On October 1, 2017, a shooter opened fire on concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, leaving 58 people dead and 546 injured. In light of the recent shooting in Mandalay Bay, The World reached out to JBS alumna Ana Llewellyn ‘07 in Las Vegas to hear her account of the tragedy and its effect on the community.

Llewellyn lives in Summerlin, Nevada, about twenty minutes from the Las Vegas Strip. She is the Vice President of Look Style Society, a company that leases space in their 18,000 square feet facilities to over 450 estheticians, hair stylists, nail artists and more. The Town Square location is two miles from Mandalay Bay, so close that Llewellyn says she can see it.

Llewellyn was in her home, asleep, at the time of the shooting. She awoke at 3 AM to a text from a Burroughs classmate, asking her if she was all right. “My throat fell into my stomach and I knew, without having to turn on the TV that something terrible had happened,” she later recounts.

Monday, October 2 came, and Llewellyn sent out a company-wide email, wanting to know if all of her employees were safe. She offered paid leave to anyone who needed to take the day off to be with family. “Trauma doesn’t have to happen to you to have a direct effect on you,” she says. Look Style Society will be holding a mobile blood drive in November as well as two fundraisers for first responders and their families.

Llewellyn stayed at the Town Square location on Monday. There were five to ten stylists in that day, and according to Llewellyn, “almost everyone that was in either was a spouse of a first responder or had friends at the concert. One of the stylists, her cousin got shot, [and] another knew three people that were shot.”
She noticed a change in her daily interactions as well. On Monday, she went to pick up coffee, and asked the cashier if everyone they knew was safe. Llewellyn remarked, “These are total strangers. There’s a sense of shellshock and quiet mixed with compassion. ‘How are you doing today’ is the same question you ask every day but now it has a totally different meaning.”

Llewellyn visited the healing garden located under the “Welcome to the Fabulous Las Vegas” sign on Friday, October 6. She described seeing the 58 crosses for the deceased as “one of the most heartbreaking and breathtaking experiences [she’s] ever had. There were rows and rows of people lighting candles and saying prayers and making a path [by the crosses] so we could read everyone’s name and give those who lost their life in this tragedy a moment of respect.”

As for her daily life, Llewellyn notes “Life goes on. You still get up, and you still have a business to run, and people whose livelihoods depend on this business running,” but continues, “you can’t unsee or unhear, but you integrate it into who you are in a way that makes you a better person and you have to take one step forward, after the other, after the other, after the other. You can’t pause time.”

While life returns to normal, Llewellyn believes the city “is forever changed,” adding that, “It’s hard to drive by Mandalay Bay, and not feel something in the pit of my gut. Silence happens in the car; I turn the radio down. [The shooting] certainly is very present, just not so much in our faces.”

Asked if she believed mass shootings were becoming a part of modern American life, Llewellyn responds by saying that she hopes not, but that effective reform must take place. Political division is a “symptom of society as a whole,” she says. “When our differences are so stratifying that two parties in Congress can’t make meaningful reform, that we can’t see human beings that have different views from us, those divisions get reflected in these mass events… I don’t think [mass shootings are] the norm if we collectively take action and set differences aside to take steps towards the things that need to be shifted.”

Meanwhile, as Congress moves towards tax policy and continuing the health care debate, Mandalay Bay seems to fade away as past shootings have done.