Most of Las Vegas and much of the country remembers what happened on Oct. 1, 2017. With 60 victims and some 800 injured, that shooting on the Las Vegas Strip was the worst modern-day shooting in the country’s history.
Since then, a design has been chosen and a large-scale memorial is planned for the site of the shooting, just across the street from Mandalay Bay, where the shooter opened fire with several weapons from the 32nd floor.
Fifty-eight people initially died. The shooter killed himself. Another person died of their injuries after the fact. Then, in November of 2024, another victim.
Kristin A. Babik, 31, died. She had been shot and survived that night at the Jason Aldean concert. But seven years later, her obituary in the Gainesville Sun said she suffered severely, physically and emotionally.
"Kristin passed away from a cardiac event brought on by the long-term effects of trauma and related health complications," the obituary states.
Not that she didn’t try to move beyond that suffering. After the shooting, Babik passed the California bar and was a lawyer in Los Angeles for a short time. That stress of the job became too much, her brother said, and she later moved to Florida nearer her family.
Her death speaks to the impact of PTSD for so many people — some 20,000 — who were at that Route 91 Harvest Festival. And it speaks to the need to not only remember the shooting and its victims because there have been more victims.
Babik was shot above her shoulder and broke a few ribs with the bullet lodged close to her spine. She had been running, like so many at the festival, as bullets rained down from above
“She talked about all the people around her. She said she started hearing some screams, and then people started running, and then she felt like a really hard slap on the back, like somebody had thrown an object at her. And she said, you know, she felt a lot of pain, but then she didn't really notice anything, you know, because they were running and running and running,” Babik recounted.
After recovering physically, Babik graduated from law school, then earned a masters in health law from the University of Washington, and passed the bar exam in California. After leaving a law firm in Los Angeles, Babik added, she worked as an AmeriCorps volunteer to help build homes for those in need.
But the stress never left her. She never felt safe. Her brother said she slept with a crowbar under her pillow. Then she developed schizophrenia.
She died in November, he said, “from a series of seizures and a cardiac event that was brought on by the fact that she was on so much medication for schizophrenia, and along with the other things that she was doing to self-medicate, it took a toll on her physically.”
By happenstance, Chaplain Stephen Smith, a chaplain for the Las Vegas Fire Department, was in Gainesville, Fla., at the time of her memorial service. He had counseled many on the night of the shooting, in the days since, and said firefighters still talk about it.
He went to the memorial service, and it got him thinking about the victims who have died since the shooting, and the committee was established to create a memorial for victims.
“Every person that was shot or lost their lives later,” Smith said. “They should have a place in that memorial.”
Tennille Pereira, director of the Resiliency and Justice Center (formerly the Vegas Strong Resiliency Center), is on that committee.
"We had the 58 original that died in the media aftermath, but we've had several die from their injuries in the years since,” Pereira said. “And so we are discussing, and we have essentially made a promise or commitment to make sure that they're honored in some way.”
Pereira said others who have died since the shooting included one woman who died from complications brought on by panic attacks that she never had before the shooting. “I know there are a number of individuals that died from suicide,” she added. “You can’t say that this didn’t play a factor in that, and so we will make sure that there’s something that honors that.”
Babik added that his sister felt education was so important, the family is trying to raise money through a GoFundMe campaign for undergraduate scholarships.
“The impact we want to have is that Kristin will continue to let light shine out of darkness forever,” he added. “She would want to help people follow their dreams. It’s what she did.”
Guests: Rev. Steve Smith, chaplain, Las Vegas Fire and Rescue; Jeff Babik, brother of Kristin Babik; Tennille Pereria, director, Resiliency and Justice Center
