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Strong Together: A friendship forged by purpose helps keep a community of survivors connected

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Tragedy is almost always confusing, and this one of ours is extreme. Five years isn’t nearly enough time to figure out how we feel about what happened, to process this very unique and unreasonable trauma, or to fully decide how to move on.

But every little bit of understanding helps. Accepting how many people were affected by the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017 is acknowledging the power of “us.” There were connections between those in attendance that night—Las Vegas visitors from across the country—along with thousands of locals working on the Strip and first responders rushing to help, and those connections remain. Whatever we are doing to deal with our tragedy, we are not alone.

Connie Long and Shawna Bartlett met in person for the first time in November 2017 at Stoney’s Rockin’ Country, the popular bar and music hall at Town Square south of the Strip. They both were at the festival on October 1, and Long, a Southern Californian and longtime law enforcement employee in the probation department, wanted to return to see the memorial of 58 crosses that had been placed at the Welcome to Las Vegas sign near Mandalay Bay. Bartlett, at the time a six-year Vegas resident and executive assistant for a small business, had organized a meetup of survivors at Stoney’s via social media.

“That was the first time we really crossed paths, and then I was back in California and we started developing plans to come together again,” Long says. Bartlett was in California two weeks later for her mother’s wedding and reunited with Long for brunch. “The rest was history,” Bartlett says.

They have many things in common, but that initial fast friendship was built on a special bond formed in the aftermath of the shooting and a shared desire to continue connecting with other survivors. “We both tried to do the same thing in our respective states that first year,” Long says. “We committed to trying to bring people together once a month until the one-year [after] mark, and then, what would we do? I felt like that’s what I needed, and thought if I needed that, other people might need that too.”

Long (left) and Bartlett

They found plenty of other people on social media, Facebook groups of self-described “Routers” who, like Bartlett, had attended the festival every year along with other country music events across the country. The monthly get-togethers progressed, and “I felt like every event had someone saying, ‘I just met this person that weekend [during the festival] and I can’t believe they’re here and I’m glad they’re safe,’” Bartlett says. “It felt like if we didn’t do these things, there wouldn’t be these stories of people able to reunite. Putting these events together and being with these people, seeing the smiles and the hugs, it was healing for me.”

Their informal organizational efforts culminated in a 2018 reunion in Las Vegas that welcomed survivors, first responders, and families of the 58. It was coordinated with local government officials and about 2,000 people attended, and for a moment, it seemed like the immense work Long and Bartlett put into the events might be finished.

But not everyone in their community was ready to reunite or revisit the tragedy that year. “That keeps us going,” Long says. The second-annual event in 2019 was labeled a remembrance event, a celebration of life, since the words reunion or anniversary didn’t seem to fit. During the pandemic in 2020, a smaller group of around 400 people met in a local park, still needing that connection during truly strange times.

Last year, Bartlett and Long reconnected with Stoney’s and added a bit more country music to the remembrance event, laying the groundwork for what they knew had to be the biggest plan yet, the five-year mark. The duo built a solid structure for their efforts by incorporating a new 501c3 nonprofit organization called the Country Strong Project, which is producing the first-ever public event in this series of anniversary reunions, the Remember Music Festival on October 1, which begins at noon at the Clark County Amphitheater Downtown.

Stoney’s has partnered with the group once again and helped bring big-name artists to the lineup, including Midland, Dylan Schneider, Meghan Patrick and Walker Montgomery. While initial tickets were offered only to the group’s community of survivors and those affected, some tickets remained available at press time at eventbrite.com.

“Everything is on a much more grand scale [this year] and we’re learning as we go,” Long says. “From things like getting volunteers to making sure we have enough ice, there’s a lot of details that always seem to work themselves out, but always had stress.”

Producing and promoting such a big event seems like it would be overwhelming for first-timers, but the Country Strong Project team is actually very experienced. Only their fellow routers have done what they’ve done, navigating tricky ground while organizing gatherings and maintaining constant communication. Listening to each other. They know their “audience,” because they are their own audience.

“There’s a group of Route 91 survivors at probably every concert between [California] and Vegas,” Long says. “At Stagecoach [the country festival in California], we pull everybody together for a big photo and sit together for those three days, and at every other concert we’re looking for each other. I might just wear an orange ribbon, but it’s just enough for somebody to see. Besides social media, we’re out there, seeing each other, finding each other and searching for each other.”

It isn’t easy for any of us to handle our tragedy. It still feels heavy and overwhelming after five years. Many of us just don’t want to deal with it. Connie Long and Shawna Bartlett feel that way sometimes, but there’s something that drives them to stay connected to each other and to the festival experience they enjoyed so much before it was ended.

“It’s an odd honor, that people trust us enough to do this, and then they show up,” Long says. “It’s thousands of people, potentially, that trust these two girls who have real jobs and families, to throw something together, and they trust that it’s going to work, and they pay their hard-earned money to come and support whatever we’re doing this year.”

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Brock Radke

Brock Radke is an award-winning writer and columnist who currently occupies the role of managing editor at Las Vegas Weekly ...

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