After tragedy, a beloved Bay Area festival shut down. Now it's back — but it'll be different

San Francisco Chronicle​

3 days ago

Greg Bozzo stood amid the towering redwoods and lush green hills of Gilroy's Christmas Hill Park, blinking back tears as he wondered aloud: When it mattered most, did he do enough?
Nearly six years ago, Bozzo — a tall, gray-haired man with relentless energy — was at this same park, getting ready to break down the 41st annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, when he heard a pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. He glanced up. Droves of people were fleeing what he later learned was a gunman, dressed like a soldier with an assault rifle, near the inflatable slide.
What Bozzo witnessed over the next 45 seconds — pure chaos as he rushed toward the slide to help; festival-goers frantically tending to the wounded; people crying out for their loved ones — has stuck with him.
'I refuse to recognize that I'm an emotional person,' Bozzo said while discussing that shooting, which killed three people, including two children.'But this? This one gets me.'
Last year, despite having no political experience, Bozzo ran for Gilroy mayor. At the crux of his campaign: a promise to help himself and others heal from the horrific events of July 28, 2019, by reviving the city's iconic festival. For the four decades before its abrupt and tragic closure, it had been an essential source of local pride.
Now, about seven months after Bozzo was narrowly elected, he is among a small group of community leaders responsible for the festival's comeback. And the big question for most Gilroyans isn't whether resuscitating the event was worth it. Rather, it's whether a scaled-down version can provide the Silicon Valley suburb's roughly 60,000 residents the closure they need.
What's clear is it will feel different. When the three-day festival arrives July 25 at Gilroy Gardens' South County Grove, it will be somewhere other than Christmas Hill Park for the first time since its founding in 1979. It will also be a fraction of the size. Long known for drawing crowds of more than 100,000 people, this iteration is limited to 9,000 guests.
Tickets sold out within six hours.
'I think we're ready for this festival so we can show that we can turn the page and move on,' said City Council Member Tom Cline, who served as Gilroy Garlic Festival Association president from 2019 to 2021. 'Boston got to have the Boston Marathon the year after the bombing, and we just weren't able to do that.'
Just as that marathon is more than a race, the Gilroy Garlic Festival became more than a place to eat and listen to music. People planned their summer schedules around it. By transforming Gilroy's garlicky stench from a punchline to a point of honor, and raising millions of dollars for charities, the event came to embody the principles residents say they value most: hard work, hospitality, community.
With those festivities now shrouded by tragedy, organizers hope to usher in a new era while reminding visitors of their decades-long heyday. Among the many familiar attractions set to return are free samples of garlic ice cream, garlic-themed arts and crafts, and 'Gourmet Alley,' where pyro chefs fire up gigantic skillets loaded with such garlic-infused dishes as shrimp scampi and pepper-steak sandwiches.
The ultimate goal: grow this reimagined event in coming years to the point where Gilroy feels like itself again.
'Gilroy is the garlic festival,' said Gilroy native Patrick Carr, who teaches at a middle school in nearby Watsonville. 'And, it wasn't just what put us on the map. It was supposed to be our safe space.'
During his recent visit to Christmas Hill Park, Bozzo leaned against his white pickup in the parking lot as he gazed at the patch of grass where the inflatable slide used to sit.
In the more than 2,000 days since he found himself about 100 yards from an active shooter, Bozzo, 58, has confided in people he trusted about the complex emotions triggered by the incident. Those conversations helped him acknowledge his nagging what-ifs for what they are: signs that he hasn't fully moved forward from the tragedy.
'Rationally, I know there was nothing I could do,' Bozzo said. 'But when you go through something traumatic like this, you can't help but question yourself.'
As the 2019 festival was winding down on a warm Sunday evening, 19-year-old Santino Legan crept along Uvas Creek, then used bolt cutters to sneak through a fence. After raising an AK-47-style rifle he'd recently purchased in Nevada, he began shooting at festival-goers gathered near the inflatable slide.
On top of the three people he killed, Legan wounded 17. Many others, like Bozzo, were left with less visible injuries.
Though Legan is believed to have had possible links to the white supremacist movement, authorities couldn't identify a specific motive for the shooting. Perhaps the closest they'll come to knowing what compelled Legan was his four-word response to someone who'd asked him amid the mayhem why he was doing this: 'Because I'm really angry.'
The rampage ended less than a minute after it started when, while under fire from police, Legan took his own life. Witnesses recall feeling like the violence had lasted forever.
Christian Swain, lead vocalist of the local cover band TinMan, was midway through Grand Funk Railroad's 'We're an American Band' when the shooting began close-by. He tossed his microphone, raced off a 5-foot stage with his bandmates, dropped to his hands and knees, closed his eyes and asked himself: How could this be happening?
Gene Sakahara, a retired educator who'd attended the festival since its inception, remembered having a similar thought. After he grabbed two of his young grandsons, Sakahara guided them behind a large barbecue grill and, while clutching a chef's knife, watched for the shooter.
Nearby, at the slide, Bozzo heard a woman screaming for her daughter, in Spanish. Almost immediately, he realized that her daughter, 13-year-old Keyla Salazar, had been killed. Before the woman could see her child, Bozzo directed her toward other family members.
Salazar, a San Jose resident, had been an aspiring animator. Legan's two other victims were Stephen Romero, a 6-year-old San Jose boy who loved Batman and Legos, and 25-year-old recent college grad Trevor Irby.
The Chronicle's attempts to contact the families of Salazar, Romero and Irby were unsuccessful.
Within a week of the Gilroy massacre, mass shootings at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and a busy entertainment district in Dayton, Ohio, seized national attention. Since then, nearly 4,000 shootings involving multiple homicides have occurred nationwide. Whenever a mass shooting hits the news cycle, many Gilroy survivors feel thrust back in time.
'The events of that day have never fully left me,' Swain said. 'Just when I think I've moved past it, I hear about a shooting at a mall, a church or even another festival, and I'm reliving it all over again.'
To some, the way to cope seemed obvious: try to replace the memories with more positive ones. Yet, even as two copycat garlic festivals sprouted in the Central Valley, Gilroy's failed to relaunch.
In the wake of the shooting, the event's insurance liability spiked from $1 million to $10 million — a prohibitive sum for its grassroots operators. A lawsuit filed by five of the wounded alleged that poor planning by the city, the festival association and the festival's security firm had made the shooting possible. Then the pandemic arrived.
By April 2022, festival organizers were announcing that the event could be canceled for the 'foreseeable future.'
Through it all, the festival association tried to keep the spirit of the event alive — and maintain the brand. There have been farm-to-table dinners, golf tournaments, concerts, even a drive-through popup at a Presbyterian church meant to mimic 'Gourmet Alley.'
'The thought of giving up was just too tough for us to stomach,' said Cindy Fellows, the festival association's president last year.
In November 2023, a judge dismissed the shooting victims' lawsuit. Soon, the city dropped the festival's insurance liability to $4 million.
The following April, Bozzo, a landscape contractor well-known for his community involvement, announced his campaign for mayor. Like many of his neighbors, he felt the city hadn't done enough to resurrect the festival. And, as a former festival association president who'd worked the event his entire adult life, Bozzo figured he was as equipped as anyone to troubleshoot any challenges.
Within days of his swearing-in, Bozzo appointed himself to a seat on the Gilroy Gardens Board of Directors, which allowed him to act as a sort of mediator between festival organizers and the city-owned venue.
'As soon as Greg became mayor, I noticed that the overall attitude shifted throughout town about the festival,' said Paul Nadeau, the festival association's current president. 'Before, there were a lot of preconceived notions that the city didn't want it, so it just wasn't going to happen. Greg campaigning on bringing the festival back was really big in making people believe, 'Hey, maybe this really canhappen.''
Bozzo's campaign theme also forced residents to face an uncomfortable question: What is Gilroy without the garlic festival?
Nestled at the intersection of two concrete paths, on what locals call Christmas Hill Park's 'ranch side,' three boulders symbolizing those killed flank a huge palm tree. Surrounding this small garden, a wooden fence has 17 markers — one for each person injured.
Though Bozzo helped the city construct that memorial, he seldom visits it. Occasionally, while talking about what many Gilroyans still consider the worst day in town history, he remembers just how raw those feelings remain.
'We can't let some crazy guy determine our community's fate,' Bozzo said. 'It's time to have our festival back. It's time for us all to heal.'
Community leaders founded the Gilroy Garlic Festival in 1979, after the president of a local college became incensed about a tiny French town proclaiming itself the real 'Garlic Capital of the World.' Within a few years, that celebration of all things garlic was packing the 51-acre Christmas Hill Park the last weekend of each July, receiving write-ups in national magazines and changing people's perceptions about its eponymous allium.
Despite being a widely used cooking ingredient, garlic had long been stigmatized as stinky, working-class and old-world. Notorious for the pungent odor that wafted from the garlic processing plants on the east side of town, Gilroy had a similarly unsavory reputation.
But the more the garlic festival ballooned in popularity, the more people appreciated the plant for its versatility and flavor. Some culinary experts touted the eclectic dishes from 'Gourmet Alley' as the ultimate showcase of garlic's unifying power. And it wasn't just cuisines that garlic was bringing together.
By the time Gilroy-based Christopher Ranch solidified itself in the 1990s as the nation's premier grower of garlic, the festival was going global. Gilroyans love recounting stories about encountering someone in a far-away land who, upon meeting them, shot back some variation of the same response: Gilroy? The garlic capital!
For a place some consider Santa Clara County's last bastion of agriculture, the garlic festival represented far more than a quirky niche. It was a reason for residents to puff their chests. Gilroy's official logo features a lowercase 'g' with a garlic bulb depicted as the curly tail. On the side of a prominent building downtown, a giant mural asserts the community's 'garlic capital' status.
'Back when I was a kid growing up in Gilroy, coming from a town that smelled like garlic was embarrassing,' said Sakahara, a lifelong Gilroyan who teams up with Greg Bozzo's father, Sam Bozzo, at every garlic festival to form 'SakaBozzo,' the crowd-favorite cooking demonstration duo. 'Now, thanks to the garlic festival, it's chic to reek.'
The festival also brought much-needed tourism to a community often on the brink of a fiscal crisis. For at least three days every year, city leaders could bank on full hotels, gas-station lines and swarmed diners. Though Gilroy is creating a new executive-level position tasked with attracting new businesses and boosting sales-tax revenue, it has no easy way to replicate the cash infusion the festival once offered.
Then there's all the money nonprofits and schools have lost without the festival. Throughout its 41-year run at Christmas Hill Park, the garlic festival was Gilroy's biggest fundraiser, generating a total of more than $12 million for local charities.
In the process, it pioneered a creative business model. At the end of each festival, event leaders divided festival proceeds among the organizations that supplied several thousand volunteers, doling out checks that covered hourly wages for every worker. For some groups, those four- or five-figure payouts were an indispensable part of their annual operating budgets.
'It has been an ongoing, significant challenge for us to replace the money we got every year from the festival,' said Kelly Ramirez, president of the Gilroy Rotary Club. 'For the first time this summer, we sold fireworks. Of course, that's not as profitable as the garlic festival was.'
All these years later, Ramirez can feel her heart drumming in her chest when she discusses the shooting. She had been in a nearby retail booth when Legan opened fire. Another volunteer in her booth was wounded.
Like Ramirez, Swain thinks a lot these days about how lucky he is to be alive. Had the shooter just turned a bit to his right, Swain said, he would have seen the stage where the members of TinMan were 'sitting ducks.'
Now Swain is preparing to finish what he started. He had only gotten to the second chorus of 'We're an American Band' before TinMan fled offstage. Though the crowd will be smaller, and the venue will be different, Swain and his band are set to perform July 26, at the end of the new-look event's second day.
Since its last garlic festival, TinMan has ended dozens of shows with 'We're an American Band.' The next performance figures to be the most memorable.
'I don't care that fewer people will be there this time,' Swain said. 'When my band finally gets to finish that song, all the memories will flood back. It'll feel cathartic. It'll feel right.'