‘We have all been broken’ — memorial remembers victims
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 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. “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.
Smith said her sister 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,” 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.”
Shooting survivors Chris and Larisa Rapanick of Chesapeake, Va., made the trip to Las Vegas for weekend events including a 5K run, a country music club show and a reunion of survivors on 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 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival late Oct. 1, 2017, said later they thought the rapid crack-crackcrack they heard were fireworks — until people fell dead, wounded, bleeding.
The Rapanicks heard bullets hitting a canvas awning near them as they fled and saw a shot hit a plastic cup that flipped in the air.
From across neon-lit Las Vegas Boulevard, a gamblerturned-gunman with what police later called a meticulous plan but an unknown motive fired assault-style rifles for 11 minutes from 32nd-floor windows of the Mandalay Bay hotel into the concert crowd below. Police said he then put a pistol in his mouth and killed himself.
Medical examiners later determined that all 58 deaths were from gunshots. Another 413 people were wounded, and police said at least 456 were injured fleeing the carnage.
Lombardo declared the police investigation over in August, issuing a report that said hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of investigative work could not provide answers to what made Stephen Craig Paddock, 64, unleash his hail of gunfire.
After breaking out windows, Paddock fired 1,057 shots in 11 minutes, police have said.