嵌套回调范围和rootScope AngularJS

I have the following controller in Angular that reads some records from DB and then outputs them into a calendar. The problem is that the events array comes back as empty. I have tried using $rootScope.events as a substitute, but that gives an error "concat is not a function of undefined." What am I doing wrong? Is there some trickery with nested scopes? I have the following controller in Angular that