Coroner: California festival gunman killed himself
LOS ANGELES — The gunman who opened fire on a California food festival killed himself after officers shot him multiple times, officials said Friday, correcting previous police accounts that the officers fired the fatal bullet.
Police gave the update soon after the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office said 19-year-old Santino William Legan died of a selfinflicted gunshot wound.
Legan killed three people — including two children — and injured 13 others at the popular Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday. Authorities say they have not yet been able to determine his motive.
Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee told reporters that the timeline remains the same: Three veteran police officers responded in less than a minute and fired multiple rounds when Legan turned his AK-47-style semi-automatic rifle on them. Smithee said the officers hit him multiple times and he fell to the ground with the rifle.
“He was able to get one more round off, and he was able to shoot himself in the head,” the police chief said.
The chief did not know how many times police fired at him, or how many bullets struck him. A full coroner’s report is pending.
Legan killed 6-yearold Stephen Romero and 13-year-old Keyla Salazar of San Jose, along with Trevor Irby, 25, of Romulus, New York, on the last day of the long-running festival. It draws more than 100,000 people to the city roughly 80 miles southeast of San Francisco.
John Bennett, the FBI’s special agent in charge in San Francisco, has said Legan did not appear to be targeting a particular group and that he did not seem to follow a specific ideology.
Legan’s social media raised questions after he urged his Instagram followers on the day of the attack to read a 19th-century book popular with white supremacists on extremist websites.
Officials say their investigation has not shown that anyone else was involved.
But authorities arrested a man earlier this week on suspicion of making threats online that apparently referenced the deadly shooting. Jose Pinon, 40, of Gilroy, posted Wednesday on Facebook that “my goal is to kill 500, not three,” Gilroy police said. Police Capt. Joseph Deras said officials did not seize any weapons from Pinon’s home Thursday and do not believe he was planning an attack.