Pall dims glitz as deadly rampage stuns Sin City’s hardy residents.
LAS VEGAS — It may be Sin City, but nobody in Las Vegas — certainly not anyone at the country music festival that became a killing field Sunday — truly anticipated evil on such a massive scale.
The gunman who opened fire from a hotel window, killing crowds of concertgoers and wounding hundreds of others, probably won’t stop the hedonistic fun that defines Vegas. But experts say it has deepened the wounds already festering in America’s psyche.
“Unfortunately, it is another reminder to folks that no one is immune to violence,” said Tanya Sharpe, an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and an expert on mass shootings. “Usually when these things happen, my phone rings off the hook and people say I didn’t think it could happen ‘here.’ Now people are saying it can happen here.”
Las Vegas, a glittery desert town of 630,000, is now the site of the most deadly mass shooting in modern American history, surpassing the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were massacred.
A quiet pall prevailed on the famed Vegas Strip all day Monday, eerie for a place that usually hums and rattles with excitement and frivolity.
As night fell, prayer vigils were held throughout the city. Grief-stricken relatives of the victims gathered at the Las Vegas Convention Center, about 2½ miles north of the Strip, where social workers outside checked names on a list of the dead and wounded.
It was a somber scene inside, with dozens of people sitting around circular tables, some hugging each other, others wiping away tears as counselors and Red Cross volunteers consoled them. Others were beyond crying, sitting alone near long tables of food and refreshments, staring at the ground in stunned silence.
Local residents began arriving at the center Monday night to offer support and services. One of them was Kurt Richter, who volunteered his two large therapy dogs, Jake and Donner, for those who might glean comfort from pets and cuddles.
“It’s shocking and unbelievable,” Richter said. “It’s one of those unfathomable things you can’t imagine, so I’m doing whatever I can to help.”
The bloody rampage shocked the world and shattered the sense of remove felt by most of the concertgoers — and, in fact, by most people from the Bay Area and all over America who flock to Sin City for its charms ranging from gambling and legal sleaze to kiddie-friendly roller coasters.
At least half of those who attended the concert lived in Las Vegas, yet most of them viewed the Strip as an oddity — a Wild West evocation of gaming and glamour — compared with their desert-tough Nevada lifestyles.
But there was always a sliver of fear in the back of their minds that things just might go sideways someday, several locals said.
“This day is going to change this city. It’s unbelievable,” said Beatriz Mata, 19, who lives in Vegas and works as a saleswoman. “We’re used to seeing it in other places, but now it’s happened in our town.”
Mata wasn’t at the concert, but she came to the edge of the shooting scene Monday afternoon with friends to leave a bouquet of flowers and a bundle of heartshaped balloons at a small but growing memorial site.
“We’re in shock,” said Samuel Silva, 19, standing alongside his friend Mata. “We don’t feel safe anywhere anymore.”
Several hundred yards away, across the eight-lane Las Vegas Boulevard and high up on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, the broken windows the killer fired through Sunday night gaped like missing teeth.
Steve Byrne, a partner in a real estate finance company, missed the shooting while he was in Santa Rosa for a bicycle race; when he flew home Monday to Vegas he spent the day calming relatives and friends of the dead and wounded.
“It’s awful. I don’t know any other word for it,” Byrne said from his office. “It’s a great town with great people. We didn’t think something like this could happen here.”
Earlier Monday, gamblers and other tourists slowly filtered out of the towering, opulent hotels — where they’d been locked down Sunday night during and after the rampage — and they looked tired, upset and bewildered.
Entertainment workers believe that if any city can overcome that legacy, this one can do it. But not without some hard work.
“This is the entertainment capital of the world, so something like this will make people not only think twice, but a few more times, about attending an event here,” said Shaun Guerrero, owner of Status Las Vegas, a VIP concierge service. “Obviously people are going to come here anyway, but this shooting will affect the feeling of freedom, and it’s going to affect my business and my family.”
People might feel more empowered, said Sharpe, the University of Maryland expert, if the federal government put in place tighter safety precautions for venues, better health care for the mentally ill and more restrictions on high-powered weapons.
“When you don’t have any of those three things,” she said, “you have a cocktail for disaster.”