A look at the Community Healing Garden in Downtown Las Vegas, Monday, June 22, 2020. The garden was created to honor those killed in the Route 91 Harvest Festival mass shooting that happened on Oct. 1, 2017.
Wednesday, June 24, 2020 | 2 a.m.
Eddie Schmitz considers the Community Healing Garden — a memorial for the Oct. 1 Las Vegas Strip shooting victims — a sacred place, kind of a “church without walls.”
That’s why Schmitz said he’s been incensed to see it desecrated by homeless people showering in the fountain, broken lights, and hypodermic syringes and human feces scattered about.
“If you had any idea of the condition that garden is in today, you’d be outraged,” Schmitz, a Healing Garden volunteer, said at a recent Las Vegas City Council meeting.
After the June 17 meeting, Schmitz and Sue Ann Cornwell, a member of the Healing Garden board, met with city officials Monday to try to get the memorial cleaned up.
“This meeting was something we needed to do to have everybody on the same page, and I think we accomplished that today,” Cornwell said. “I just have to give them the opportunity to do what they said they’re going to do now.”
Police have already stepped up monitoring the garden, and the city agreed to fulfill the group’s maintenance requests, Cornwell said.
City spokesman Jace Radke said the meeting “went well, and they pointed out a couple of other minor maintenance issues, such as some loose tiles that we will be working on.”
The garden, 1015 S. Casino Center Boulevard, is a grassroots community project to commemorate the 58 people killed and more than 800 injured when a gunman opened fire from a Strip hotel tower on a country music festival below. It was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
The garden, which the city notes was sketched out on a napkin and built in just four days, includes a wall of remembrance, a grove of trees, shrubs, flowers, walkways and benches.
“The Healing Garden is a place of peace and reflection for our community. It is a place that is precious and beyond meaningful to us all,” Mayor Carolyn Goodman said.
Cornwell, a survivor of the shooting, said one of the victims died in her truck on the way to the hospital. “I’m emotionally invested,” she said.
For oversight of the Healing Garden, the city partners with Get Outdoors Nevada, a nonprofit that connects people with nature. The group oversees volunteer work at the garden.
“Our focus is connecting people to outdoor experiences, and the Healing Garden for us was emblematic of the way the outdoors, even a small slice of the outdoors in the middle of an urban center, can help heal,” said Mauricia Baca, executive director of Get Outdoors Nevada.
Tennille Pereira, Director of the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center, poses for a photo at the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden, Tuesday, June 23, 2020.
By the first anniversary of the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting, the group helped raise enough money to replace the remembrance wall, which was originally made of wooden pallets. The new one is built of steel and includes a water feature and angel wings.
Tennille Pereira, director of Vegas Strong Resiliency Center, an agency providing services to Oct. 1 victims’ families and survivors, said the 1 October Memorial Committee is planning a separate, more durable tribute.
The project is in the planning stages and will take years to bring to fruition, she said.
“It’s really hard for people to heal and move forward if they don’t feel validated,” Pereira said. “If the community forgets and doesn’t set up things like healing gardens or anniversary remembrance events ... then they feel very isolated, very alone, and healing is going to be much more difficult.”
