Here’s what we know about the gunman in the Gilroy mass shooting
Police on Monday named 19-year-old Santino William Legan of Gilroy as the man who opened fire Sunday at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Northern California.
Legan, who was wearing camouflage and carrying a rifle, started shooting toward the crowd at 5:41 p.m., killing three people and injuring 12, police said. Police quickly shot and killed him.
Gilroy Police Chief Scot Smithee said Legan cut his way through a fence to get into the festival about 30 miles south of San Jose, California.
Police officers engaged Legan “in less than a minute,” Smithee said, and the attack ended minutes after it began.
Legan is the grandson of a former Santa Clara County supervisor, Tom Legan, who died last year, and police were searching his father’s home in a cul de sac less than two miles from the shooting scene, McClatchy reported.
An Instagram account, now taken down, created by Legan just days earlier contained two posts shortly before the shooting, CNN reported.
“Ayyy garlic festival time Come get wasted on overpriced sh**,” read one post, according to the network.
“Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white tw**s?” read the other, CNN reported.
First published in the late 1800s, “Might is Right” is described as a “white supremacist text” that promotes a world at war in which the strong must overcome the weak, according to the network.
Julissa Contreras, who saw the shooting, told NBC News the gunman looked like “your average white guy.” She told the station he appeared to be firing a semi-automatic rifle, “kind of just going left to right and shooting whoever he could, honestly.”
This story was originally published July 29, 2019 at 6:35 AM with the headline "Here’s what we know about the gunman in the Gilroy mass shooting."
