Vegas grows. The comforting thing, however, is that the Valley remains navigable. From any given point within the mountains that embrace the greater Las Vegas area, you need only to look toward the bright lights and rising geometric shapes of the Strip to know where you are in relation to the Valley. For despite the mass influx of people into this region over the past 25 years, and despite the mass proliferation of houses, shopping centers, residential communities and now even high-rise condominium towers the physical geography of this region remains fixed, and the Strip continues to stand tall at its center.
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As the Strip goes, so goes the city that surrounds it. Studies at the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research show that for every room built on the Strip, seven new jobs arise, and double as many people come to fill them. And, to the good fortune of the tourism and gaming giants who occupy the four miles of hotels and casinos at the heart of the city, the Strip has experienced unprecedented success. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, total visitation this year is projected to exceed 39 million for the first time. In consequence, the population in Clark County surpassed the 2 million mark this year. And with increasing numbers, the county has become proportionately more complex in its details, its intricacies, its infrastructure. That is, in its daily life.
This is not news. Hence, the master theme to this Valley year after year has been growth. Chairman of the Clark County Commission Rory Reid, who was raised in the Las Vegas Valley, says, “The thing that sticks out in my mind about this year is no different than previous years: the growth.” Moreover, he emphasizes:
“Just explosive growth. Like a wave that keeps riding along. When [I was young] there were 300,000 people here. When my daughter was born there was 800,000. She’s in high school now and there are two million. It’s been a wild ride.”
It has also had tangible effects. Many of which have been overt, if not traumatic, this year.
Although violent crime in the Valley has decreased since 2006, the Congressional Quarterly nonetheless ranks the Las Vegas metropolitan area the nation’s third most dangerous. The Nevada Department of Corrections tells us that, with more than 13,000 prisoners, jail space has vanished. The Clark County School District has built an average of one school per month to accommodate growth in population, and yet there are still not enough classrooms to hold all the students nor enough teachers to lead them. The traffic and water shortage crises have surpassed the threshold of tolerability, and so this year the Legislature initiated $7 billion worth of plans to mitigate them. Child welfare services experienced well-documented overflows. And while the nation’s economy took a blow in 2007 and foreclosures wreaked devastation from coast to coast, Nevada suffered most of all.
Some things have just become ungovernable. That has been evident this year, too. In February, the NBA All-Star game, an event that finally came to the city after intense campaigning, inspired a weekend of havoc concluding in 403 arrests and unforgettable nightmares reported by many locals. The Strip, unaccustomed to terror, endured four high-profile acts of violence this year, in the end totaling 10 victims of nonfatal gunshot wounds and one death by bomb.
“As numbers increase—as more people come to Las Vegas—the chances of crazy incidents like these increase,” says Alan Feldman, senior vice president for public relations at MGM-Mirage, whose properties Luxor and New York-New York witnessed the most traumatic events this year. “We haven’t found a way yet to prevent—to totally prevent—stupid things from happening. I don’t think anybody has.”
It is as if the Valley has become increasingly unmanageable with growth. That is what we’re talking about here: intractability. Things getting out of control. One of those events on the Strip, I think, reflects this. Maybe even encapsulates it. That is, the night Steve Francis Zegrean walked into the New York-New York and allegedly went on a shooting spree. 
According to the security cameras at the New York-New York, which would capture the violence to come from two points of view, a man in a white trench coat entered the hotel’s mezzanine level at 12:41 a.m. It is a small landing atop a pair of escalators that run up from, and down to, the casino floor, and it is invigorated with small shops, kiosks and sleepless passersby that give it the feel of a bazaar, and in the surveillance videos the man in the white trench coat paces. Back and forth, the videos show, back and forth, close to the escalators. For a solid two minutes.
Police allege the man to be Steve Zegrean, 51 years old at the time: July 6, 2007.
He had been having problems, Metro Capt. James Dillon said on July 7, during a press conference attended by both local and national media. Zegrean, a painter by trade, had lost his job and was in danger of losing his house. On July 4, Dillon said, he had caused a disturbance at his home when he tried to kill himself, and when police arrived he convinced them he was all right.
Zegrean lived in Las Vegas but he was not from here. He had come from Hungary and was a naturalized citizen of the United States, one of the many transplants who make up two-thirds of our town, according to UNLV statistics.
“I was trying to create a conflict,” Dillon quoted Zegrean as telling detectives after his arrest. He had spent the entire day of July 5, with its record 116-degree heat, wandering the Strip in a trench coat, hoping to elicit suspicion from the police. It didn’t work. And so he began pacing the New York-New York’s mezzanine level. Then, he assumed a sniper’s post to the right of the escalators, on the balcony that hangs over the casino floor: craps, blackjack and poker tables in the distance, and sundry slot machines down below. It was 12:43 and 10 seconds, to be precise.
Troy Sanchez, 13, was riding down the escalators. According to his testimony during Zegrean’s grand jury hearing last September, he had come from California with his mom to visit his brother, who worked as an attendant at the New York-New York roller coaster ride. His brother, in fact, was right there with him when Troy Sanchez thought he heard a firecracker. And then more. Sanchez told the jury during the private proceedings, bullet fragments still in his left ankle, that he looked to his brother, who was off and running. And so Sanchez ran, too. Away from the escalator. “Not until after I got past the [security] desk on the right,” he said, “and then that’s when I felt me getting shot.”
Carrie Zeravica, a dance instructor from Florida, was walking hand-in-hand with her boyfriend toward the escalators when she heard three pops, according to what she told the grand jury. There was a pause. And then a rapid succession of pops that could have been nothing other than gunshots, Zeravica said. She said she turned to run, and that’s when she knew she had been shot, “because I had no leg to step on,” she said. “It was tingling, numb, like when your foot falls asleep.” The bullet had entered just below the knee of her left leg and exited through the calf, she told the grand jury two months after the incident, still wearing an orthopedic device, without which her damaged leg cannot support her weight.
Apryl Jackson testified that she was at the New York-New York with a big group of family and friends. They were at the craps tables, she was playing slots. Just sitting at the machine, one elbow resting on it and one hand feeding it nickels, when she heard three bangs. The last of which, she said, grazed her elbow as it hit the machine.
Watching his girlfriend play the Wheel of Fortune slots, about 100 feet from the escalators leading up to the mezzanine, Fernando Maestas recognized the sound of gunfire right away. He was a U.S. Air Force intelligence analyst. He told he jury he could hear the bullets ricocheting off the slot machines. He told the jury that when he looked for his girlfriend she was huddled with 10 others, strangers, all holding on to one another, “just a ball of people, holding each other.” He told the jury that he had been hit by a bullet fragment on the thumb of his left hand, and he showed them the scar to prove it.
Zegrean had a Springfield XD 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, police allege. They say he discharged an entire 16-round clip onto the casino floor, hitting four but killing none.
It was one of four violent, high-profile incidents to occur on Strip properties this year, resulting in an assortment of victims. In the early morning hours of August 19, a miniature riot broke out in front of Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, where some 20 young men engaged in punches, bottle-throwing and gunfire that left four bystanders in the hospital with noncritical bullet wounds. Two weeks earlier, on August 4, horror erupted on the casino floor at Caesars Palace when a 34-year-old man stepped out of an elevator and opened fire on two men with whom he had earlier had a conflict. On the morning of May 7, an explosive device went off atop the garage at the Luxor and killed the man for whom it was targeted in an ugly love triangle. While all four incidents attracted intense and widespread media coverage, the latter’s was instantaneous, and insatiable, on account of its resemblence to a terrorist act.
“I think the fact that these events stick out in people’s minds shows that they are out of the norm, which is a good thing, and I’m glad that people around the Valley are concerned about these events,” says Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie. “Both in this county, and in the country, we are continually faced with more people turning to firearms to take out their aggressions. Whether it happens on the Strip or anywhere else in the city, it concerns me.”
“What you have to keep in mind,” says Feldman, of the MGM-Mirage, “is that Las Vegas is now in the spotlight. And so everything that occurs here is going to generate publicity. It’s like New York 20 or 30 years ago, with the intense media coverage. Vegas is in that spotlight now.”
Indeed, according to the widely reputed Image Power Survey, Las Vegas as a brand is one of the most prominent in the nation. Results from 2006 indicate it ranks second only to Google. Ahead, even, of iPod. From the NBA All-Star game in February to the Democratic presidential debate at UNLV in November, Las Vegas has seen a glut of worldwide attention this year.
Justin Lampert, 24, had come to Las Vegas from North Dakota on July 4 for an unoriginal reason, and that was a bachelor party. At 12:40 a.m. on July 6, according to what he would tell police, the press and then later a grand jury, he and one of his friends bought hotdogs from a Nathan’s kiosk on the New York-New York mezzanine level. They took a seat near Vegas Express, a shop flanked by the escalators and the doors exiting the hotel toward the pedestrian bridge that connects to the MGM Grand, and without preface a few pops went off. Lampert said there was a silence, and his friend retreated into the store. Then a barrage of shots. Lampert said a massive crowd came running his way, trying to escape the hotel. Among that crowd, he said, he saw someone who seemed out of place. A man walking slowly. He turned toward Lampert so that Lampert and he made eye contact: an older man with disheveled hair and a beard, wearing a cream-colored trench coat. He was trying to reload his gun, surveillance cameras show. It was 12:43 and 48 seconds. Lampert, a sergeant in the National Guard who not only served in Iraq but also earned a hero’s medal during his service there, acted on instinct and rushed the man, wrestling him to the ground and holding him there until more civilians came to assist. Until police came to make the arrest. The man Lampert tackled, police would later state, had more than 200 rounds of ammunition on his person.
Steven Francis Zegrean now waits in the Clark County Detention Center for his trial to commence on February 25. He faces, among dozens of others charges, 17 counts of attempted murder, one for each shot he fired unto the casino floor and one for the lone bullet that remained in the chamber.
According to witness testimony given during Zegrean’s grand jury hearing, people in the New York-New York that explosive night had been panicking, screaming, yelling, dropping their purses and leaving behind their high heels and running, jumping behind slot machines, and crying. It was pandemonium. One woman was hurt in the stampede of patrons, and one witness said that she felt utterly helpless in that massive wave of chaos and commotion.
A chaotic, ungovernable situation. Stirring feelings of despair. It is this same dynamic occurring throughout Las Vegas. It’s as if the individual no longer knows his place in the context of this growing city.
Cranes hang high over the Strip, and throughout the Valley. High-rise condos come nearer to completion with each passing day. Ground is broken on new high-end communities around the outskirts of the Valley. Las Vegas plays host to more and more high-profile events and high-profile celebrities, and appears in media highlights across the nation. The cost of living here is higher than ever before. These are all self-evident truths. It’s as if Las Vegas has been hit with a full clip of citification.
Which is to say, Las Vegas, just a small town not too long ago, is now emerging as a major metropolitan area, almost comparable with forerunners such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, New York.
Except that Las Vegas maintains its one crucial difference, our region’s ultimate dependence on the tourism and gaming industry. As the Strip goes, so too does the city that surrounds it.
Which is why the shooting spree at New York-New York was such a critical event. It could have been calamitous. Not just due to the very real possibility that someone could have died, but also because it could have inflicted a serious injury on the tourism and gaming industry, and thus on the region’s economy in whole.
To the good fortune of everyone, it did not. MGM-Mirage in specific, and Las Vegas in general, continue to surge forward. “I don’t want to minimize what happened,” says Feldman, “but in the macro sense it did not have much of an effect on us, that we can see.” Likewise, Pope says neither tourism nor Las Vegas in general seemed to suffer much from the New York-New York incident or from any other on the Strip. “Month-to month measurements didn’t seem to reflect anything out of the ordinary,” she says. “Visitation didn’t drop. More than 39 million people will have come here and returned home safely this year.”
Nevertheless, the incident at the New York-New York reminded us of the ancient possibility that prosperity and growth can carry with it the seed of its own destruction.
That is, in the form of intractability.
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According to Commissioner Reid, the key thing to do now is to share responsibilities.
“The people who look to government to solve all their problems are confused,” he says. “What we need to see is government collaborating with non-profit organizations, private entities, and individual citizens to work out these problems.” In this way, the commissioner implies, people can regain a sense of ownership over the region in which they live. They can reassess where they stand in relation to this burgeoning metropolis of ours.
Joshua Longobardy is a Las Vegas Weekly staff writer.