Ron Helus<\/a>, who was among the 12 victims. Helus, 54, died saving the lives of others at the bar. He was among the first to respond to the shooting.<\/p>\n\u201cThere\u2019s nothing I can really say here that will fill the hole that is left in our hearts,\u201d Dean said. \u201cI ask that you join me in remembering Ron and all the victims. As we reach out, we hold the hands of everyone in our community, we come together to move forward and overcome evil with good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Local religious leaders also spoke, offering messages of unity and love amid times of sorrow.<\/p>\n
\u201cOurs is a very small and beautiful community,\u201d\u00a0said Mohammed Esa, of the Islamic Center of Conejo Valley. \u201cWe\u2019re all truly connected in every way. With this tragedy, it has affected us to our core. It is unfathomable. How do we manage such grief? The only way is through love. All of us from all faiths, let us all stand together with the stricken families in the city of Thousand Oaks. To the families, we say we share in your sorrow, and share our loves and prayers with you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mayor Fox closed the vigil by saying, \u201cHave hope.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHope has sustained communities, very much like Thousand Oaks, through the exact same triages of mass shootings,\u201d he said. \u201cTonight Thousand Oaks takes its place with those cities, who in order to move forward will rely on hope\u2026 we are Thousand Oaks strong.\u201d<\/p>\n
A musician performed \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d at the end of the vigil as attendees sang along and held up their candles. As people left the theater, they stopped to embrace one another and shed tears.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2353,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"give_campaign_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-coverage"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5770\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vccf.org\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}