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Couple who survived Las Vegas shooting killed in car crash

A California couple who survived the mass shooting in Las Vegas this month died just two weeks later in a car crash a half-mile from their home.

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Dennis and Lorraine Carver were killed when their vehicle crashed into a metal gate outside their community in Riverside County, California, on Oct. 16 and burst into flames, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The accident was so close to home that their youngest daughter heard the collision.

The Carvers were at the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest music festival on Oct. 1 when bullets fired by Stephen Paddock from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort rained down on concertgoers. Dennis Carver thought fireworks were going off at first, but once he realized that wasn’t the case, he jumped on top of Lorraine to shield her.

"That's just the kind of love they had for each other," Brooke Carver, the couple's oldest daughter, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "Their love was selfless."

The Carvers escaped the shooting uninjured. They returned to their California home two days after the attack.

“After the shooting, they heard from all of the people they cared about most. They were so happy,” Brooke Carver, 20, said. “The last two weeks of their lives were really just spent living in the moment.”

The couple’s youngest daughter, Madison Carver, 16, heard the crash Oct. 16 and ran down the street. As she rounded the corner, she saw her parents’ car in flames. Dennis, 52, and Lorraine, 53, died together.

Their daughters were grateful that their parents made it out of the massacre alive, they said, and saw amazing glimpses of love from them in the two weeks following the tragedy.

"We were so relieved when they got out of the shooting alive," Brooke told the Review-Journal. "But I also think we've been given little pieces of them that we would've never gotten if the shooting hadn't happened right before they died."

The damaged windows on the 32nd floor room that was used by the shooter in the Mandalay Hotel after a gunman killed at least 58 people and wounded more than 500 others when he opened fire on a country music concert in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 2, 2017. Police said the gunman, a 64-year-old local resident named as Stephen Paddock, had been killed after a SWAT team responded to reports of multiple gunfire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay, a hotel-casino next to the concert venue. (MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)

AFP Contributor/AFP/Getty Images