‘Pain that never really goes away’ for families, survivors a year after Las Vegas shooting
LAS VEGAS—A year after Jann Blake and two friends survived the gunfire at a country music festival in Las Vegas, the trio returned to the city Monday to mark the 12 months that have passed since the deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s modern history.
“We need to have this. It’s not a closure ceremony, it’s more a remembrance,” Blake said at an evangelical prayer vigil. “There was a lot of good. There were people in there that helped us get out.”
Blake, of Menifee, Calif., along with Linda Hazelwood of Anaheim and Michelle Hamel of Yorba Linda, held hands and bowed heads at the ceremony at City Hall, one of many somber tributes marking the anniversary of the night that a gunman opened fire from a high-rise casino-resort suite on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans.
As dawn broke over the city Monday, a flock of doves were released at a ceremony, with each bird bearing a leg band with the name of one of the 58 people slain.
“Today we remember the unforgettable. Today, we comfort the inconsolable,” Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval gathered told several hundred survivors , families of victims, first-responders and elected officials who gathered at the dawn ceremony at an outdoor amphitheater.
He added: “Today, we are reminded of the pain that never really goes away.”
The sunrise ceremony kicked off a day of memorials, prayer services, blood drives and dedications to commemorate the lives lost in the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting. The giant casino marquees were set to go dark in unison Monday night with the names of the victims to be read shortly after.
The festival venue that became a killing ground has not been used in the year since the shooting.
MGM Resorts International, the owner of the property and Mandalay Bay hotel, has not said if or when it will reopen.
Company officials redirected curious people on Monday to a nearby Catholic church that offered a spot for “quiet reflection.”
They also reminded people about an evening dedication scheduled at the downtown Las Vegas Healing Garden, which became a memorial for victims of the shooting.
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.