The Monterey Park City Council is in the early stages of planning a memorial honoring the 11 victims of January’s Star Ballroom Dance Studio attack.
Considered the deadliest such massacre in Los Angeles County history, the city is looking to erect a permanent show of respect for the fallen and bring the community closer to a sense of closure.
During its Sept. 8 meeting, Monterey Park City Council members opened the floor to discuss the beginning stages of such a project by forming a memorial committee.
So far, the city is merely in the idea phase, and requested staff to research similar memorials and the strategies employed to bring those to fruition. With sites of mass shootings increasingly dotting the United States, such memorials have become more common place: San Bernardino, Aurora, Colo., Orlando, Fla., Newtown, Conn. all have memorials where the dead are remembered.
Officials in Las Vegas recently approved a plan to honor the 58 initial victims of the massacre on the Las Vegas Strip in October 2017. In that shooting, a gunman opened fire from a 32nd-floor suite at the Mandalay Bay hotel on a country music festival crowd on the Las Vegas strip, making it the deadliest such shooting in American history. Among the hundreds injured, two people initially survived but died in subsequent years.
Monterey Park officials sounded eager to set up a process for robust community engagement on memorial planning.
“All of that is still up in the air,” said Councilman Thomas Wong. “Most of the other processes we’ve looked at are years-long processes, and I’m personally very interested in making sure we have a lot of community engagement and to gather feedback. Especially to extend to the victims and their families who may want to be engaged in this — we want to be sensitive to that as well.”
On Jan. 21, a gunman walked into the studio and opened fire, killing My My Nhan, 65; LiLan Li, 63; Xiujuan Yu, 57; Muoi Dai Ung, 67,;Hongying Jian, 62; Yu-Lun Kao, 72; Chia…
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