A loving father lost in San Jose VTA shooting.
Terra Fritch first met her future husband, Alex Fritch, at the country Saddle Rack Bar when it was in San Jose through mutual friends.
“He had noticed me but I had not noticed him,” Terra said. Still, after a few Fridays at the bar together she asked him to dance, bonding over their shared love for riding dirt bikes. He left that day without her number, but a few weeks later they reconnected anyway.
“He and I both knew on our first date,” she said. “We didn’t want it to end.”
They had their first kiss on the beach in Santa Cruz that night. Six months later they were married. They were inseparable, Terra said, right up to the moment nurses made room for her to lay in bed with her husband, holding him in her arms one last time as his heart stopped on
Wednesday, killed in a mass shooting at the VTA rail yard where he had worked as a substation manger.
Fifteen hours after he was shot, Alex Ward Fritch, 49, became the ninth victim of a tragedy that has ripped apart families from Tracy
through San Jose and Santa Cruz. But before that, he was a devoted father who supported Terra through multiple spinal surgeries, who loved his three kids and who worked overtime as his family’s sole financial provider. A GoFundMe page was created
to support the family.
He had a 30-year-old daughter from a previous relationship plus two sons, 16 and 18 years old, with Terra, one of whom is transgender.
“He stood right there by him and loves him and supported him no matter what,” she said. “He was our rock for this family.”
He leaves behind a legacy that includes Fred and Ginger’s Exotic Cocktail Bar and Lounge, the tiki bar he built in their covered back patio and named after a pair of decorative parrots they picked up on vacation in Mexico, he told the blog Tiki with Ray.
A lover of midcentury design who dreamed of living in — or even building — an Eichler home, Alex took to the tiki bar community with gusto, even going to a tiki bar crawl in Sacramento.
“He was the life of the party. Always there with a friendly quip, a kind word, or to make a funny face when you’re taking a selfie,” fellow tiki aficionado Kevin Crossman wrote. “I had finally found a friend to nerd out with on this rum and cocktail stuff. Now he’s gone.”
He’s gone and Terra is left grappling with the senselessness of his death. They own guns, she said, but wants owners to have to be responsible for how their weapons are used. It’s something she and Alex discussed often.
“I’m sick and tired of people saying something needs to change and then not doing something about it,” she said. “We have to go through more hoops to get a driver’s license than we need a gun.”
Now what’s left is what he won’t be able to do. His oldest son graduates next week, without his dad. Alex and Terra were going to Hawaii for the first time in September to renew their vows after two decades together — “he was trying to get in shape so he’d look good in the pictures,” Terra said.
“We had something that people dream of, we had that fairy-tale relationship,” she said. “We were literally each others’ best friends and I don’t know how I’m going to move on but I’m going to take it second by second and just keep remembering to breathe.”