Fellowship helps Vegas survivors cope with terror

LAS VEGAS — It's been five years since carnage and death sent his family running into the night, leaving them separated and terrified as a gunman rained bullets into an outdoor country music festival crowd on the Las Vegas Strip.

The memories don't fade, they sharpen, William “Bill” Henning said as he prepared for ceremonies in Las Vegas marking the date of the Oct. 1, 2017, massacre.

“Chaotic and unreal,” he recalled. “A human stampede. People were bleeding and screaming and running. We all got separated. We didn't know who was alive. That was the most difficult.”

Henning is now part of a survivor community thousands strong, one that's helped him sort through the horror of what happened during the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 850 were injured among a crowd of 22,000.

In the years since, the grim drumbeat of mass shootings has continued: schools in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Fla.; grocery stores in Buffalo, N.Y., and Boulder, Colo.; bars in Dayton, Ohio, and Thousand Oaks (Ventura County); a city building in Virginia Beach, Va.; a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. Meanwhile, the debate over gun laws in the U.S. rages on.

The massacre is part of a horrifying uptick of shootings with especially high numbers of people killed, said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University in Boston. Five of the nine mass shootings in modern U.S. history with more than 20 people killed have taken place since 2016, starting with the Pulse nightclub in Orlando and continuing through the elementary school shooting in Uvalde.

“The severity of public mass shootings has increased in the past few years. That's clear,” Fox said. “And worrisome.”

Watching the steady stream of shootings in the U.S. is tough for survivors, said Tennille Pereira, director of a Clark County recovery and support program called the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center.

“I know when it keeps happening, people often express feelings of hopelessness,” Pereira said. “I think the big thing for Las Vegas is to be able to share with those other communities that healing does occur, and that there is hope.”

Police and the FBI spent months investigating and concluded that gunman Stephen Paddock acted alone, meticulously planned the attack and intentionally concealed his actions. He amassed an arsenal of 23 assault-style rifles in his hotel room, including 14 fitted with bump stock devices that help

the weapons fire rapidly.

Caches of weapons also were found at Paddock's homes in Reno and Mesquite, Nevada. But he killed himself before police reached him, and local and federal officials said they never identified a clear motive for the attack.

The Las Vegas survivors are working toward a permanent memorial on a corner of the former Las Vegas Strip festival ground.

John Locher / Associated Press 2017 People visit a makeshift memorial honoring the victims of the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting in Las Vegas. Fifty-eight people were killed and more than 850 were injured by a lone gunman.