It’s a place where families can come to see a lasting memory of loved one they lost in the One October shooting.
Stacey Davis, earlier this week, stopped by the memorial wall at the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden, looking for a memento of her nephew Austin. “I kept looking and looking and looking,” Davis said in a telephone interview. “Where is Austin’s block. Why isn’t it there?”
Austin Davis was gunned down at the Harvest Festival. Volunteers placed blocks with pictures of the 58 victims on the memorial wall. But something or someone removed blocks for Austin and seven others connected to him. "The whole family is just absolutely disgusted,” Stacey Davis said. “We don’t deserve being disrespected by petty thieves.”
Steve Round, a Las Vegas resident, taking it upon himself to make sure the memorial is secure, doesn’t care if someone took the blocks for some misguided reason or if it’s flat-out vandalism, the pictures, he said, are there for the families. “It’s left here for a reason don’t screw with it,” Round said. “Be respectful. Don’t take stuff from here.”
Round is helping Outside Las Vegas, which oversees the garden, with an effort to replace and pay for the missing blocks.
In the meantime, Stacey Davis can’t believe how someone could be so thoughtless to take her family’s last memories of her nephew. “We don’t have future memories with our loved ones. We only have the past. We only have remembering,” Davis said.
Outside Las Vegas is looking into ways to better secure the garden like making a permanent memorial wall or building a security fence.
