Stagecoach 2025: Survivors find healing in country community

Years after a pair of massacres rocked the country music community, there is healing for a survivor.

Julie Craig of Norco runs an apparel business called Countryfied and was a vendor at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas that turned tragic on Oct. 1, 2017 when a gunman in a nearby hotel tower killed 58 attendees and wounded more than 500 on Oct. 1.

“I saw the devil himself that night,” Craig said at the time.

The pain was intesified the following year after the Borderline Bar & Grill shootings on Nov. 7, 2018 claimed 13 lives, including the shooter’s.

Since then the Stagecoach Country Music Festival has become a meet-up place for survivors. The three-day festival takes place in the last weekend of April at the Empire Polo Club in Indio.

Craig said 15 or 20 survivors came by the booth in the first couple of hours of the festival on Friday. Countryfied is near the Compton Cowboys corral.

Craig sells Route 91 blankets and gives a portion of the proceeds to the Forever One Memorial, which is working to build a permanent tribute to the victims in Las Vegas.

She recently visited Las Vegas for a Boots in the Park Festival headlined by Old Dominion.

“It was beautiful. They did 15 seconds of silence for the survivors. It was so nice.”