Suspect: Gilroy High grad from longtime county family had lived in Nevada, police say
Santino William Legan, the 19-yearold identified by police as the teen who shot dead three people Sunday evening at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, was a 2017 graduate of Gilroy High School who bought an assault rifle legally in Nevada this month and apparently cut through a security fence to carry out the seemingly random killings.
FBI agents early Monday raided an apartment linked to Legan in a remote town in Nevada’s Mineral County.
Legan opened fire with what police described as an SKS AK-47-style rifle at the close of the three-day festival before he was killed in an exchange of gunfire with three Gilroy police officers.
The three people killed were a 6-year-old San Jose boy named Stephen Romero, 13-year-old Keyla Salazar of San Jose, and Trevor Irby, 25, from New York. More than a dozen others were wounded.
Legan comes from an established Santa Clara County family. His late grandfather, Tom Legan, was a twoterm county supervisor, the sole Republican on the board at the time, and a former engineer and a Kaiser Cement executive. As a supervisor, Legan lost a reelection bid in 1988 after a jury acquitted him on charges of molesting a young female relative.
The extended Legan family also gained prominence in the region through the award-winning Kukar’s House of Pizza, founded by George Kukar, the late husband of Tom Legan’s aunt.
At a news conference Monday morning, Gilroy police Chief Scot Smithee said the attack “seems like a random act” but authorities have a “long way to go” with their investigation. The chief described the shooter’s gun as “an AK47-type assault rifle that had been purchased legally in Nevada on July 9.”
In a post on an Instagram page days
before the shooting, a user identified as Santino William Legan told followers, “Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard” — an apparent reference to the racist manifesto “Might is Right or The Survival of the Fittest,” written in 1890. The work, penned under a pseudonym, has become a key part of the modern white supremacist and neo-Nazi canon, and is frequently mentioned on extremist websites.
In the Instagram post, which has since been taken down, the writer also used racial and misogynistic slurs to describe “hordes” of Silicon Valley workers and people of mixed race origin “overcrowding” towns. The post was accompanied by a photo of a Smokey Bear sign warning of high fire danger. In a post dated Sunday, the writer referenced the Gilroy festival. “Ayyy garlic festival,” the post read. “Come get wasted on overpriced (expletive).”
Neighbors said Legan, who had three brothers, had lived in his parents’ twostory suburban home not far from the site of the Garlic Festival. Outside the home Monday, two cats were lying in front of the garage door near a scratching post. Family members worked out regularly in a gym in their garage, according to neighbor Elia Scettrini, who described Legan’s father as a devoted parent.
Scettrini said she last saw Santino Legan about a week ago and raised her hand to say hello. “You don’t know what’s going through the minds of people,” Scettrini said.
However, police said Monday that Legan had been living in Nevada, but it was not immediately clear when he returned to Gilroy, or whether he was staying or living at his parents’ house at the time of the shooting.
The District Attorney’s Office in Mineral County, Nevada, said FBI agents early Monday raided a unit in a triplex in Walker Lake that Legan was believed to have used “during the days prior” to the Gilroy shootings.
A property manager at a triplex that public records linked to Legan said he rented out a unit three months ago to a man between the ages of 19 and 25, who showed up with no furniture and hardly any belongings except a computer, saying he worked in online tech support. The renter didn’t use the name Santino Legan when he moved in, according to the property manager, who would not give his own name or the name his renter used. The renter paid for three months upfront, the manager said.
Walker Lake, about two hours south of Reno, is the kind of place where residents leave each other alone, the property manager said. “I don’t think anybody knows anybody,” he said, “because they’re there to get away from everybody else. We have scorpions, we have rattlesnakes on the property. We have bears that have been picked up on the property. Walker Lake is not a place for a person who doesn’t like the outdoors to live. You have to seek it out. I even told him this is not the right place for you. Move into town.”
One of Legan’s brothers, Rosino, was listed by the U.S. national boxing team as a lightweight fighter in 2015, when at age 17 he won one bout and lost one in the elite class at the USA Boxing national championship that year. Rosino Legan, according to a 2017 Gilroy Dispatch article, sparred with Santino and two other brothers, Nick and Carlo, and their father, Tom, in a boxing ring set up in the family’s garage.
Jerome Turcan, who said he trained Rosino in boxing and martial arts, told the Los Angeles Times that when he heard on the radio that there had been a shooting in Gilroy, he called Rosino. Turcan recalled that Rosino told him he was in the car with his cousin, searching for his little brother, Santino, according to the Times. Rosino couldn’t find his brother and was thinking of going to the emergency room. “They wanted to be sure he was OK. That was the last contact I had with him,” Turcan said. “And then I learned this morning it was Santino who did the shooting.”