It’s late July in Gilroy, and Christmas Hill Park is unrecognizable.
Bicyclists roll through the Uvas Creek levee trail, passing by people pushing strollers or being pulled by their dogs. Young children don their rollerblades as they make their way around the playground, with their parents watching on.
A construction crew digs deep into foundation work on the Miller Red Barn, funded by a series of grants to restore the historic structure. Few remnants remain of a staging area set up for fire personnel fighting a blaze northwest of the city.
During any other late July, Christmas Hill Park would be undergoing a transformation. Tents and stages would be popping up, with hundreds of volunteers scurrying this way and that, all with the smell of garlic in the air.
The Gilroy Garlic Festival is not returning this year.
A year after tragedy ripped the soul out of the city’s most beloved gathering, there is no closure in Gilroy.
For the families of the three lives lost, no amount of thoughts and prayers or compensation will ever heal the deep wounds caused by a deranged individual with deathly intentions.
For those attendees who suffered permanent physical and mental scars, they are constantly reliving those traumas they experienced that day in 2019.
For everyone in Gilroy, Covid-19 robbed them of the chance to make new memories of the festival in 2020, healing from the horrors of the 2019 event’s final minutes. Future health and financial concerns make them wonder if they will ever walk through Gourmet Alley again.
On July 28, 2019, as the sun began to set on the last day of the festival, a 19-year-old gunman burst into the grounds, killing three—Trevor Irby, Keyla Salazar and Stephen Romero—and injuring at least 17 others.
The chaos, confusion, anger and sadness continues to be felt this day. But the Gilroy community has shown resilience amidst the tragedy.
Donors contributed nearly $2 million to a victims relief fund in the month after the shooting. The Gilroy Strong Resiliency Center opened in downtown in January, providing free counseling and other services to those affected.
There is a renewed sense of pride in Gilroy and a connectedness among its residents. We all went through this together in one way or another.
On the one-year anniversary of the shooting that forever changed the course of Gilroy, and while we are in a global crisis of which none of us have ever experienced, let’s continue supporting one another, while battling the underlying societal issues that plague our country.
“Gilroy Strong” shouldn’t just be a slogan on social media. It must be a way of life that is dedicated to instilling change in all of us, one person and city at a time.
