Activist for disabled dies of liver disease

Vincent Triggs, who dedicated his life to helping the disabled in Southern Nevada, died Tuesday from complications of liver disease. He was 59.

Triggs, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and moved to Las Vegas in 1975 to teach severely developmentally disabled and emotionally disturbed children.

His willingness to help others started at an early age, said his wife, Jonna Triggs, when one of his eight younger siblings couldn't read.

The school district had written him off as retarded, but Vincent Triggs patiently helped his brother learn to read, she said.

"It was always in him," Jonna Triggs said. "He just liked to see people maximize their potential. He didn't want their impediments to hold them back."

In 1981 Vincent Triggs culled support from city, county and state politicians to build the nonprofit Nevada Association for the Handicapped, which became Easter Seals Southern Nevada in 2004.

He served as the organizations executive director for 23 years until a falling out with Easter Seals, his wife said.

Four months later he had a heart attack.

"He missed it," she said. "It was his baby."

He served two terms as a state assemblyman from 1986 to 1990.

During that time he helped create the Nevada Commission on Substance Abuse Education, Treatment and Enforcement, and co-sponsored legislation creating the Mental Health and Developmental Services Commission.

When Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman took office in 1999, Vincent Triggs served in his "kitchen cabinet" of minority advisers as the representative of the disabled community.

Vincent Triggs believed the disabled should be integrated into the rest of the community, Jonna Triggs said.

"He truly believed everybody had value," she said. "He worked for true integration, not in an institution or some sheltered workshop, but working next to us and doing what they could do."