Remembering Vegas shooting
People embrace Norma Felix at a prayer service Monday on the anniversary of the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting in Las Vegas. Felix attended the country music festival last year and came back to Las Vegas for the anniversary.
LAS VEGAS — A flock of doves fluttered skyward at sunrise in Las Vegas on Monday, each bird bearing a leg band with the name of one of the 58 people slain in the deadliest mass shooting in nation’s modern history one year ago.
Marking the anniversary of the night a gunman opened fire from a highrise 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, firstresponders and elected officials who gathered at dawn.
He added: “Today, we are reminded of the pain that never really goes away.”
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-year-old 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.”
Christie Kraemer, a Las Vegas real estate agent who wasn’t at the concert but knew people who were, said “I never want Oct. 1 to happen again. But I love Oct. 2 because of the way everyone came together.”
Shooting survivors Chris and Larisa Rapanick of Chesapeake, Virginia, made the trip to Las Vegas for weekend events including a 5K run, a country music club show and a reunion of survivors Saturday. At the sunrise service, they stood with their two adult daughters.
“We weren’t going to let this ruin a place we like to come to,” Chris Rapanick said. “I’m glad to be standing here.”
Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo recalled the chaos and confusion of the shooting, and the prayers to “heal broken hearts,” blood banks filled with donors and “acts of kindness that comforted the suffering” that followed.
“When the sun rose the next morning, grief turned to anger, anger turned to resolve and resolve turned to action,” Lombardo said.
Many who were cheering Jason Aldean’s headline set on at the Route 91 Harvest Festival late Oct. 1, 2017, said later they thought the rapid crack-crack-crack they heard was fireworks — until people fell dead.