Healing Las Vegas: The Las Vegas Community Healing Garden in response to the 1 October tragedy

On Sunday, October 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire from thirty-two floors above a crowd of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas Strip. The event left fifty-eight people killed, more than 860 injured, and thousands psychologically wounded. To date, this was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States in the last seventy years. Despite the chaos and terror, first responders, concert-goers, and passersby aided vic­tims and survivors. Nearby businesses, hotels, and the university provided safety and services. Medical personnel rushed to area hospitals. And as the scope of the tragedy unfolded, the people of Las Vegas flooded blood donation centers and offered food, water, comfort, and care. And they cre­ated a garden—The Las Vegas Community Healing Garden.

The story of the garden unfolds through photographs and the words of survivors, first responders, family members, medical professionals, counsel­ors, and members of the community. In only a matter of days, volunteers and local businesses transformed a vacant downtown lot into a serene urban oasis. Families and friends of those lost in the tragedy soon adopted each of the fifty-eight trees planted in honor of their loved ones, and visitors left behind colorful mementos, including painted rocks, photographs, and orna­ments, as well as words of encouragement, love, loss, and strength.

In the aftermath of 1 October, an often misunderstood city revealed its soul under the most heartbreaking of circumstances. The inspirational voices and stories from a community touched by tragedy provide comfort and encouragement. And the organic response to the unthinkable is a testa­ment to how one community came together at its darkest hour, chose hope over despair, unity over hate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781948908481

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Notes

Terminology

This book uses the term, 1 October, which the public adopted as the reference to the tragic event that cost fifty-eight lives, changed countless other lives, and became the catalyst for creating the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden.

We also use October 1, 2017, or October 1 when we refer to the date on which the event happened.

Location

The Las Vegas Community Healing Garden is located at 1015 South Casino Center Boulevard, Las Vegas, Nevada 89101, just north of the intersection at East Charleston Boulevard.

University of Nevada Press | Reno, Nevada 89557 USA

www.unpress.nevada.edu

Copyright © 2019 by University of Nevada Press

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Cover art by SquareShooting.com

Cover design by Alrica Goldstein

LET THERE BE PEACE ON EARTH

by Sy Miller and Jill Jackson

Copyright © 1955, Renewed 1983, by Jan-Lee Music (ASCAP)

All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission. International copyright secured.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2019905299

ISBN:      9781948908474 (hardcover: alk. paper)

                9781948908481 (ebook)

Manufactured in China

Healing Las Vegas

The Las Vegas Community Healing Garden in response to the 1 October tragedy

Edited by Stefani Evans and Donna McAleer

UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS

Reno & Las Vegas

Dedication

This book was inspired by the people who envisioned, built, planted, tended, decorated, visited, prayed at, and connected around a special place—the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden—honoring those who died at the 1 October shooting in 2017.

People who lost someone they loved and those who survived the event bore witness to what they experienced that day.

You did not have to be at the Route 91 Harvest Festival to be touched by the tragedy. Maybe you stayed awake for hours watching the news, aghast as the death toll climbed from two to twelve to twenty to finally fifty-eight. Or perhaps you called friends—repeatedly—until you finally heard they were home safe. And maybe you were one of the thousands who asked themselves, What can I do? or How can I help?

These memories were captured in oral histories collected in the months following the tragedy by the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries.

The Las Vegas Community Healing Garden was one response to the question, How can I help? The garden, conceived on Monday, October 2, as a sketch on the back of a napkin, was created in just a few days by a multitude of volunteers and local businesses. It was dedicated on Friday, October 6.

Working with the City of Las Vegas, the nonprofit organization Get Outdoors Nevada joined the effort and coordinated an ever-growing band of volunteers to keep the garden going by staying in touch with the families of the deceased and shepherding events held in the garden. The group also had the foresight to chronicle the garden in periodic photographs as it evolved.

This book