The killer: Police name 19yearold from wellknown South Bay family
The sleepy town of Gilroy was reeling Monday in the aftermath of a mass shooting at its famed garlic festival, where three young people — a 6yearold boy, a teenage girl and a recent college graduate — were killed by an assailant identified as a man who grew up in the area.
Police said the shooter was 19yearold Santino William Legan, who came from a longtime, wellknown South Bay family. Legan fired an assault rifle into the crowds Sunday evening near the festival food court, police said, injuring a dozen people in addition to the three who died,
before police shot and killed him.
Law enforcement officials and witnesses said the number of casualties could have been tenfold greater if the gunman had not been subdued by three responding officers minutes after the shooting began. The Gilroy Garlic Festival is the area’s most famous event and draws enormous crowds — around 100,000 over three days, almost double the population of the city of Gilroy.
The Santa Clara County Medical Examiner identified 6yearold Stephen Romero and 13yearold Keyla Salazar, both of San Jose, as victims. The county had not released the name of the third victim, but Keuka College in New York identified him as 25yearold Trevor Irby, a 2017 graduate who studied biology.
“Any time a life is lost, it’s a tragedy, but when it’s young people, it’s even worse, and it’s very difficult,” said Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee at a news conference Monday.
The semiautomatic rifle used in the attack was an AK47type weapon that Legan purchased legally in Nevada on July 9, according to Smithee. However, it was illegal to bring the WASR10 rifle to California, a federal lawenforcement source told The Chronicle.
Witnesses reported a second perpetrator in the shooting. Police were investigating leads Monday as to the second person’s identity and role in the attack, Smithee said. It does not appear that the second person fired any shots.
Police took a 20yearold man into custody Monday after he claimed on social media that he was involved in the shooting, but Smithee said authorities determined that his story was false.
Smithee said Legan and a companion entered the festival, held at the 55acre Christmas Hill Park, through a creek and cut through a perimeter fence to avoid metal detectors. Witnesses said Legan was wearing camouflage clothes and a protective vest.
Monday afternoon, authorities found the vehicle Legan drove to the festival parked about a mile from the site, on Laurel Drive, according to Smithee.
The motive for the shooting is unclear. The FBI is determining whether Legan had any ideological aims or was involved with any problematic groups, said Craig Fair, a deputy special agent with the FBI.
“The crime scene is much more expansive than we originally thought,” Fair said.
A witness to the shooting, Jack van Breen, singer with the band Tin Man, said he saw a man with a rifle fire into the food area, Associated Press reported. Van Breen dove under the stage where the band had been about to play. He said he heard someone shout: “Why are you doing this?” and the reply: “Because I’m really angry.”
Legan graduated from Gilroy High School, and much of his family still resides in Gilroy. He had been living in Walker Lake, Nev., a rural area southeast of Reno near the California state line. Mineral County sheriff ’s deputies and the FBI searched an apartment believed to be Legan’s on Monday.
An Instagram account under Legan’s name showed a photo of the festival with the caption, “Ayyy garlic festival time Come get wasted on overpriced s—.” The photo was posted less than an hour before police received their first calls reporting the shooting.
A second photo, posted around the same time, showed a sign that read, “Fire Danger High Today,” with a caption encouraging people to read “Might is Right or the Survival of the Fittest,” by Ragnar Redbeard. The book, published in 1890 by a pseudonymous author, is widely considered a manifesto on white supremacy.
The Instagram account was taken down after the shooting, and the photos are no longer visible.
Police descended on the Legan home in Gilroy early Monday. Neighbors said Santino Legan’s parents lived in a gray house on the 300 block of Churchill Place, a culdesac less than 2 miles from the garlic festival site. Tacked to a fence in front of the house is a wooden sign that reads, “Beyond this place there be dragons.”
A man walked out of the house at about 7:30 a.m., covered his face, jumped into a bluegray pickup truck and drove off. Half an hour later, three police officers began searching a slategray Nissan Altima — registered to Thomas Michael Legan — parked outside the residence. Officers searched the trunk and interior of the vehicle but did not appear to remove anything.
They left the home at about 8:15 a.m. carrying bags of evidence.
Earlier in the morning, the street was quiet aside from neighbors occasionally coming out of their homes. In addition to the parents, three or four boys also live at the house, said Elia Scettrina, 65.
Scettrina said she moved onto the street in 1999, shortly before the Legan family arrived in the neighborhood. She said her children used to play with the suspect and his siblings when they were younger.
“I’m shocked that this is happening,” Scettrina said. “They’re a very, very nice family.”
Legan’s grandfather, Tom Legan, was a former Santa Clara County supervisor who served in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1987, Tom Legan and three other Santa Clara County supervisors were sentenced to 10 days in jail and fined $2,000 for violating a judge’s order to provide more jail cells for male inmates. In 1998, his eldest daughter accused him of molestation. A jury found him not guilty.
Prior to public office, Tom Legan served as a U.S. Army captain in the Korean War. He died on May 31, 2018.
Santino Legan’s brother, Rosino Legan, was a renowned high school boxer in Watsonville. In 2014, he competed in the USA Boxing National Championships in Spokane, Wash.
At the festival site Monday morning, the entrance road was blocked with orange cones and police tape. Dozens of cars remained in the vendor and volunteer parking lot. Witnesses gathered nearby, many of them revisiting the chaos of the previous night — of people fleeing the food court, of children dropping to the ground as gunshots popped all around them.
Rhonda Brandt, a United Airlines mechanic from San Jose who has worked in her friend’s booth at the festival for 20 years, said she saw the shooter reloading and later saw police dragging his body. Brandt echoed what local officials confirmed Monday: Hundreds of people could have died.
“I could have been dead. That shooter could have killed a lot more people than he did. I’m in awe that I’m alive,” said Brandt, 63. “I know that I have angels floating around me.”
Seven of the 12 people injured in the shooting were taken to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose; the victims ranged from age 12 to 69. As of Monday afternoon, one patient had been discharged and one had been transferred to Stanford. The remaining patients’ conditions ranged from fair to critical, according to the medical center.
Six people were taken to St. Louise Regional Medical Center in Gilroy with gunshot wounds, according to the hospital. One of those patients died. The rest have been discharged. Eight other people were treated and released for nongunshot injuries.
Relatives of Stephen Romero said his mother and grandmother were also injured in the shooting.
Dr. Adella Garland, the trauma medical director at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, said injuries sustained from a “highenergy” weapon like the assault rifle used at the garlic festival can be particularly difficult to treat because the damage can be extensive and radiate like a “shock wave” beyond the obvious wound site.
She added that treating children can be especially challenging, physically and emotionally.
“There is a poignant feeling you get when there is a child who is injured. It’s a time of innocence lost,” Garland said. “Before that time they were thinking about how garlic ice cream would taste, and now their lives are changed forever.”
On Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom visited several of the wounded, including Stephen’s grandmother, at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. He also met with a 12yearold girl who told him she had been shot in the leg while playing in a jump house.
“There was a 12yearold shot who smiled when I walked into the room. I asked, ‘How are you smiling? You just got shot,’ ” Newsom said. “And she starts describing the courage as she was running away after she was shot and kept running. And here she is, comforting the governor.”
Newsom said he was appalled by the violence “at a festival that all of us who grew up in the Bay Area know well.” He said gun laws need to change, but so does the culture of hate.
“The Gilroy community will mourn, but we will get through it,” said Mayor Roland Velasco. “We are resilient. We will get through this. This morning, our prayers are with the families of those injured and killed in the senseless shooting.”