Posted on: September 30, 2024, 05:07h.
Last updated on: September 30, 2024, 05:07h.
Las Vegas officials said Monday that a permanent memorial to the victims and survivors of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history will be complete by the 10th anniversary of the Oct. 1, 2017 attack.
The announcement was made one day before the seventh anniversary of the Oct. 1 shooting, in which lone gunman Stephen Paddock shot 58 people to death from his Mandalay Bay hotel suite as they attended the Route 91 Harvest music festival beneath him. (In subsequent years, two more people died of their gunshot wounds.)
Ground will be broken on the memorial within six months, according to the Vegas Strong Fund nonprofit. It will be built on the northeastern corner of the former concert grounds then known as Las Vegas Village.
The design of the memorial, approved last September, will incorporate 58 giant candle structures, each displaying the name and photo of a murder victim. It will also feature 22,000 lights, one for each concert attendee that night. A walking path will take visitors through a garden, and past a 58-foot glass tower, to the candles.
Construction is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars, officials said. Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, has donated $1 million.
Unspeakable Loss
For more than 10 minutes beginning at 10:05 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2017, Paddock fired more than 1,000 rounds into the crowd attending the Route 91 Harvest music festival crowd from Room 32‑135 of Mandalay Bay The attack ended when Paddock, 64, killed himself with a revolver
The attack was meticulously planned. Though the mass murderer’s motive is listed by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department as unknown, last year, the FBI released a trove of documents suggesting that Paddock, a career gambler, was upset about the reduction in perks and benefits that various casinos were extending to high-rollers like him.
In 2020, MGM, which also owns Mandalay Bay, settled a class action lawsuit from 4,000 survivors and victims’ families for $800 million.
Two years later, North Dakota’s Three Affiliated Tribes purchased 13 of the 15 acres of the original Las Vegas Village festival grounds, which has sat untouched since the tragedy, for a reported $90M.
