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Todd Riley was buying beers for a group of friends who traveled with him from Denver to Las Vegas when a gun began to bark on Sunday night.

“We had a great time up until about 10,” he said on Wednesday.

In the hail of bullets that followed, the assistant principal of Century Middle School in Thornton was wounded, tried to save a life, and survived a massacre that impressed on him the human capacity for heroism.

“There were so many people that night who stood up and did the right things,” Riley said. “All the police, the firefighters, EMTs were absolutely amazing.”

Riley and Century eighth-grade teacher Mike Grapner were among a group of eight friends who planned for months to take the trip to Vegas to attend the聽Route 91 Harvest聽Festival, one of聽country music’s聽biggest events, he said.

Riley, whose leg and back were peppered with shrapnel, was the only member of the group wounded.

Shortly after he and a friend reached a vendor’s site to buy beer, they noticed people beginning to run, but they were standing below speakers, and couldn’t hear the shots.

Some in the crowd said someone was shooting, and when he stepped further from the speakers he heard “pop, pop, pop.” The shots started coming more rapidly and he ducked behind the bar.

“We were yelling for people to get down behind the bar,” he said.

He realized the shots were coming from above, where a gunman was firing from the 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, when suddenly he felt a burning sensation in his leg.

A woman fell nearby. Riley and another man, grabbed her and dragged her to shelter where they began administering CPR. “She was not responsive.”

A young man pushing a wheelbarrow ran to them and asked if they had anyone with them who was seriously injured. They loaded the woman into the wheelbarrow and ran toward a group of police cars.

“I said, ‘I think she is dead,’ and immediately police made a wall in front of us with their long guns up and got between us and the gun fire.”

Medical personnel began treating his wounds, and Riley wound up in the back of a pickup truck with another wounded woman and raced to a hospital.

As they drove, three men in an SUV, pulled ahead of them to stop traffic at intersections, he said. “They were just three guys in a car, doing the right thing, helping out the way they could.”

His friends, including Dawn Brindamour, his fiance who had escaped the carnage uninjured, met him.

Many of those in the emergency room were more seriously wounded, so in an effort to free up medical personnel to treat someone else, Riley asked if he could leave.

“I told the doctor I could get checked out when I got home.”

As he walked out, the woman whom he had given CPR was rolled by. “She was dead, and when I went out to where they were keeping the families, all I could see is shock.”

Doctors at Swedish Medical Center in Denver have examined Riley’s wounds. They found at least six bullet fragments in his thigh, hamstring, knee and calf, but decided removing them could cause more damage than leaving them in his body, Riley said.

“I’m a little sore, but I’m OK,” he said.