Ashley Powers

AURORA, Colo. - They began arriving hours before the prayer vigil began Sunday, lugging shattered hearts as a thunderstorm crackled and light rain fell.

By the time thousands had gathered outside Aurora’s City Hall amid noticeably tight security, the sun had penetrated the clouds and the day’s stifling heat had lifted.

As authorities continued to amass evidence in Friday’s massacre inside an Aurora movie theater, Coloradans sought strength in the face of madness, packing church services and coming together as a community to remember the 12 who died.

BAKER, Nev. -- Once a year, the sheepmen -- white-haired, crinkly-eyed, some using walkers -- pack into a cafe to share stories of herding bull-headed sheep amid furious snowstorms here in Nevada's Snake Valley, a forlorn patch of desert on the border with Utah.

LAS VEGAS -- In this casino town partly built on gangster money, it's a sentiment you hear with some frequency: "Things were better when the mob ran Vegas."

It conveys a certain wistfulness for the smaller, ostensibly friendlier city where, decades ago, locals shrugged at mobsters' running casinos and reinventing themselves as civic leaders. Sports handicapper Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal hosted a television show. Bootlegger Moe Dalitz helped build a hospital.

The city began formally cashing in on its mafia legacy Tuesday with the opening of the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement -- better known as the Mob Museum.

LAS VEGAS -- Their time together was so brief.

Michelle Mitchell was at a sober-living home here, trying to halt a two decade-cycle of crack cocaine and prostitution. Her daughter Miracle, a bundle of energy in pink Velcro sneakers, tornadoed through the kitchen.

LAS VEGAS -- The Ballard house was as unassuming as any in the stucco outskirts of Las Vegas: a two-story box the color of an oatmeal cookie. Police charged inside one night searching for a domestic violence suspect. Instead, they smelled something skunky.

Marijuana. Lots of it.

LAS VEGAS -- Marisela Quintero read the headline. She winced, as if she'd been punched.

Emma had been killed.

Emma was 17. She had recently been arrested on prostitution-related charges in a Motel 6 parking lot, wearing a skin-hugging tank top, high heels and booty shorts. She'd flashed a fake driver's license and, in her purse, carried eight latex condoms and a bottle of vodka.

RENO, Nev. -- Federal investigators, in their first official report on the deadly Reno air races crash, said Friday that photos and witness accounts indicate that a tail piece on the souped-up P-51 Mustang broke off around the time the aircraft pitched violently skyward. The crash at the Reno-Stead Airport killed the pilot and 10 spectators and injured 74 others, most of them seriously, the National Transportation Safety Board said in the report. On Friday, 11 people remained hospitalized, two of them in critical condition.