“Vital to our community’s continued healing”
MGM Resorts International announced this week that it is donating two acres of land, part of the Las Vegas Village festival site, to be used as a memorial for the victims and survivors of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting. The October 1 shooting was the deadliest mass shooting perpetrated by a single individual in the history of the United States.
“Having a permanent memorial commemorating the victims and heroes of 1 October is vital to our community’s continued healing, and we are honored to donate a portion of the Village site to help bring that memorial to fruition,” MGM Resorts told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “We look forward to supporting the committee as it proceeds with planning for the memorial.”
Locals were initially invited to provide their thoughts on a memorial in a survey in March. Around 65 percent said they wanted the memorial to be at the Las Vegas Village, where the shooting occurred. Less than a fifth of respondents said they wanted it to be placed elsewhere. Of those, more than a quarter want it somewhere else because they have post traumatic stress disorder from the attack or lost a loved one and do not want to revisit the site.
A new survey, which is on Clark County’s website, asks for more input a design and education features for the memorial.
“The survey is an important step in an ongoing communitywide conversation about the best way to memorialize what occurred,” said Tennille Pereira, the chairwoman of the memorial committee and director of the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center. “We will create a lasting memorial to remember, but getting the input of those affected is key to the success of this endeavor.”
Brief rundown of the shooting
The devastating shooting nearly four years ago shocked the country and the world. 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, a regular high-stakes gambler in Las Vegas, setup shop in his 32nd floor room at MGM-operated Mandalay Bay, located across the Strip from the Las Vegas Village. Equipped with two dozen firearms, most of which were of the notorious AR-15 and AR-10 varieties, Paddock unleashed over 1,000 rounds into the crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest country music festival down below, close to 500 yards away. The entire attack lasted ten minutes.
Paddock killed 58 people that night, while two more victims passed away from injuries directly related to the shooting in 2019 and 2020, respectively. A total of 867 were injured, nearly half with gunshot or shrapnel wounds.
By the time law enforcement officers breached Paddock’s room, which he had secured, he had killed himself.
In November of 2017, a group of 450 shooting victims sued MGM for lax security that allowed Paddock to bring that many guns to his hotel suite; he toted them in suitcases with the help of hotel staff, who obviously did not know what was in the bags. MGM counter-sued, saying it was not liable. In October 2019, two years after the shooting, MGM settled with the victims for $800 million.
