6-year-old boy among victims in California food festival shooting
A festival crowd scattered into panic as gunfire tore through the closing night of Gilroy’s biggest annual celebration.
The 41st Gilroy Garlic Festival was winding down its final evening at Christmas Hill Park on July 28, 2019, when a gunman opened fire on the crowd, killing three people and wounding at least 15 others. CBS Mornings correspondent Janet Shamlian reported that six of the wounded were being treated at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose as authorities pieced together how the attacker got past festival security.
- Three people were killed — 6-year-old Stephen Romero, a 13-year-old girl, and a man in his 20s — with at least 15 others injured, six of them treated at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.
- Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said the gunman bypassed bag checks and metal detectors by cutting through a wire fence along a creek bordering the park before opening fire with an assault-style rifle he had legally bought in Nevada earlier that month.
- Officers already patrolling the festival engaged and killed the shooter, identified as 19-year-old Santino William Legan, within roughly one to two minutes of the first shots.
Gunman Gained Unauthorized Building Access
According to Chief Smithee, festival organizers had screening in place at every entrance — bag checks and metal detectors meant to catch exactly this kind of threat. Legan avoided all of it. Investigators say he cut through a wire fence running along a creek that borders Christmas Hill Park, walking onto the festival grounds from a blind spot security hadn’t sealed off.
Once inside, he opened fire on the crowd with an assault-style rifle that, police confirmed, he had purchased legally in Nevada just weeks before the attack. The rampage happened fast. Officers who were already stationed inside the festival for crowd patrol moved on him almost immediately, shooting and killing him at the scene within one to two minutes of the gunfire starting — a response time Smithee credited with limiting how much worse the toll could have been.
Profile of Suspect Santino William Legan
Legan, 19, graduated from Gilroy High School in 2017. Earlier on the day of the shooting, he had posted a photo of the festival grounds to Instagram, complaining about the event before returning later that evening to carry out the attack. Investigators searched his family’s Gilroy residence afterward as they worked to determine his motive and whether anyone else was involved.
Stephen Romero’s Last Day at the Festival
Stephen Romero had just turned six in June. He was at the festival with his mother and grandmother — both of whom were also shot and hospitalized — when the gunfire erupted. His father, Alberto Romero, described a boy who loved soccer and was, in his words, always happy.
Officers were already patrolling the festival and engaged the shooter within one to two minutes, killing him at the scene.
That single detail — a rifle bought legally in Nevada, carried through a gap in a creekside fence, past screening built specifically to stop it — is the part investigators kept circling back to as they briefed reporters in Gilroy. It’s also the detail that will shape how festival organizers everywhere look at their perimeters long after this year’s event.
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