Coroner releases causes of death in Gilroy Garlic Festival shootings

Two of the Gilroy Garlic Festival victims died of gunshot wounds to the chest and a third died of a wound to the back, the Santa Clara County coroner’s office said Monday.

The deaths of Stephen Romero, 6, Keyla Salazar, 13, and Trevor Irby, 25, were classified as homicides by the coroner. Thirteen other people were injured during the rampage at the annual festival.

Salazar and Irby suffered what the coroner called perforating gunshot wounds to their chests, meaning the bullets completely passed through their bodies. Romero suffered a perforating gunshot wound to his back.

The gunman, Santino William Legan, 19, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head administered through the mouth, the coroner announced late last week. That con

tradicted an earlier police report that Legan had been fataly shot by three Gilroy Police Department officers who responded to the scene in less than a minute.

In an updated chronology presented during a Friday news conference, Gilroy

Police Chief Scot Smithee said officers shot Legan when they arrived, bringing him to his knees and then down on the ground. Legan shot himself at some point during that confrontation.

Smithee said he doesn’t yet know how many times the shooter was struck by the officers and also said there’s no evidence bystanders were shot by police

during the exchange.

It’s still unclear what motivated Legan to attack the festival with an AK-47-style rifle July 28. In a since-removed Instagram post made shortly before the shooting, Legan encouraged people to read a 19thcentury white supremacist manifesto popular with right-wing extremists.

Since the attack at the Gilroy festival, 31 people have been killed and at least 53 injured in mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. The attack in El Paso is being treated as a domestic terrorism incident by the Justice Department.