Chaos broke out in Nice, France, after a truck plowed through throngs of tourists and locals celebrating Bastille Day on Thursday evening.
Scrambling for safety, the crowd dispersed and took cover in nearby restaurants and hotels. Here are accounts from some of those witnesses:
‘Bodies strewn on street’
Dominique Molina and her husband Tony saw the scene unfold from their hotel balcony, which overlooked the beachfront promenade where the attack took place. Their 14-year-old son was with them.
She said it took a few seconds to register that the truck, which she saw veer onto the street at about 25 mph “barreling people,” was intentionally mowing down the crowd.
“I grabbed my son, and i just felt like shielding him and protecting him from seeing that,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “He’s really shaken,” she said. “People should not see these types of things.”
She said heard the “banging sounds” the truck made as it ran over the crowd from the balcony. After the gun fire, she heard shrieking and began to see flocks of people run frantically among fallen bodies.
“Within a few moments of the gun fire everything went very quiet, very eerily quiet and then you started hearing wailing and screaming and crying,” she told Anderson Cooper.
Her husband Tony said they saw at least 10 dead bodies, strewn on the street.
“These bodies kind of sat. It was sad, because there were families just laying down, crying next to these bodies,” he said.
“Then they had to clear the area out. The bodies sat there covered up.”
Video shot by Dominique Molina and posted to Twitter shows the aftermath of the attack.
‘We had to run for our lives’
Paul Delane had just finished watching the fireworks for the Bastille Day celebrations — France’s equivalent to July 4 — when thousands of people started running in his direction.
“My partner took my hand immediately and we started running with everybody and honestly in my head I had no idea what was going on and the music was so loud.”
Though he didn’t see the truck, Delane did see “people running and screaming and crying and people carrying their children, and it was just very frightening.”
“We all just knew that we had to run for our lives. Well, that’s basically what happened,” he told CNN
Taking refuge
Others took shelter at a nearby restaurants.
“We were eating and a huge crowd ran into us and we didn’t know what was going on,” said Maryam Violet.
“I walked to the beginning and saw a lot of people around their families, a lot of single dead bodies with no one around them,” Violet said.
Eric Dartell was able to escape:
“You can see wreckage all along the way, a body, bicycles, street lamps and debris everywhere,” he told CNN.
Fireworks, gunshots, and shrieking
Zeynep Akar also watched from her balcony at home as the horrific scene unfolded. She had stepped outside to watch the fireworks.
“I suddenly heard the crash and people shouting,” Akar told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “There were so many people on the ground.”
When she heard gunshots, she ran inside her house and switched off the lights.
Brenden Phillips, a Georgia Tech student studying abroad in France, was in Nice for the four-day Bastille Day weekend festivities.
Five to ten minutes after the fireworks ended, police cars rushed past him and an influx of people began running in his direction on the Promenade.
An officer was directing people, repeatedly shouting “Go quickly! Go that way!” in French, Phillips said.
‘Accelerated over bodies’
An American witness said he was standing 15 feet away as the long, white truck drove into the crowd “mowing bodies over.” He said it accelerated as it hit the bodies.
“It seemed like an accident at first, but became apparent very quickly that it was deliberate,” he told CNN.
