LAS VEGAS — There’s a deeper meaning inside T-Mobile Arena when the Vegas Golden Knights take the ice, for family members sitting in Section 11, Row L, Seats 1 and 2.
Aaron and Rhonda Hawley have occupied their season tickets since the Knights’ inception into the NHL in the 2017-18 season.
They vividly remember the Oct. 1 shooting not too long after a preseason game in 2017, because they received a call from their daughter Ashley, who was attending the University of Oregon.
“The shooting, my nephew was there with his new girlfriend,” Rhonda Hawley said. “I actually got the phone call from Ashley up in Oregon, because he called her. They were like brother and sister, and it hadn’t even hit the news.
“The Golden Knights, even now, but back then, meant the world to us. It gave us a place to go. It gave us something positive going on.”
Little did they realize how much they’d lean on the 31st NHL franchise six months later.
It was March 29, 2018 when their 17-year-old daughter Brooke and her two classmates, Dylan Mack and A.J. Rossi, were killed after police said 27-year-old Bani Duarte slammed into their red Toyota at an intersection on the Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach, California.
Two days later, Section 11, Row L, Seats 1 and 2 were a temporary salve to a lifetime wound that will seemingly never heal.
“I miss my daughter, it doesn’t change,” Hawley told The Hockey News on Tuesday. “But again, (the Golden Knights are) a common positive, and there’s not a lot of common positives in this. Six degrees of Brooke. Everywhere I go, I run into something that was tied to her. And although the Knights were, it was also tied to us, and our community, and our family.
“So it feels like our team and our place to go for positive.”
When told about the Hawley’s story, original Golden Knight Brayden McNabb was touched he was part of a team that could provide healing for a family dealing with such a tragedy.
“That’s awesome hearing that, that’s pretty cool to hear,” McNabb said during an event for Oct. 1 first responders and their families held at the team facility. “I’m just happy that we could help put a smile on her face in hard times. That first year was special, just on ice and off the ice. To hear that, I’m very honored to be able to be a part of that team and to help out the community as we could.”
Rhonda Hawley said she had always been amazed how the community leaned on the Golden Knights after the Oct. 1 shooting. She never dreamed the same adoration an entire city had in its time of need would be directed towards her family after losing her youngest daughter to the mindless act of another person.
“We were still grieving (with) everything that was going on with October 1 when Brooke was killed,” Hawley said. “The team doing what they did for the city was tremendous and it gave some place for everybody to go.
“The first thing we did (two) days after Brooke was killed was go to a Golden Knights playoff game. And I know a lot of people didn’t understand it back then, but you didn’t want to go home. You didn’t know what to do, but that was someplace to go. It was something that we had with them, with the team, with our family and our friends when we had met so many people that are still season ticket holders around us. It never dawned on us not to go. We needed to be someplace. And it was comfort. It made sense to go there.”
Rhonda Hawley said the overwhelming support from other season ticket holders, in addition to everything that had taken place with Oct. 1, cemented everybody around them in their section as a community.
And while she added she’s “still in a fog” over those first few weeks, she still remembers the feeling of comfort whenever she arrives at T-Mobile Arena.
“It just spilled over to us when we had to deal with what we had to deal with,” Hawley said. “We watched them win the Stanley Cup. We took our kids to that Game 5. Everybody around us is crying. We’re crying because they won, but we’re crying too because we started with them. It was very emotional to watch but for more reasons than just this town.
“They saved us that first year, that first season, in more ways than a lot of people understand. It gave us something to cheer for, it gave us something to look forward to. And it gave our family something to do together when that was super hard.”
