MILL VALLEY (KRON) — A Mill Valley couple was in Paris last Friday when the terrorist attacks were going on.
They returned home Monday and shared their experience. Susan and Rick West were in Paris to celebrate their daughter’s birthday.
Everything was wonderful — the weather was nice, and they said they were having dinner across town when the attacks happened.
And information started slowly coming in on everyone’s phones, they said.
“Our waitress though was gone, and she came back and she said her boyfriend was a waiter over in the area. He was in the restaurant. He was working,” Susan said. “They were down on the floor. and there was a lot of shots.”
They said they made their way back to their hotel and knew something had happened, but they did not know the extent of the carnage.
“We went to bed…more information was coming,” Susan said. “We knew they stormed the music hall.”
“We were hearing like 20 deaths,” Rick said.
“So, when we woke up in the next morning, we had heard the borders had been closed, state of emergency,” Susan said. “We heard about the numbers. We heard all of the…terrorists had been killed. Everything was closed.”
Rick and Susan said they made it out of their hotel on Saturday to walk around.
And they said the experience was surreal, with soldiers on every corner.
“The Eiffel Tower had a couple of guys with machine guns…but they were just regular patrols but these were like much greater,” Rick said. “There (was) triple that number of people out there afterwards.”
“It was a little chilling, really, to walk down the street,” Susan said. “We walked past one government building, and they were just apart.”
Rick and Susan said security was high at the airport in Paris, as well as JFK Airport when they landed.