A student at Truckee Meadows Community College is one of the victims who was killed during the Las Vegas shooting Sunday. Our News Director Michelle Billman reports.
His name is Austin Meyer and he was at the country music festival celebrating his 24th birthday with his fiancée, Dana Getreu, who is a student at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Meyer was in the transportation technologies program at TMCC, which is a small cohort of students who work together closely. Kyle Dalpe is the dean of technical sciences and had to break the news to Meyer's classmates.
"Not only did I start to choke up and looked up at the instructor who was very obviously grieving but I also saw it on the faces of the students, especially you look in the front row and you see people and they're like, 'Wow, this really happened.' They're all affected by it."
Dalpe was accompanied by a counselor on those class visits and TMCC will continue offering counseling services to anyone in the campus community who needs help. Joan Steinman is director of retention and support at the college.
"People will deal with this in different ways. There's no one right way to process this kind of a situation. There's no typical way, really, to deal with something like this. Everybody does this in their own way and in their own time."
TMCC is also using trained therapy dogs through the program Paws4Love to offer comfort to affected students and faculty.