Clark County officials on Monday unveiled a fundraising campaign to build a permanent memorial honoring the victims of the 1 October shooting, seven years after the Las Vegas Strip became the site of the largest mass shooting in American history.
Officials hope they will raise the tens of millions of dollars necessary within the next three years, with the goal of opening the memorial 10 years after the shooting occurred. The nonprofit leading the fundraising — Vegas Strong Fund, which formed in the wake of the shooting to support victims — will seek state and federal grants and donations from the public.
“It was the community that was impacted, and showing that they have a hand in building this permanent memorial, I think is really important to the authenticity and the integrity of the project,” said Jan Jones Blackhurst, the former Las Vegas mayor now serving as chair of the board of directors for Vegas Strong.
The fundraising blitz is the latest development in the city’s efforts to memorialize the victims of the 1 October shooting, which caused 60 deaths and injured more than 850 people. The memorial’s design was approved last year by a county committee that oversaw the project’s development. A website for the memorial also launched Monday that links to a donation page.
The memorial — called the Forever One Memorial — will stand just off the Las Vegas Strip where the shooting occurred. It will be in the shape of an infinity symbol and will include a 58-foot glass “Tower of Light” — signifying the initial death toll of 58 people — and a circular chamber called “Surround” containing 22,000 points of light, the same number of concertgoers who attended the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival, the location of the shooting.
An exact cost for the memorial is unknown, but officials will need much more than what has already been donated. The Clark County Commission approved $1 million in grant funding for the memorial in July, and the county received $35,000 that was raised during a remembrance event in 2022. As of March, about $144,000 had been donated to a fund for the memorial, and that money was transferred to Vegas Strong this year.
In an interview with The Nevada Independent, Jones Blackhurst said officials researched memorials built to honor the victims of other mass shootings and found that some had run into obstacles. For example, one honoring the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando has run into years of delays and will be much smaller than originally planned.
“That’s why we really felt it was important to set a deadline, how much money we had to raise, how we’re going to go about getting the contributions and trying to have the remembrance open on the 10-year anniversary,” Jones Blackhurst said.
A memorial honoring the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting also opened 10 years later.
At Monday’s event, Karessa Royce, a member of the county’s memorial committee, shared how she was critically wounded by gunfire.
“As someone who was there that evening, I can assure you, memorials matter,” Royce said. “They mark the historical permanency. They ensure the lives lost are honored and never forgotten, and they lift up the unique stories and experiences of survivors, first responders and the community at large.”
Paramedic Brian Rogers, who was a first responder at the concert, recalled Monday when he first heard from his daughter that there was a shooting.
“That night will leave a mark on my brain that will never go,” Rogers said. “For our victims’ families, our survivors, we know that you long for a space to lie down, to grieve, to pay respects to those you’ve lost and to gather in community and remember the good parts of the time you shared together … Forever One Memorial is that place.”
