Visitors on Labor Day view candles, flowers, posters and other memorial items left in the area surrounding a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where a shooter gunned down 22 victims on Aug. 3, 2019.
Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2019 | 2 a.m.
Almost a month later, a green fence surrounding the grounds at this border city Walmart was tacked on with stuffed animals, rosaries and signs. Dozens of religious candles and flowers lined up the ground.
The small tributes seemed to have come from many cities. “Orando for ti,” read one from DeFuniak Springs, Fla. Translated from Spanish it means, “Praying for you.”
Then, past the German, Mexican, American and Texan flags rested 22 white crosses — one for each victim of the Aug. 3 massacre. A similar display of white crosses were placed on the Strip after the mass shooting that claimed 58 lives almost two years earlier.
When the victims in the border city of El Paso, Texas, were gunned down at the neighborhood store, allegedly by a gunman who targeted Mexicans, Clark County officials reached out to the binational community just as representatives from Orlando, Fla., did after the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting on the Las Vegas Strip.
Three days after the shooting in El Paso, Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg was on a flight to Texas to help set up a family assistance center in El Paso’s downtown convention center. He was joined by Clark County Deputy Fire Chief John Steinbeck and Ryan Turner, Henderson’s division chief of emergency management and safety.
It was instrumental for El Paso officials to learn from other cities that have endured mass casualty incidents, to sift through what approaches would work for El Paso and what wouldn’t, said Laura Cruz-Acosta, El Paso’s strategic communications director.
Through a spokesman, the Clark County officials requested not to comment on their experiences in El Paso.
The assistance center in El Paso is in a transitional phase, Cruz-Acosta said. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, it was erected as a family reunification center, which was then transformed into a family assistance center.
Officials from Orlando, where 49 people were slain in 2016 by a gunman in an LGBTQ club, also lent a hand. And the lessons learned from the extensive conversations with other jurisdictions would carry on to opening a more permanent location in El Paso, which will be similar to the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center.
Cruz-Acosta described needing an assistance center as unfortunate but also crucial for families of those killed and those who survived the El Paso
onslaught who are especially emotional and vulnerable immediately after the tragedy, she said.
Among the assistance the center provided was helping arrange power of attorney for survivors whose parents were killed and “may be too young,” Cruz-Acosta said.
The center also helped people who might have left behind their paid-for supplies at Walmart when shoppers frantically scrambled. Those individuals may not have had money to replace the goods for weeks, she said.
The El Paso assistance center also offered free legal advice, contacts to victim-services resources, lodging, food and monetary assistance for medications, mortgage and utility payments. There were also representatives from the driver’s licenses division and Social Security administration for those who may have lost ID cards during the chaos.
Cruz-Acosta envisions a day when El Paso officials might be dispatched to a different community. How could she not, hours after the El Paso shooting, a gunman opened fire at a bar district Dayton, Ohio, killing nine victims? Less than a month later, about 300 miles east of El Paso, a shooter indiscriminately shot people on a Texas highway, killing seven.
Still, Cruz-Acosta struck a hopeful tone when she said that maybe someday, somehow, the collaboration between devastated communities would bring an end to the onslaught.
