Mass shooting survivors’ memories are full of sensory detail, both positive and negative

It was perhaps fitting, in a twisted, only-in-America way.

On the day William B. Ridgway and his University of Nevada, Las Vegas colleagues met to analyze narratives written by mass shooting survivors, a gunman killed three faculty members in the building next door.

“It’s definitely something where you realize that you’re not really outside of it, [meaning] the frequency and rates of mass shootings in this country,” Ridgway said.

Since the 1960s, mass shootings have steadily increased in the United States, with more than 500 to date and nearly 1,800 fatalities at the time of publication (Schildkraut and Elsass, 2026). Ridgway, now an operational psychologist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was interested in what survivors remember from these traumatic events and what themes emerge. Most of what’s known about memory under times of extreme stress comes from lab studies, which can’t ethically produce real terror, or clinical samples that study memory in the context of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Neither really tells you what a person’s mind actually does in that time that they feel that they’re going to die,” said Ridgway.

The analysis—postponed until the next day, given the circumstances—was of the memories of 42 survivors of the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting in Las Vegas. On October 1, 2017, a man shot into a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers from a top floor of a casino, killing 60 people and injuring over 800, making it the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. For the study, published in 2026 in Psychological Science, survivors completed a survey within one month of the shooting that asked them to recount their emotions and experiences.

“No story was the same. Some people’s memories were organized around escape routes, some were around a wounded stranger, some around the thought of their children learning how they died,” said Ridgway. “You have the same event, the same 10 minutes, but very different interiors.”

To see what similarities did emerge, a subset of 10 narratives was analyzed to create codes for the details subjects included; those codes were then applied to the remaining narratives. Four main themes emerged. Contextual memory was the most common theme, with sensory-perceptual and spatial details present in nearly all narratives and temporal distortion appearing in many. Physical injury, either to themselves or others, was referenced by nearly all survivors, while acts of heroism (their own or others’) and contemplating mortality were present in about half of the narratives. The findings suggest that survivors’ memories were not globally impaired but shaped in selective and patterned ways.

Ridgway was most surprised by the latter themes that speak to the human element.

“You would probably typically expect [the narratives] to be solely about threat and what comes with that: sensory detail and escape routes,” he said. “But the survivors recalled compassion with the same precision as they did the gunfire.”

Survivors wrote about lying on a wounded man to prevent him from getting shot again, using a belt to tourniquet someone’s arm, or holding a stranger’s hand and talking like old friends to deal with the shock. These memories were recalled vividly, with sensory and spatial detail and emotional weight.

“The compassion wasn’t necessarily an afterthought to the terror that was being experienced. It was encoded with the terror at the same intensity,” said Ridgway.

Jaclyn Schildkraut, the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, noticed similar sensory details in her interviews with mass shooting survivors. For example, the smell of Chinese food from the cafeteria on the day of the Columbine High School shooting was so salient in survivors’ minds the school had to stop serving it.

“The level of detail, it’s almost like this moment in time that’s frozen in such high definition,” said Schildkraut.

She’s also heard stories of heroism. A Columbine survivor talked about how she and 60 others trapped in a choir office took turns lifting each other into the ceiling to get fresh air.

“They worked together to keep each other safe,” she said. “There are so many moments of altruism that we don’t often think about.”

That altruism should be extended to the greater community. Schildkraut warned that the onslaught of media attention following these tragedies often dries up suddenly, and communities are left struggling to find a path forward. She advocates for continued public support, opportunities for survivors to connect with each other, and acknowledgment that everyone takes their own time to grieve.

“You can’t tell them to get over it, and it’s not our place to do that,” she said. “Our place is to be supportive, always.”

Ridgway’s paper provides hope for that support.

“These narratives highlight the willingness to reach out to loved ones, to aid people while risking their own life,” he said. “It highlights that community, that resiliency and that unity.”

References

Ridgway, W. B., Mohawk, K. D., Soriano Smith, R. N., Liboro, R. M., Morgan, C. A., III, Benning, S. D., & Parks, C. M. (2026). What survivors remembered: Cognitive and experiential themes in trauma narratives from the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. Psychological Science, 0(0).

Schildkraut, J., & Elsass, H. J. (2026). Mass shooting factsheet. Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, Rockefeller Institute of Government.