Hundreds are dead after succumbing to Las Vegas’ heat

Alan Halaly, Katie Futterman, Tribune News Service

Hanging on Judy Reiber’s kitchen wall is a photo of a particularly bad snowstorm that finally convinced her it was time to leave Colorado. What she didn’t know then was that the Nevada heat would kill her. Reiber is only one of at least 402 people who have died from heat-related illnesses this summer, marking the deadliest heat year on record for Las Vegas since the coroner’s office began to consider heat a contributing cause of death in 2021. “Heat is a killer,” her husband, Tim Reiber, said in an interview. “You don’t get enough fluids one morning, and you’re out in the heat — I don’t care what your age is — it could be your last day.”

It is also a chronic stressor. This year, Nevada experienced the most heat-related emergency room visits since the state began recording them in 2020, according to data obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Preliminary numbers show that there were 4,014 of them — close to a 42 percent increase from 2023. The ends of more than 400 lives in the summer heat look quite different — some suffered because of their age, drug use or lack of housing. Some seem foretold because of risk factors, and others seem random and senseless. But they all have one thing in common: The punishing desert heat was either the primary cause of their death, or a contributing factor.

“Heat illness is a continuum of dysfunction of the body,” Clark County Coroner Melanie Rouse said. At 79, Judy Reiber was healthy, save a bout of breast cancer in 2002 that she had overcome. Mostly retired, she worked part time at the Nathan Adelson Hospice as a nurse, comforting the most vulnerable in their final moments. She spent time each day sunbathing and reading fiction on her patio in east Henderson. Her home, where she lived with her second husband, was plucked out of a tropical postcard — a way to honor her upbringing in Florida. “It’s a Florida girl thing,” Tim Reiber said. “Florida girls love to sunbathe.”

One of the risk factors for heat-related deaths is old age, according to Dr. Ketan Patel of the emergency department at University Medical Center. As people get older, their bodies are less resilient to intense heat, he said. They might have underlying conditions or take prescription drugs that have this effect, as well. When Tim Reiber, a lead baker at MGM Grand on the Strip, came home home from the night shift on a Thursday morning, he gave Judy a kiss — one he now remembers as extra sweet. When he woke up hours later, he did not hear the typical sound of her bath running in the other room. Catching a glimpse of her blistered body collapsed on the ground, he ran outside and called 911. Some glimmers of hope remained amid the panic — he performed CPR until he heard his wife’s ribs crack. Then, the reality set in: His wife of nearly 30 years was gone.

In the immediate aftermath of losing his soulmate, when police investigators arrived, Tim Reiber was a murder suspect. How could an otherwise healthy woman slip away in a flash? He knew the menacing desert heat had to be the culprit, and his suspicions were confirmed when the coroner’s report arrived eight weeks later. “What can you do? Someone had to go first,” Tim Reiber said through tears. “Now I know why so many men die first, because you don’t want to be left.” It reached 113 degrees on June 6, according to the autopsy report — one of the hottest days in a summer that would see temperatures skyrocket alongside heat-related deaths. Climate change increased the likelihood of that day’s average temperature fivefold, according to science communications firm Climate Central.

This summer, nighttime offered no reprieve from the punishing heat of the day. When comparing two 30-year periods of weather data, the number of abnormally hot nights in Las Vegas has grown 179 percent — the most of any of the fastest-growing metro areas in the country, according to a New York Times analysis of National Weather Service data. In June and July, every night except for seven hovered above 79 degrees. July dealt Las Vegas some nights that didn’t dip below 94 degrees. In a “city that never sleeps,” as Patel put it, that’s a problem for people consistently outdoors in the summer. It’s a concerning phenomenon to doctors and officials alike, especially for the city’s homeless population, which grew 20 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a point-in-time census conducted by outreach organizations. “There’s no relief,” Patel said. “You just can’t get a complete break from it or avoid it.”

With nothing — or a tent if they are lucky — between them and the scorching sun, the homeless population is disproportionately affected by the heat. At least 62 homeless people were reported to have died in 2023 from heat alone, said Louis Lacey, director of HELP of Southern Nevada. Others suffered serious pavement burns and injuries. “The heat is amazing,” Lacey said in an interview in July while giving out water and offering resources to people on the streets. “I’ve never seen it this hot, and I’ve been here since 1972. It’s been hot, yes, but something on this magnitude, no.” Diane Schryver, 65, had been surviving on the streets of Las Vegas for decades. One hot day this August killed her. Schryver was discharged Aug. 5 from Valley Hospital Medical Center, where she had checked in for a brain injury a week before. Hospital workers handed her a bus ticket to get to a nearby shelter.

Confused and wandering the streets, she died two days later. “She was a sweetheart, but she was headstrong,” her sister Sallie Schryver said. “She always tried to do good by everybody.” The two sisters’ lives diverged as they got older — Diane Schryver and her family in Las Vegas had struggled with housing for several years, and Sallie Schryver lived in California. “She was just caught in a rut, like so many people in this country,” Sallie Schryver said of her sister’s struggle with housing. When Sallie Schryver spoke to her on Aug. 5, she said Diane Schryver had struggled to remember facts like why she was in the hospital, the name of her sister’s son or where she lived. So when Sallie Schryver learned that her sister had been discharged just a few hours later, she was bewildered.

“They just opened those doors wide open so that she could walk right out there to her death,” Sallie Schryver said. The events of her discharge are unclear, with Sallie Schryver believing it was because of an overcrowded hospital. Hospitals do experience more incidents in the summer, but both UMC and Valley said they remained properly staffed.