Las Vegas shooting victim: Lisa Patterson, Lomita, California
Lisa Patterson and two friends bought tickets for the Route 91 Harvest Festival six months before the concert.
She was considering coming home to California early from the three-day festival, said her husband Robert, because the couple have three kids and a house to run.
But he was adamant: Don’t come home, he told her, I’ve got this.
“The last thing I ever thought was that something like this would happen,” he told the Review-Journal Friday.
Patterson was killed Sunday in the mass shooting on the Las Vegas Strip — an attack that sent her husband and her two oldest children scrambling to Vegas to look for her.
“She had called me about an hour before to tell me how much of a great time she was having,” Patterson said. “Then somebody called me on the phone shortly after 10 o’clock, saying I needed to text my wife immediately, that something had happened. I immediately sent a text and got nothing back, so I started dialing and texting and calling.”
A funeral service will be held at St. John Fisher Catholic Church on Oct. 13 — the day after what would have been the couple’s 21st anniversary.
“I’d have probably took her to a wonderful dinner and just spent time with her. Even though we spent a lot of time together, we didn’t have a lot of alone time,” Patterson said. “I loved my wife so much, she was everything to me. And the last thing I ever thought was that she would be gone at this age.”
Patterson, 46, lived in Lomita and was active in everything — coaching softball teams and serving as president of the parent-teacher association. She volunteered at her children’s St. John Fisher School almost weekly, her husband said.
The couple ran a hardwood floor business together — one that Lisa took charge of from the very beginning.
“My goal when I opened my company was to give my wife full rein to do whatever she wanted, which was bring up my kids the way that they should be brought up,” Patterson said.
In building their life together, their family came first — and he wanted the time for both of them to be able to spend with their children.
California resident Dennis Kim, who said he graduated from Torrance High School with Robert Patterson, said Lisa brightened Robert’s life and described the Pattersons as the “picture-perfect family.”
“They both are just the perfect parents that anybody can ask for,” Kim said.
“Bob is very well known, they both are, for their craftsmanship and quality of work — which is going to really kind of suffer now, because Lisa won’t be there to handle all the administrative bookkeeping,” he said.
A GoFundMe page for Lisa Patterson had raised over $80,000 as of Friday night.
“Lisa had an infectious energy and fierce love for her family, and we are beyond heartbroken for Bob and their three kids,” friend Andy Tamilin wrote on the GoFundMe page. He said Patterson and her husband “spent endless hours donating their time and energy to help the girls of our community.”
Contact Amelia Pak-Harvey at apak-harvey@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4630. Follow @AmeliaPakHarvey on Twitter.
