Las Vegas shooting a year later: ‘None of us will ever be the same’

LAS VEGAS — A flock of doves fluttered skyward at sunrise in Las Vegas yesterday, each bird bearing a leg band with the name of one of the 58 people slain in the deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s modern history one year ago.

Marking the anniversary of the night that a gunman opened fire from a high-rise casino suite on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval gathered with several hundred people at an outdoor amphitheater remembrance ceremony.

“Today we remember the unforgettable. Today, we comfort the inconsolable,” Sandoval told survivors, families of victims, first-responders and elected officials who gathered at dawn.

Among those who offered prayers, songs and speeches was Mynda Smith, whose sister Neysa Davis Tonks was killed.

Mynda Smith said her sister, who pronounced her name “Neesha,” was a 46-yearold single mother raising three boys in Las Vegas. Smith called her sister energetic, adventurous, a fan of all kinds of music and a person who danced when no one was watching. Smith started a scholarship fund for victims’ children and said she reached out to loved ones of almost all the dead.

“None of us will ever be the same,” Mynda Smith said. “We have all changed. We have all been broken. But we can find a way to pick up those pieces and glue it all back together. Yes, the cracks will be seen. But it can be whole again and we will be stronger.”