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You won't find this stat in a Las Vegas tourism brochure or advertisement. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas....and sometimes never leaves apparently.
Vital Vegas this week tweeted out some interesting data. 1,928 tourists died in Las Vegas, most in hotel-casinos, in the year 2022.
In 2022, 1,928 tourists died in Las Vegas, most in hotel-casinos. About one a week committed suicide. How many have you heard about? Archive: https://t.co/O5KaDiIaIy https://t.co/PCgx3hcdth
— Vital Vegas (@VitalVegas) June 21, 2024
The data was actually revealed by Scott Roeben in late May, but most of us were on holiday, maybe in Vegas.
"There’s an unspoken rule in Las Vegas media (at least that’s the perception): Avoid talking about death, especially when it involves tourists."
He goes on to reveal: "We got some exclusive data from the Southern Nevada Health District that sheds some light on how many Las Vegas visitors (non-Clark County residents) die while they’re here, as well as the number of homicides and suicides are in the mix. The Las Vegas Strip is in Clark County. (Downtown Las Vegas is in the City of Las Vegas.)
"In 2022, the last full year for which these statistics are available, 1,928 non-Clark County residents (tourists) died in Las Vegas. The residency of 129 of those people couldn’t be determined definitively, but they’re lumped into these numbers, anyway."
So maybe, just maybe, only 1799 tourists really died.
But wait, there's more.
The number of tourists who died in Las Vegas in 2021 was 2,253, even more than 2022, and presumably there were far fewer tourists with the pandemic still in full effect.
Of the Las Vegas visitor deaths in 2022, 1,487 (77%) were of natural causes. That number was 1,812, or 80%, in 2021.
Eight causes of death were “undetermined.”
In 2022, 344 Las Vegas visitors (18% of the total deaths) died of accidents of various kinds. In 2021, 337 died of accidents.
In 2022, 51 Las Vegas visitors (2.6% of the total number of deaths) committed suicide, or about one per week. That number was 49 in 2021.
In 2022, 36 people (1.9% of the total) died of homicide. It was 27 people in 2021.
"We’ve always found the 'cone of silence' around death among Las Vegas visitors fascinating," Roeben infused a bit of sarcasm.
According to the New York Times last year, the installation of fencing, nets or other physical barriers at tall structures has become a recognized strategy for preventing suicides. This included at Disneyland, where three people had taken their own lives by suicide.
The Times further notes that parking garages are a particular concern for suicide prevention, because they tend to have open sides and less monitoring than other tall structures, according to the International Parking & Mobility Institute.
Bridges are also a common target of such interventions.
A number of those responding to Vital Vegas' tweet were hardly surprised by the Vegas numbers.
Twelfth Amendment wrote: "There are people who really seem to believe there are suicides plummeting constantly from buildings. I had an acquaintance ask me with a straight face if it was safe to walk around inside Luxor and if they had netting to catch jumpers."
Chris Seferyn tried to put this all in perspective: "When you take into account 42 million visitors, 1928 deaths isn’t that much."
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