carnage Stephen Paddock unleashed while she was abroad caught her completely unaware.
“He never said anything to me or took any action that I was aware of that I understood in any way to be a warning that something horrible like this was going to happen,” Danley, 62, said in a written statement read to reporters by her attorney in Los Angeles, where the FBI was questioning her.
An FBI official in Las Vegas, meanwhile, said no one has been taken into custody.
But Clark County Sheriff Joseph Lombardo told reporters he found it hard to believe that the arsenal of weapons, ammunition, and explosives recovered by police in their investigation could have been assembled by Paddock completely on his own.
“You have to make an assumption that he had some help at some point,” Lombardo said at a news briefing. Lombardo said the attack was the obvious outcome of meticulous planning.
“What we know is that Stephen Paddock is a man who spent decades acquiring weapons and ammo and living a secret life, much of which will never be fully understood,” the sheriff said.
Nearly 500 people were also injured when Paddock, 64, strafed an outdoor country rock concert with gunfire on Sunday night from his 32nd-floor suite of the Mandalay Bay hotel on the Las Vegas Strip.
He took his own life before police stormed his room, bringing the total death toll to 59.
Police recovered nearly 50 firearms from three locations they searched, nearly half of them from the hotel suite. Twelve of the rifles there were fitted with so-called bump stocks, officials said, allowing the guns to be fired as though they were automatic weapons.
In response to a question, Lombardo said investigators were examining the possibility Paddock’s purchase of more than 30 guns in October 2016 may have been precipitated by some triggering event in his life. He did not elaborate.
If Paddock did have any accomplices, there remained no evidence as yet “to indicate terrorism” in the shooting spree, said Aaron Rouse, FBI special agent in charge of the Las Vegas field office.
Earlier in the day, President Donald Trump visited Las Vegas, marking the first time since taking office that he has had to confront a major mass shooting.
