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RIP John Phippen
One of the victims of the Las Vegas shooting this past weekend.
I didn’t know him, he looks a nice guy. He was shot while dancing with his son. So why am I writing about John specifically? Well, because I have now received two emails from people I know checking in with me, apparently confusing Phippen and Philpin. (Easily done … it’s an odd name.) Suffice to say, I am alive and well. Sadly John (who I did not know) is not. “One minute he was dancing with his son, and the next minute, he was being carried to a car, fatally wounded.” The following is extracted form Heavy.
There is a GoFundMe site to help his children. According to SignalCV, “John Phippen ran a home remodelling and repair company in Valencia called J P Specialities.”
According to The Los Angeles Times, “He was dancing next to his son, Travis, at the country music festival in Las Vegas when he was struck by a bullet in the lower back. Travis, an emergency medical technician, carried his father to a car” that rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. “Today, we lost an amazing, wonderful, selfless, sweet soul of man to a senseless act of violence in the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting,” it reads. “My name is Leah Nagyivanyi and I was a Santa Clarita neighbour and a friend of John’s for 17+ years. My husband Paul and John had become very close over the past three years. All of us spending time in the Sand Dunes, Havasu and doing lots of beach camping. We intertwined many of our friends and to say we are devastated by this loss is an understatement. If you didn’t know John you surely missed out. He had a heart that was larger than life and a personality to match. You felt like you knew him for years the first time you met him. He was a simple man who enjoyed the simple things in life and having fun doing them.” Phippen was remembered as a man who “had your back from the moment he met you and by having your back that could mean, having a cold beer in your hand when yours was empty or if you needed help with your car or in our case, your sandrail, your house or you just needed to chill. Even if you were someone he had never met before but were in need, he was there for you.” SaveSave