Survivors of mass shootings get help from Nashville nonprofit

It was difficult for Taylor Eickenhorst to attend concerts after the Route 91 Harvest festival shooting, but earlier this year she found herself finally, fully enjoying herself at a show.

She wasn’t there for her marketing job with Apple Music; there was no inner monologue reminding her it could happen again. After working through some of her trauma from the Oct. 1, 2017, attack, her “happy place” was back.

“I just want other survivors to know it does get better, and there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Eickenhorst said in a phone interview Tuesday. “The tunnel is dark, and really scary, but there’s a lot of people out there that can relate.”

Eickenhorst lived in New York City at the time of the shooting, but now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she and other survivors helped Nashville nonprofit Onsite Foundation create a free, weeklong workshop for mass shooting survivors. It’s called Triumph Over Tragedy, and Eickenhorst was the sole Route 91 survivor to serve on the workshop’s advisory council.

The workshop, first held in March, is different from other counseling and trauma support programs because it allows all survivors to stay together in rural Tennessee and work toward healing as a group, said Deanna Wantz, director of the Onsite Foundation.

That’s especially important for Route 91 survivors, as many were not from Las Vegas, Wantz said.

Felt isolated

“They all went home, then they feel very isolated — not able to connect with other survivors easily,” she said.

Eickenhorst said she felt the same when she returned to New York after the attack.

“I just kind of threw myself back into work,” she said. “I didn’t know anybody in New York who had survived it, so I didn’t really have a support group.”

Forty survivors — about half of whom survived the Route 91 shooting — participated in the first workshop. The next Triumph Over Tragedy workshop will be held in 2021, but the organization is still working on finalizing dates and fundraising during the coronavirus pandemic, Wantz said.

Terri Keener, the behavioral health coordinator with the Las Vegas Resiliency Center, said that like Wantz, she’s not aware of another residential treatment program aimed at helping mass shooting survivors. When the Onsite Foundation was looking to create the program, Wantz reached out to the center to ask for help, Keener said.

“They listened to us when we said, this is what we feel like our community needs,” she said.

Seek out other survivors

Keener said the isolation that many Route 91 survivors feel can lead them to seek out other survivors. That’s where group therapy programs, like the Triumph Over Tragedy workshop, can help.

“People don’t want to feel alone, and they want to feel connected, and they want to feel like others understand them and can relate to their experience,” Keener said.

The workshop was developed about a year and a half ago, after the death of Austin Eubanks, who was injured in the 1999 Columbine High School mass shooting and died from an overdose. His girlfriend, Laura Hutfless, is now an Onsite Foundation board member and helped develop the workshop, which was funded in part through money raised in Eubanks’ name.

Hutfless said that for her, learning why she experienced mental and physical trauma helped her grieve. She said she hopes survivors who go through the Triumph Over Tragedy program will have a similar experience.

Eickenhorst said talking about Route 91 is difficult, and certain events such as the anniversary can be triggering. But she hopes that by sharing her story, she can help others.

“I think surviving Route 91 and everything that has come through it afterwards — it really has been the hardest thing in my life to overcome, personally,” she said. “The whole experience has shown me how strong I am.”

Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Follow @k_newberg on Twitter.