Vegas shooting survivor helps spread ‘be kind’ message
Emerald Park store employee recalls ‘touching and overwhelming’ encounter
Lynette McGill is spreading the message “be kind,” after an unusual encounter with a customer at the Emerald Park store where she works.
On Monday at Bella Chic, McGill met a survivor of the Oct. 1 mass shooting in Las Vegas.
The woman did not leave her name, but she purchased two bracelets, leaving one bracelet and a message on a yellow sticky note for McGill to pass on to the next customer.
“(She said) she’s just going through a really hard time and she wants to pay it forward and do something kind,” said McGill.
“It’s been a really tough go these last couple months and she wants to do 58 random acts of kindness to pay it forward to people, and this was one of them.”
The woman chose the number 58, she wrote, “in remembrance of the 58 angels who lose their lives that night.”
McGill said their meeting was “touching and overwhelming.” They both cried.
“She said it’s very difficult to get out of house and she feels scared. … She doesn’t know why she survived and others didn’t,” said McGill, who finds the woman’s message “heartwarming.”
“Just that random act of kindness, you don’t know what people are going through, so it could change their whole day or their whole life,” said McGill. “So just be kind and pay it forward and it could really help somebody out.”
The simple friendship-style bracelets already had a positive message.
They are being sold as part of a fundraiser for a 13-year-old Emerald Park girl named Mya, who has cancer.
Bella Chic owner Michelle Strawford plans to donate $1,000 to the Saskatoon Ronald McDonald House, where Mya’s family has stayed during her treatments.
“For her to choose these bracelets, it also means more to us than she probably knows,” said McGill.
This is a positive story, said McGill, when “so many things that can be bad on social media.”