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Gabriella Gaus hopes to one day regain her trust in people. For now, though, she says it is lost.
Though the 26-year-old Scotts Valley resident said her bullet wounds are healing faster than she expected, she — like many of those present when a gunman opened fire at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday — now faces a changed reality, her life and outlook forever altered by those moments of terror.
“It sounds really bleak and sad,” Gaus said Thursday. “But I hope I feel a sense of general trust towards humanity, because right now, I really don’t.”
In total, 16 people were shot Sunday, when 19-year-old Santino William Legan fired an AK-47-style rifle into the festival crowd, including three people who died from their wounds. The three killed have been identified as 6-year-old Stephen Romero and 13-year-old Keyla Salazar, of San Jose, and 25-year-old Trevor Irby, who recently had moved to Santa Cruz from upstate New York.
Authorities on Thursday said they had identified an additional victim who had been grazed by bullets in the attack and sought his own treatment for his injuries.
Others wounded suffered far more severe injuries, including bullets lodged in organs and gunshot wounds to the abdomen, legs or arms.
As of Thursday afternoon, three patients were still being treated at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, at least one of whom remained in serious condition, according to Joy Alexiou, a spokeswoman for the hospital. The center has treated seven gunshot-wound victims from the shooting, including two who were transferred from St. Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy. One patient later was transferred to Stanford Medical Center.
The remaining patients at St. Louise all had been discharged by Monday afternoon, Alexiou said. Stanford still is treating one patient wounded in the attack; a spokesperson for the hospital declined to give details about that person’s condition Thursday.
Gaus was with her friend, Brynn Ota-Matthews, of Santa Cruz, near the top of an inflatable bounce house just before the shooting began.
Moments later, they plunged their bodies down the braided bungee ladder, running together as they watched Legan opening fire on the crowd. Both were struck by bullets as they sprinted through the event’s parking lot.
Ota-Matthews, 23, was hit in the back, the bullet grazing her lung and puncturing her diaphragm before lodging in her liver.
“Miraculously it didn’t hit any organs in a way that I can’t heal from,” she said at a press conference at Valley Medical Center, where she was treated and expected to be discharged from Thursday. But, she added, she will live with a reminder of those moments of terror forever.
“I’m going to have a bullet in my liver for my whole life. I’m not going to be able to see it, I’m probably not going to be able to feel it at a certain point, but it’s always going to be there,” she said stoically.
“I’m sure I’ll be healthy soon. I’ll be able to walk and do all the things I want to do without pain. I just don’t know that I’m ever going to forget how it felt. It feels really bad,” she said.
Other injured victims are still on their journey through recovery, coming to terms with the physical and mental reminders of their experience.
Barbara Aguirre — the mother of Stephen Romero — was hit in the stomach and the left hand, leaving her fingers almost completely detached.
Just before undergoing her surgery to reconnect her fingers, Aguirre was told about their son’s death, her husband, Alberto Romero said. Aguirre’s mother also was shot and is still recovering at Valley Medical Center, though details of her condition are unclear.
Wendy Towner and her husband, Francisco Aguilera, were working as vendors at the festival when they were both shot in the leg. The couple has undergone multiple surgeries and remain hospitalized, according to a GoFundMe page started by Towner’s brother, Troy Towner. Their three-year-old son was saved from the gunfire when another festival-goer dragged him under a table, the page said.
“With tubes and machines everywhere, her son’s excitement was all consuming as he was finally able to see Mom and Dad,” an update to the page said Tuesday.
“Their bodies are starting to heal, and we see the long road to recovery ahead,” the page read. “Lets hope for the best.”
After the shooting, medical staff at Valley Medical Center and St. Louise were able to cope with the influx of wounded people as extra staff and doctors poured into their workplaces instinctively, while others who hadn’t heard the news were called in.
Dr. Jeffrey Chien, the head of the emergency department at Valley Medical, said it was “heartwarming” to see the hospital’s effort in the hours after the shooting.
“Everybody wanted to help,” he said. “It was a carefully choreographed moment of organized chaos.”
Gaus and Ota-Matthews said the experience was surreal.
“Every time I’m awake, it’s always in the back there. Sometimes like happy feelings, like I’m so happy that we did this and we got away … and then sometimes it’s just terror,” Ota-Matthews said. “I just see him walking into the festival.”
Gaus, who was discharged from St. Louise on Sunday night after the shooting, said she’s felt nauseous and has had “uncontrollable” reactions to being around other people and even sometimes feels uncomfortable around friends if they make sudden movements.
“Someday, I hope to maybe feel really positive about, have a positive outlook, but I don’t know,” she said. “Right now, it’s not really there.”
