‘Resilience Center’ opens to heal
Buoyed by student art, service offers counseling, resources for those still feeling effects of Garlic Festival tragedy
GILROY » After the media vans had moved on and Christmas Hill Park finally re-opened in the wake of the July mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, a community was left to mourn those who died, and devote their attention to those who were wounded.
Thousands of residents invested immense emotional capital trying to bring normalcy back to their world, and put off their own trauma to help restore their city’s spirit.
With those examples in mind, Santa Clara County’s criminal victim advocates launched the Gilroy Strong Resilience Center, which opened Jan. 28 in the city’s downtown.
“Grief and trauma don’t obey a timeline,” said Kasey Halcon, program director for Santa Clara County’s Victim Services Unit. “Oftentimes victims don’t know what they’re looking for, or where the nearest services are. When you’ve had a trauma, it’s hard to seek those out.”
The center, spearheaded by Halcon’s office, will initially be open Tuesday and Thursday evenings at the Neon Exchange in downtown Gilroy, and offer individual and group counseling, trauma education, and help with applying for public funds set aside for victim compensation.
In April, organizers hope to expand the center by adding therapy services and increasing availability.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen said at the Jan. 28 opening that it was essential to provide an ongoing resource, to accommodate the varying ways in which residents, first responders, and other affected people coped with the festival shooting.
“We will be here to serve every single member of the community impacted by the Gilroy shooting,” Rosen said. “From one terrible minute of chaos can come an enduring and powerful sense of community.”
The launch of the resource center was anchored around the results of the DA’S annual “Justice For All” high school art contest, which solicited students’ visual interpretations of the #Gilroystrong slogan that became a rallying cry after the July 28 outburst of gunfire on the final hours of the final day of the 2019 garlic festival.
Three people — 6-year-old Stephen Romero, 13-year-old Keyla Salazar and 25-year-old Trevor Irby — were killed and 19 others were injured.
The gunman, 19-year-old Santino Legan, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the scene.
His motives remain unclear. Contest winner Ana-gabriela Cadena, a 17-year-old senior at Lincoln High School in San Jose, earned first-place recognition for her art piece portraying a woman standing with her fist in the air, amid a field of garlic bulbs, headlined by a #Gilroystrong logo, with a backdrop of a sunset that subtly incorporated a city map of Gilroy.
“I really wanted my piece to focus not on violence at all, but unity,” Ana-gabriela said.
Second-place honors went to
Isabella Kimerer, Sarah Wright and Jodi Fields, three freshmen at Ann Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill.
Their piece, portraying hands grasping with Gilroy City Hall in the background, contains the message, “Stronger today. Stronger tomorrow. Stronger together.”
Gilroy resident Jasmine Martinez, 15, a sophomore at Dr. TJ Owens Gilroy Early College Academy, took third place for her painting of smiling garlic bulbs bounded by “Gilroy Strong.” Jasmine was at the garlic festival the day of the shooting but left before the violence erupted.
“We really had to become unified
Clean water cost-sharing
and let each other know we’re all there for each other in this tragedy,” she said.
That the new center is being run during the evenings is by design, in recognition of residents’ feedback given Gilroy’s role as a bedroom community for much of the Bay Area.
“We want to be here when the people are here,” Halcon said.
It also dovetails with the revitalization of the space that is now the Neon Exchange. Owner Toni Bowles, a career employee with the Superior Court system, was restoring the once-dilapidated property when in a bout of serendipity, she came into contact with the DA’S office, which was looking for a place to house the resource center.
“It was a healing process to taking something to broken and heal it,” Bowles said, referring to the space. “This was a perfect blend of interests.”
Gilroy Strong Resiliency Center
Services will be offered Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Neon Exchange, 7365 Monterey Road in Gilroy.
The center can be reached via a hotline at 408-209-8356, as well as by email at gilroystrong@dao.sccgov.org, or at the Facebook profile “GSRC.DAO”.
Contact Robert Salonga at 408920-5002.