David Maldonado assembles a heart-shaped structure at a makeshift memorial for victims of the Oct. 1 2017, mass shooting in Las Vegas, Sunday, Sept. 30, 2018, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/John Locher)
LAS VEGAS (AP) – A year after Jann Blake and two friends survived the gunfire at a country music festival in Las Vegas, the trio returned to the city Monday to mark the 12 months that have passed since the deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s modern history.
“We need to have this. It’s not a closure ceremony, it’s more a remembrance,” Blake said at an evangelical prayer vigil. “There was a lot of good. There were people in there that helped us get out.”
Blake, of Menifee, California, along with Linda Hazelwood of Anaheim and Michelle Hamel of Yorba Linda – held hands and bowed heads at the ceremony at City Hall, one of many somber tributes marking the anniversary of the night that a gunman opened fire from a high-rise casino-resort suite on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans.
As dawn broke over the city Monday, a flock of doves were released at a ceremony, 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 Gov. Brian Sandoval gathered told several hundred survivors , families of victims, first-responders and elected officials who gathered at the dawn ceremony at an outdoor amphitheater.