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It’s always someone’s hometown

Gilroy, California, is where I worked as a reporter for a year from 2003 to 2004, in between my stint as an Enterprise reporter and when I returned to the Enterprise as managing editor.

I worked for the Gilroy Dispatch, a newspaper that was similar to this one in terms of staffing, even though it covered a city 10 times the size of Saranac Lake. Back then it was published six days a week at noon, just like the Enterprise. Now it’s a weekly, but that’s another story.

My beat was public safety: crime, fire and transportation. So you can imagine I was a little disturbed by Sunday’s mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival.

That police chief you may have seen at the press conferences, Scot Smithee? He was a sergeant during my time, one of the three or four who would rotate to meet with me on my daily visits to the police station. They seemed like a good police department whose gang task force had made the city safer in the decade before I arrived. My editor thought they spent too much tax money, but they were good at their job.

They proved that Sunday by killing the gunman within minutes, before he could shoot more people in the massive crowd.

If this horrible tragedy had happened 15 years earlier, it would have been me covering it.

As it is, it’s being covered by my friend Scotty Forstner, a Long Islander who was our sports editor back then and now works as a news reporter. I emailed him the other day to tell him to keep reporting the hell out of it, and he responded right away — probably in the middle of a very long shift — saying how crazy it had been to see all those police in tactical gear searching the park after the shooting.

Garlic Fest is famous, usually drawing about 100,000 people a year. And rightfully so, because it’s pretty spectacular.

It’s held during the hottest part of summer, which means it may well be 100 degrees. Many California towns have food festivals, but some of them focus more on vendors and such — the kind of thing you have at every festival — than on the food item they’re supposed to celebrate. But not in Gilroy — it’s all about garlic. Its pungent odor fills Christmas Hill Park, mixing with the smells of sweat and eucalyptus trees. Before long, it goes to your head, and you spend the rest of the day in a stinky kind of euphoria.

The food only adds to that feeling. At the central tents, chefs are constantly cooking up garlicky dishes such as shrimp scampi and calamari pasta, which are absolutely delicious. And for acres around there are all kinds of garlic products. I was able to compare the garlic ice cream from multiple booths, if that tells you anything.

The thought of someone wanting to kill, wound and terrify those happy people is sickening.

We had a mass-shooting scare when I worked there. Gilroy High School was locked down after some students playing hooky thought it would be funny to call in and threaten a catastrophe. When you see armored police officers with assault rifles stalk around a school with students hunkered down inside, and helicopters flying overhead, it makes your stomach drop.

Thankfully, it was a false threat. In the days that followed, I had to track down the teenagers’ identities. My editor said he wasn’t sure if we would ever print their names, but he wanted us to know them anyway, just in case. It was a tough assignment. They were juveniles, and their court hearings and records were closed. But I did it. At one point all I had on one of them was that he lived on a certain block of a certain street, so I literally knocked on the front door of every house on that block until one neighbor told me who it was.

I had to do all that for a prankster. I’m thinking this week how much higher the stakes would have been if that dumb kid had actually been a mass murderer.

It’s always someone’s hometown when you hear about terrible situations like this. In this case, the hometown used to be mine. It’s full of good, down-to-earth people, and right now I miss them.

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