Inside healing garden’s gates, survivors of massacre ‘feel 58 people hugging us’

By Grace Da Rocha (contact)

Saturday, Oct. 1, 2022 | 2 a.m.

Sue Ann Cornwell and Alicia Mierke were about 10 feet away from each other five years ago when the bullets started flying over their heads.

They were strangers that awful night, Oct. 1, 2017, as a gunman opened fire on the 22,000 attendees at the Route 91 country music festival on the Strip killing 58 in the immediate aftermath and wounding more than 800 others. Today marks the fifth anniversary of the massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history.

The women met a few days after the tragedy and have become inseparable in helping care for the Las Vegas Community Healing Garden. The garden, which opened in downtown Las Vegas four days after the shooting, is highlighted by a wall of remembrance listing the deceased.

Cornwell and Mierke’s friendship has blossomed much like the healing garden has.

As survivors of the Route 91 shooting, both women have a strong connection to the garden and each victim memorialized on its wall of remembrance. Cornwell even had one of them — Denise Burditis — die in the back of her truck as they escaped the scene.

“When we used to come here, we used to feel real heavy and cry, and it was real emotional,” Cornwell said. “Now we walk in here and I feel — and I think Alicia feels the same way — we feel 58 people hugging us when we walk through those gates.”

Mierke, who said the two of them were at the Community Healing Garden “all the time,” said seeing the faces of “the (58) angels,” meeting with survivors, and speaking with the families of those who died allowed them to “feel so much love.” Listening to the stories of these people in the garden helps the two women heal, but it also gives them strength to continue their work, they said.

From the tiles that stretch along each wall to the biographies of the shooting victims, Cornwall and Mierke have left their mark in each corner of the area that sits on South Casino Center Boulevard, just north of East Charleston Boulevard.

Mierke even picked up some carpentry skills from Cornwell so she could help with creating a few of the garden’s elements, like the 58 green trellises made for each person killed in the shooting.

They also worked together to design and complete a new butterfly sculpture that will serve as the centerpiece for a neighboring Storybook Garden that will be temporarily opened today for the dedication of the art piece.

“We can’t just come down here and relax,” Mierke said. “It’s like, ‘OK, that needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed.’ (But) it’s not work when you’re enjoying it.”

For Mierke and Cornwell, each survivor and those related to the victims are a “family” that have experienced something many others have not. The garden gives them a place to “feel comfortable.”

“I think in the very beginning, people who weren’t there (at the music festival) didn’t know how to talk to you … even your own family members, they watched you and they wouldn’t ask you questions,” Mierke said. “They were afraid to ask, where with our Route 91 family, we can just be us. It’s all just natural — sometimes we cry, sometimes we laugh.”

Although Mierke knows that the community engagement might decrease now that five-year “milestone” is passing, she strongly believes that the group of Route 91 survivors will continue to be “forever family,” a slogan garden attendees will become familiar with.

It’s a concept so important to the group of survivors and their healing that Cornwell, with the help of fellow survivor Patrick Amico, built a bench with the phrase painted on it in bright colors and placed it in the garden.

Both Cornwell and Mierke, now grandparents with more time on their hands, plan on caring for this garden “until (they) can’t do it anymore.” Mierke, who has spent years volunteering, said she “(loved) to do this kind of work” and would continue to help because “this is who (she) is.”

It isn’t about recognition or the money put into the garden for Cornwell and Mierke. They merely want to “live better for those who can’t” and show the world that they are “healing,” Cornwell said.

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