The marquees on the glimmering Las Vegas Strip on Monday night dimmed their lights for three minutes as officials slowly read the 58 names of the people killed a year earlier in the deadliest mass shooting in the modern history of the US.
The names of the slain were recited before a silent crowd punctuated by sobs shortly after 10:05pm, nearly the exact time 12 months earlier that a gunman in a tower suite at the Mandalay Bay casino-resort opened fire on the crowd of 22,000.
Rick Barnette, whose 34-year-old daughter Carrie was one of those killed, sobbed and looked at the sky as the names were read. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of his daughter on it.
Photo: AFP
“It’s really hard. Every night, when I go to bed, I think about her. Every day,” Rick Barnette said after the ceremony. “They say you get over it. I don’t think you can get over it.”
The ceremony ended a somber day of events reuniting survivors and the family members of those killed at last year’s music festival.
Jane Matusz of San Diego, who had attended the festival with friends, said memories of the Oct. 1 shooting returned as she attended memorial events in Las Vegas.
“There is something very comforting about being with other survivors [and] family members,” she said. “It’s a very strange club to be a part of.”
Hours earlier, victims’ families, survivors and elected officials marked the anniversary of the tragedy by placing roses on a tribute wall and dedicating a downtown memorial garden.
The dedication ceremony under a cloud-streaked orange sunset drew at least 200 people, including former US representative Gabby Giffords, herself a survivor of a 2011 mass shooting.
The garden, which features a tree for each of the 58 victims and an oak that represents life, is the only permanent public space that has been created as a memorial to the shooting.
It was built by volunteers and created days after the shooting as the community’s way of reacting to the searing violence, the project’s cocreator said.
“We’ve pushed back with a very deliberate act of compassion,” Jay Pleggenkuhle said.
The city known for its gambling and entertainment started the tributes with a sunrise ceremony where a flock of doves were released, 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 Governor Brian Sandoval told hundreds of survivors, families of victims, first-responders and elected officials who gathered at the dawn ceremony at an outdoor amphitheater. “Today, we are reminded of the pain that never really goes away.”
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, has not said if or when it would reopen.
On Monday night, hundreds of survivors of the shooting formed a human chain around the shuttered site, linking arms and hands to show solidarity. Nearby, a procession of pickup trucks with US flags flying from their truck beds drove the Strip while honking their horns.
Many who were cheering Jason Aldean’s headline set on at the Route 91 Harvest Festival said later that they thought the rapid crack-crack-crack they heard was fireworks — until people fell dead, wounded, bleeding.
From across Las Vegas Boulevard, a gambler-turned-gunman with what police later called a meticulous plan, but an unknown reason, fired assault-style rifles for 11 minutes from 32nd-floor windows of the Mandalay Bay into the concert crowd below.
Police said he then 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.
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