A GREENOCK football boss was only hours away from being caught up in the Las Vegas shooting massacre which left 59 people dead and 500 more injured.

Shaun Dillon, the assistant manager of Greenock Juniors, was in the city through his work as an account manager with Hewlett Packard.

He and his colleagues were safely on a return flight home before the appalling carnage unfolded.

Shaun, 33, of Falcon Lane, said: “It’s shocking.

“You go there for a good time and a holiday, it’s not something you expect in Las Vegas or anywhere really.

“It’s an absolute tragedy.

“My thoughts and prayers are with all the people who are still out there and the people who have been affected by it.

“That will live with them for the rest of their lives.”

Shaun said he stayed in the Wynn Hotel further down ‘the strip’ where lone gunman Stephen Paddock went on a shooting spree from the top floor of the Mandalay Hotel.

The 64-year-old started firing at thousands of concert-goers gathered at an outdoor country music festival before killing himself.

Shaun said: “We’d been up at the area where it happened, when we went on a trip to the Grand Canyon.

“We saw the staging being built up.

“Our flight left at 3.30pm and the attack happened at 10pm, so we missed it by a few hours.

“Everyone’s mobiles started going off in my party when we landed, to make sure everyone was okay.

“There were 25 of us but another five or six had stayed on for a few days and our first thought was to get in touch with these guys to make sure they were safe.”