Jason Aldean shared a brief, heartfelt remembrance on the sixth anniversary of the 2017 Route 91 Harvest Festival mass shooting on Sunday (Oct. 1).
Each year on the anniversary of the massacre, Aldean — who was performing onstage at the Las Vegas festival when shooting broke out — shares a tribute to the survivors of the Route 91 shooting and those who lost loved ones in the attack.
This year, he shared a simple design of an orange-and-black token reading “Route 91” and “Country Strong,” surrounded by a purple background and white wings folded into the shape of a heart.
“Hard to believe it’s been 6 years,” Aldean comments in the caption of his post. “Thinkin about all the Route 91 family today.”
On Oct. 1, 2017, 64-year-old gunman Stephen Paddock was positioned at the window of his 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay Hotel when he opened fire on the crowd attending Aldean’s headlining set at Route 91. Paddock fired more than 1,000 bullets, killing 58 people at the scene, with over 800 more suffering injuries. Authorities subsequently found Paddock dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in his hotel room.
In the years that followed, three more people died from injuries related to Route 91, bringing the death toll to a total of 61. The tragedy remains the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, and it galvanized a conversation about firearms laws in the U.S. Specifically, the legality of “bump stocks” — a method used to fire ammunition rounds in rapid succession — which Paddock used during the shooting.
In late 2022, a four-part documentary about the Route 91 shooting called 11 Minutes was released. The series featured first-person accounts of the tragedy from concertgoers and first responders, plus Aldean’s first-ever in-depth interview about the shooting.
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