A little over a year ago, on December 6, 2023, tragedy struck the UNLV campus when a gunman killed three faculty members and seriously injured a fourth.
The victims were Patricia Navarro Velez, Jerry Cha-Jan Chang, and Naoko Takemaru. Professor Daraboth Rith was left critically wounded.
The ordeal ended quickly when the gunman was killed in a shootout with police.
The shooting shook students, faculty and the Las Vegas community coming just six years after the Las Vegas Strip killing of 58 people on October 1, 2017.
In the months since, UNLV has taken steps to improve campus security while focusing on healing and remembrance.
Beam Hall, where the shooting occurred, has been transformed with student-created murals and a Japanese paper crane project that brought together past and present students from around the world.
Kylee Brahma, is an undergrad junior mechanical engineering major at UNLV. She co-lead the project that entailed more than 4,000 hand folded paper cranes. More than 200 people worked on the project, from UNLV students to a former UNLV faculty member in Japan who sent cranes by mail.
Brahma said the Japanese tradition is a way to honor the victims.
“The whole reason for it is to show community support, to show that you're there for the person,” Brahma said.
“In Japanese culture, it was used in the aftermath of Hiroshima. The paper crane has become synonymous with the idea of peace and just community togetherness.”
The paper crane memorial is at UNLV’s Beam Hall near the advising center. Four cases of paper cranes are on display, with red cranes in each case arranged to form a single letter. Together, they spell out "UNLV."
“It's something that I'm really proud people came together for,” Brahma said.
“I hope that these professors are remembered for how much they were loved, because they still are.”
Stephen Benning, an associate psychology professor at UNLV, led a study researching the traumatic effects of the October 1 shooting back in 2017. Using some of the same framework and applying what he learned, he did the same for the December 6th shooting.
“One of the big things that we found is that both people who were at Beam Hall, the Student Union, had high levels of post traumatic stress in what we call the acute stress period, that is within one month of the shooting happening,” Benning said.
“Once we got into the post traumatic stress period, symptoms went down substantially for people who were actually at the scene of the shooting, but for those who fled before lockdowns happened, their levels of post traumatic stress remained elevated until six months afterward.”
Benning said data is still being collected and has not found the exact reason why stress remained elevated for those that fled the scene instead of those who remained.
Part of the study also aimed to find out how people could alleviate trauma.
“Simply be there for them in a way that includes them in everyday kinds of activities that they might normally participate in, and allow space for sharing, but not constant questioning about the details of the event and not assuming that people should be over it,” Benning said.
Benning was at UNLV the day of the shooting. He says he and other faculty are doing better and that he has hope for the future.
“After a year, I have felt like I was much better able to engage with everyone,” Benning said.
“I think there is optimism for the future, people are able to process this event, and there are supports that they could take advantage of if they needed to.”
Guests: Kylee Brahma, UNLV student; Stephen Benning, associate Professor of psychology, UNLV
