After Shooting, Business of Vegas Moves On As Many Pause to Mourn

You can hear people's screams of delight as they plunge down the steep drops and hairpin curves of the New York New York roller coaster that towers over the Las Vegas strip. It roars over the faux skyline of the casino-hotel several times an hour.

"What I've been seeing is just this churn of a business town,” said Brian Dawson of San Francisco, while walking on the strip a few days after the mass shooting that took place at the Route 91 country music concert Sunday night.

He’s a documentary filmmaker and a fellow at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Dawson headed to Vegas right after the shooting to do some filming. He happens to be working on a documentary about gun violence.

"It seems to me like business as usual in a way that I personally wouldn't have expected,” said Dawson of what he’s seen in the Las Vegas Strip in the days after the violence.

“I thought I'd see more businesses closed. This morning I called a shooting range where you pay about $60 a pop to shoot a machine gun. They're open today,” he said.

But obviously, something is different. People stop along the broad sidewalk below the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino to look up at the two windows of the 32nd floor suite that Stephan Paddock used as a shooter’s nest while he fired into the open air concert area directly across the street.

"It's just somber, you can feel it,” said Mindy Whelan. She’s sitting on the sidewalk outside the Mandalay, with her daughter Jennifer Tucker, on a little patch of grass looking across the Strip at the fenced-off outdoor venue.

"I don't know what they're going to do with this. I can't see them holding another anything there," said Tucker. "Like that is just a place you don't even want to step on; you don't want to go near that."  Her mom agrees.

“I would think they would build a memorial of some sort, that's what I'm thinking, that's going to be a memorial forever," said Whelan.

Whelan and Tucker are natives of California, from the town of Upland, not too far from San Bernardino. They settled in Las Vegas several years ago. And they have no plans on leaving.

“No,” said Tucker. “This is home forever, this is where I’m planting my roots.”

Las Vegas beckons a lot of people from California. It's just a short flight or a few hours’ drive from parts of Southern California. Housing can be a lot cheaper there. And the economy is humming; unemployment is at just five percent.

Victor Ortigazo headed here from Ontario, California looking for work. He arrived just one week before Sunday’s attack. But he stayed away from the Strip until Friday, even though he lives nearby with a brother.

He could hear the music from the outdoor country music festival all last weekend. Then he heard the shots that  stopped the music.

“Bang, bang, bang over and over again,” said Ortigazo.

“There’s nothing I could do, I thought it was firecrackers. Turned out, (it was) another one of those attacks,” he said, cursing bitterly.

I run into some other recent Vegas transplants also hard up for work. Three young men dressed in big colorful Alvin and the Chipmunks costumes. They pose for photos with tourists, hitting them up for a couple bucks or loose change. The guy dressed as Alvin is from Arizona. But he wants to use his nickname: Snoopy.

"Up until mid-June I didn't have a job. I was homeless on the streets, until my friend hooked me up with this gig,” he said.

"Some people are just out here to support a family like I am, I have a one-month(-old) child. This is how I feed them every day,” said ‘Snoopy.’

“If the shooting hadn't happened, I'd have a decent paycheck this week and I wouldn't have to worry.”

Some people stop to pose for a photo with the Chipmunks or share a couple laughs. But not a lot of people apparently are feeling like taking a goofy picture.

‘Snoopy’ said that’s ok. "We're trying to cheer them up. Maybe they need to talk to someone about this, get it out in the open you start feeling better,” he said.

People are talking about the events of Sunday. I pick up on conversations almost everywhere I go in Vegas; the hotel lobby, the airport, in a convenience store and of course out on the Strip.

And yet the city has this other side that pulses along—a kind of ruthless energy that seems to have little time for prolonged reflection.

Sunday’s mass killing revealed the two often competing populations of Las Vegas: the full time residents, many of whom are in the midst of some profound grief and soul-searching, and the enormous transient population of international tourists, pleasure-seekers and gamblers flush with cash.

Transient as they may be, many of them are sharing in the sorrow as well. And far too many will leave this place with it.