1 October Memorial Committee generates ideas, has timeline for design

LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) - The 1 October Memorial Committee keeps asking for local artists’ ideas for a permanent memorial, with hopes for a design submitted for approval by September 2023.

A Clark County website showcases the ideas from various artists, featuring sketches, poetry, photography and music. One submission by Nancy Erskine, a Las Vegas native who recently relocated to Pahrump, is generating plenty of excitement with its thorough and thoughtful design of a possible memorial.

“I would like to see [visitors] leave with hope, and leave with knowing that there were a lot of heroes that night. Even though we lost a lot of really good people, in the end, I want them to see that we had a very strong community,” Erskine said.

The sketches of a proposed memorial depict numerous stations along a walking path, from tributes to each victim, halos of light to represent heroes from first responders to doctors, steps to leave mementos, and a globe to represent solidarity among survivors from across the world.

Tenille Pereira of the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center explains the crucial process to create a memorial and the need for local artist representation.

“We have people from all over the world there that night. We want to represent them. But at the end of the day, this happened in the Las Vegas community, and you saw Las Vegas come together in a way that we’ve never seen before,” Pereira said. “Permanent memorials often take a lot longer than people anticipate or maybe think they should take. One of the big things with our memorial is we wanted it to be a healing process. And we wanted to also capture healing of the community,” Pereira said.

The committee could incorporate some or all of the local submissions into a final design, which will be presented to Clark County for approval.

Submissions on the Clark County website will be accepted through October 31.

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