Gilroy Garlic Festival victims seek to understand shooting
It was the smell of garlic wafting through my San Jose neighborhood last week that triggered the memory.
Olfactory experts say the sense of smell is far stronger than most people realize and revives powerful memories. Scents are the only sensations that travel a direct path to the emotional and memory centers of the brain. The result is an intimate connection that can bring people to tears — or evoke instant fear.
So it should come as no surprise that the smell last week instantly brought back thoughts of the Gilroy Garlic Festival and the mass shooting last summer that left the gunman and three other people dead and 17 wounded.
Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the tragedy. Bay Area residents are still trying to come to grips with the senselessness of it all. The healing process seems all that much harder because the coronavirus pandemic forced festival organizers to cancel this year’s event.
My family loves the Garlic Festival. We love the food. We love the family atmosphere, and we especially love that all the profits go directly to charity.
My wife, my daughter and I had attended the festival the afternoon before the shooting. We spent time where the victims were killed. That’s right. Had we gone a day later, we could have been victims.
If the smell of garlic caused a flashback to the festival, I can’t imagine what it’s like for those who were wounded at the event.
Or for the families who lost loved ones. Or for the hundreds of terrified people who were within range of the shooter and managed to run to safety.
It’s not just smell that evokes memories, said Sylvia Mata of the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Victims Services Unit. The day after the shooting she helped set up the Gilroy Family Assistance Center at Rucker Elementary School, five miles from the Christmas Hill Park site of the Garlic Festival.
“I’ve heard from people that sounds can be triggering. The sound of sirens, the sound of helicopters, the sound of fireworks.”
Some victims report going to grocery stores or malls and finding they are constantly looking for exits. Others have trouble sleeping or can’t focus at work.
“For some people, the idea of going back to the park is unbearable,” said Mata. “That’s understandable. But it’s also the time to ask for help. Avoidance delays your healing. It’s important to talk to counselors who can help guide people through their problems. We have found that creating a safe place where people can talk about trauma with other people who were there is helpful.”
The family assistance center was open for 12 consecutive days and offered counseling and other services for more than 750 people. The counseling continues at the Gilroy Strong Resilience Center on Main Street in Gilroy.
The Resilience Center is holding a memorial event Tuesday
to remember the victims and honor the police who saved dozens of lives by responding within minutes of the shooting. The memorial will be livestreamed at 5:15 p.m. Tuesday on Youtube live at youtu. BE/ZRH3Y8PBNAY and through Facebook Live at facebook.com/ GSRC.DAO.
“We’ve learned that the pain the community feels doesn’t go away a week after the shooting or a month after the shooting,” said James Gibbons-shapiro, the Santa Clara County assistant DA who leads the Victims Care Unit. “It continues for long periods of time and especially so on and around anniversaries.
“First and foremost, I hope the families of those who lost their lives, the people who themselves were victims of the shooting, feel like we haven’t moved on. We are feeling their pain and honoring them for the sacrifices they made. And I’m hoping the broader Gilroy community and the broader Bay Area community can feel some healing through this event.”
I plan to livestream the event, and I hope you do, too. And I hope the tragedy doesn’t deter people from returning to the Garlic Festival when the pandemic ends and it’s safe to venture to community events again.
In the meantime, we should also work to offer the mental health programs and gun control laws that will help lessen or end the mass shootings that cause the kind of tragedy witnessed in Gilroy. It’s the least we can do for those who lost their lives at the festival.