San Diego

Filmmaker, Psychologist Team up 1 Year After Las Vegas Shooting

One year after the mass shooting in Las Vegas took so many lives, a San Diego psychologist and documentary filmmaker are helping the victims work through their emotional scars. 

On Oct. 1, 2017, a shooter in the Mandalay Bay killed 58 people are the Route 94 Harvest Festival, making it the deadliest shooting in U.S. history. Nearly 500 people were injured.

Horacio Jones of CinemaViva is working on a film about the San Diego lives changed by the shooting. “I started doing research on the tragedy and looking at videos and it just really got to my heart,” Jones told NBC 7. “I find myself enthralled with it and also frightened and you know feeling compassion for these people it became even more so once I actually met the survivors.”

One of those survivors is clinical psychologist Dr. Shiva Ghaed. “I have snapshot memories of seeing bodies being carried, just an enormous pool of blood on the ground and then I just kind of blacked out,” she remembered. She said she thought she was going to die.

After the shooting, however, she founded a weekly support group at InCahoots in Mission Valley to help local survivors with their trauma. Also, she just wrote a book to help survivors heal.

“For the survivors themselves, for the people’s whose lives were impacted sometimes it doesn’t feel like life moves on so quickly,” she said.

And while Jones is interviewing local survivors, he hopes to bring his documentary to a national audience. “We realize there’s a much bigger story that needs to be told." 

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