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GILROY — Mary Gutierrez left the Gilroy Garlic Festival on a summer Sunday afternoon just before the shooting began.
But as soon as chaos broke out on July 28, Gutierrez, Gilroy Fire Division Chief, quickly returned to the scene where a gunman had killed three and wounded 17 before fatally shooting himself after an exchange with police officers on duty.
Wearing bullet-proof gear, Gutierrez spent the next nine hours helping her crew care for victims and assisting police in clearing the area.
“I could not imagine being anyplace else but in the hot zone with them,” said Gutierrez, who had spent that day working as a volunteer at the Rotarian Club booth at the famous festival.
She did not return home until 3 a.m. with her husband, a San Jose firefighter who also assisted that night. It was only then the full weight of the ordeal hit her.
“Firefighters don’t have the luxury to grieve,” Gutierrez said. “We can’t be sad, we can’t be anything because we have to present.”
But many first responders struggle with the emotional stress in the aftermath of horrific incidents such as a mass shooting. Few understand the trauma better than Janet Childs, a program leader of the Centre for Living and Dying’s Critical Incident Stress Management team.
For the past four decades, Childs has worked behind the scenes at disasters throughout the Bay Area to help survivors, victims and first responders regain their bearings in the aftermath of tragedy. So Gutierrez was not surprised to get a call from Childs later that morning on July 29 asking, “What do you need?”
Childs said the Gilroy shooting was different than when she worked with victims of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 and the Oakland hills wildfire in 1991.
“It creates another dynamic of trauma or not feeling safe, of feeling violated, because a human being chose to do this,” Childs said.
The experience often leaves a lasting imprint on those involved, added Childs, whose team she said continues to help hundreds of people who were impacted by the Gilroy shootings.
Childs’ program is part of Bill Wilson Center, a nonprofit agency offering a wide range of services in Santa Clara County. The crisis management team does not charge for its services. Instead, it relies on grants to pay staff, provide professional grief counseling and conduct educational and training meetings for first responders. A donation through Wish Book will help defray staff costs and fund programs the team used in response to the Gilroy shootings.
Childs said recovery starts with sharing experiences in group settings in the hours, days and sometimes years after an incident. The crisis counselors have heard a common theme among Gilroy survivors thus far.
“People were saying, ‘I couldn’t run away fast enough. I could almost feel myself getting shot in the back,’ ” Childs said.
Childs said some people have suffered lingering trauma because they felt the garlic festival — which started in 1979 — was a respite from outside problems. But the community’s sense of safety shattered within hours of the mass shooting, she added, and then was compounded a week later with two more incidents.
Six days after the Gilroy episode a man shot and killed 22 people and injured 24 others at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. A day later, on Aug. 4, another man used an AR-15 rifle to shoot and kill nine people and injuring 17 others in Dayton, Ohio.
Childs said some Gilroy survivors barricaded themselves in their homes because they were too afraid to leave.
“Going to do the activities of daily living felt almost impossible to do,” Childs said.
Emergency personnel does not have the luxury of shuttering away because the next call always is around the corner. But like victims and survivors, first responders need mechanisms to deal with the intensity of what they witness every day, experts say.
“They put themselves in harm’s way and went in there to pull victims out,” Gutierrez said of her crew during the Gilroy shooting. “Firefighters don’t have weapons. We have tunicates and Band-Aids.”
Childs said she began focusing on the wellbeing of first responders in 1976. It is not always about coping with a catastrophe, either. Childs has helped comrades deal with suicides of five San Jose firefighters who were close friends of Gutierrez and her husband, Robert Gutierrez.
“She is an ever-present person there for us for trauma and grief,” said Mary Gutierrez, adding that Childs is known in the South Bay as the “Mother Theresa” of firefighters.
Almost three years ago, the Gutierrezes came to Childs’ aid for a change after she had to evacuate from her San Jose mobile home because of flooding. They drove to her house to help dig it out of mud and sewage after seeing Childs interviewed on television at the mobile home park. When they arrived they found Childs down the street counseling the other victims.
“We took care of her home while she counseled everybody else who had lost so much,” Gutierrez said. “She just gives everything.”
THE WISH BOOK SERIES
The Wish Book is an annual series of The Mercury News that invites readers to help their neighbors.
WISH
Donations will support Bill Wilson Center’s Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) program, which provides immediate crisis intervention and support to first responders, families and the community following incidents such as natural disasters, school shootings or other emergencies. Goal: $25,000
HOW TO GIVE
Donate at wishbook.mercurynews.com or mail in the coupon.
ONLINE EXTRA
Read other Wish Book stories, view photos and video at wishbook.mercurynews.com
