Month: July 2019

“We had many, many officers in the park at the time this occurred … which accounts for a very, very quick response time,” Smithee said.

Victims whose conditions ranged from fair to serious were transported to area hospitals, hospital officials said.

Witnesses reported seeing a second individual who has not yet been identified or found. Authorities haven’t yet determined how the second person was involved, Smithee said.

A manhunt is underway for that second suspect, the chief said.

They thought the pops were fireworks

Lex De La Herran was walking away as the music on stage had begun winding down, he said.

“I turned around for a quick moment and I hear the gunshot sounds,” he said. “At first I thought it was fireworks but a man behind me screamed that ‘those are real, those are real.'”

“I just froze like a deer in the headlights,” he said.

De La Herran said a piece of shrapnel hit him in the head. Then, he started running among the crowds.

“I saw people jumping over the fence, people trampling over each other, it was just widespread chaos,” he said. “People were definitely in shock … some people were visibly shaking.”

Cynthia Saldivar also said she initially thought the sounds were fireworks.

“We looked toward the area that it was coming from and everyone stood still for a second and realized it was gunshots,” she told CNN. “Everyone started running out towards us up the hill to the street to be safe. Then I saw some people shot some doing CPR on others.”

It felt like a nightmare, Miquita Price said.

The shooter stood about 15 feet away from her and was blocking her only possible escape route, she told CNN.

“I started running, we hit the ground and I literally laid down on the ground,” she said. The shooter stopped firing for a couple of seconds, multiple people reported, and when he began to shoot again, Price said she took off running.

The woman running next to her was hit and Price said she continued until she found a truck to hide behind.

She’s still in shock.

“(There) was blood everywhere,” she said. “I read about this but I never thought I would be in it.”

A 6-year-old killed

Stephen Romero, 6, was killed during the shooting, Gilroy City Councilmember Fred M. Tovar told CNN.

Tovar said he was “deeply saddened by the news.”

“I pray that God will grant his family strength. My most sincere condolences. I will keep your family close in my thoughts and prayers in the coming weeks as you are going through the process of grieving,” he said in a statement.

Stephen’s grandmother and father both spoke to CNN affiliate KRON about the boy’s death.

Officers confronted suspect in minutes

Swain said police seemed to secure the area within five minutes from when the shooter began firing.

“We know the event was well-covered with security and we’d seen them as we came in to set up and play,” he told CNN. “At least in my head, I knew they would be there and sure enough that seems to be what happened.”

Smithee said shots began around 5:41 p.m. local time.

Officers were in the area, he said, and engaged the suspect “in less than a minute.”

The suspect was shot and killed, Smithee said.

“I can’t speak enough about the courage of police and first responders are showing at this moment,” Tovar said. “My thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who (lost) their lives, and those recovering in the hospital.”

Shooter came in from a nearby creek, police chief says

“It appears as though they (suspect) had come into the festival via the creek which borders a parking area and they used some sort of a tool to cut through the fence,” Smithee said. “That’s how they got into the festival area itself.”

Police recovered a firearm and rifle ammunition from the shooting scene, a law enforcement source told CNN.

The shooter had “some sort of a rifle,” Smithee said during a Sunday night press conference.

As of now, it appears, the suspect was firing at random as he moved into the festival, the chief said.

“It is just incredibly sad and disheartening that an event that does so much good for our community has to suffer from a tragedy like this,” Smithee said.

‘Our annual family reunion’

The festival attracts about 100,000 people annually, based on attendance records. There’s food, live music, cooking competitions and thousands of community volunteers who bring it all together.

No one saw this coming.

“To have seen this event end this way this day is just one of the most tragic and sad things that I’ve ever had to see,” Gilroy Garlic Festival Executive Director Brian Bowe said.

Gilroy, a city of about 58,000 people, is a “tightly-knit,” family-like community, Bowe said.

“And for over four decades that festival has been our annual family reunion,” he said Sunday.

How politicians responded

In the hours following the shooting, President Donald Trump tweeted a warning.

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke called for change.

California Sen. Kamala Harris also weighed in, saying she was “grateful to first responders who are on the scene in Gilroy and keeping those injured by such senseless violence in my thoughts.”

Late Sunday night, Former Vice President Joe Biden said “this violence is not normal.”

Another trusted Trump ally — Secretary of State Michael Pompeo — has charted a path from the back benches of the House of Representatives to the senior levels of US power.

But the nomination of a staunchly conservative politician to a non-partisan position — one that has little to nothing to do with domestic investigations — along with Ratcliffe’s lack of experience and the serious geopolitical challenges facing the US mean the three-term lawmaker’s confirmation is anything but assured.

‘Simply not as qualified’

“He’s simply not as qualified for the job as his predecessors,” said David Priess, a former CIA intelligence officer who delivered the daily intelligence briefing during the administrations of former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

“Do not take confirmation for granted,” Priess added. “The only thing that points to his appointment at this time is the fact that he was strident and energetic in his criticism of Robert Mueller during last week’s hearing.”

Priess, now a national security fellow at George Mason University, said the Republican-controlled Senate has in the past pushed back against Trump’s nominees. “Yes, the President has many allies in the Senate, but there have been many nominations and prospective nominations when it was made clear the Senate would not accept it,” he said.

Early Republican responses praised outgoing director Coats without mentioning Ratcliffe.

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a member of the intelligence committee, tweeted that, “Coats is one of the finest public servants I have ever known. He led the intelligence community with integrity and skill, and his departure is a huge loss to our country.”

She made no mention of Ratcliffe and neither did Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, who released an extended statement praising Coats for his “deliberate, thoughtful, and unbiased approach.”

The Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, focused on the House lawmaker in his own statement.

“It’s clear that Rep. Ratcliffe was selected because he exhibited blind loyalty to President Trump with his demagogic questioning of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller,” Schumer said. “If Senate Republicans elevate such a partisan player to a position that requires intelligence expertise and non-partisanship, it would be a big mistake.”

But Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina, the ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism, offered effusive praise, saying “the only thing stronger than his credentials is his character” and adding that he could “think of no one better” for the job.

The job in question — Director of National Intelligence — was a Cabinet level position created after the 9/11 attacks to better coordinate intelligence. The director doesn’t have the authority to issue orders. Instead, the position is more about coordinating and overseeing.

‘Serious questions’

The director heads the entire US intelligence community, directs and oversees the National Intelligence Program, advises the President and his Cabinet, and produces the President’s Daily Brief, the collection of information from across the agencies that most presidents see every day.

The 53-year-old Ratcliffe would come to the job with eight years’ experience as mayor of Heath, Texas, a town of just under 9,000 people. He has been a US Attorney and federal terrorism prosecutor, spent time in private practice as a partner with former Attorney General John Ashcroft at his law firm, and worked as an aide to Sen. Mitt Romney during his 2012 presidential campaign.

In the House, Ratcliffe has served on the Intelligence, Homeland Security, Judiciary and Ethics Committees.

Priess, the former intelligence officer, said this resume doesn’t compare positively to previous directors, most of whom spent a lifetime in military or foreign service. “One of the reasons there are serious questions here, all we have to do is look at the five men who have served in this position and then look at Ratcliffe,” he said.

Former directors

Past directors include John Negroponte, a former foreign service officer and ambassador several times over; Michael McConnell, a former National Security Agency director; Dennis Blair, a former commander of US forces in the Pacific; and James Clapper, who ran the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial Agency.

Coats had less intelligence experience than the others, but he had been ambassador for Germany and “served on Senate select committee on intelligence for years,” Priess said.

“You look at Ratcliffe and there’s no comparison,” Priess continued. “He’s only been in the House a few years, and he’s barely been on the intelligence committee. He doesn’t come close to matching the experience of those other men or the objectivity of those other men in their previous positions.”

Gregory Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, echoed Priess’ concerns about Ratcliffe’s partisanship. “I worry about the combination of amateur and political, especially since he seems quite ideological,” he said.

Ratcliffe was a key lawmaker in the 2016 Republican-led House investigation into the FBI and Justice Department’s handling of both the Hillary Clinton and Russia investigations, working closely with former Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina.

When Gowdy retired this year, Ratcliffe took his place on the House Intelligence Committee, in addition to his seat on the Judiciary Committee, putting him in a key position to push back on the panel’s Democratic-led investigations into the President.

Ratcliffe’s aggressive questioning and skepticism about the Bureau during the 2016 probes gained him the trust of fellow conservatives in the House GOP Conference, and he played a key role in the Mueller hearings, jumping up in seniority on both committees as the second Republican to question Mueller immediately following the ranking members.

Ratcliffe charged that the special counsel had gone beyond his mandate by stating he couldn’t exonerate Trump.

But Ratcliffe’s criticisms of the Mueller investigation are also likely to be a key point as Democrats press him on in his confirmation hearing. His push on Fox News’ Sunday program for an investigation into the Obama administration will likely be a factor as well.

In his interview, Ratcliffe said that “the Mueller report and its conclusions weren’t from Robert Mueller. They were written what a lot of people believe was Hillary Clinton’s de facto legal team.”

‘No accountability’

He charged that the crimes committed during the Obama administration included the phone intercepts that led to the investigation into Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. “Someone in the Obama administration leaked that call to The Washington Post. That’s a felony,” Ratcliffe said.

“We know that things happened in the Obama administration that haven’t been answered. There’s been no accountability for that yet,” he said.

Arguing that the American people have lost trust in the Justice Department, he said the “only way to get that back is, therefore, to be real accountability with a very fair process” and that he has “supreme confidence” in Attorney General Bill Barr’s ability to deliver that.

“And at the end of the day, wherever the outcome may be, as long as we know that the process was fair, the evaluation was fair, justice will be done,” he said.

Speaking to CNN affiliate KGO-TV, an eyewitness at Gilroy described fleeing the scene of the shooting with his 12-year-old cousin, who had been shot.

“She was hurting a lot,” he said. “She was running fast — that’s why we didn’t know if she got shot, she was running normally … It was probably just adrenaline because she wanted to get out of that situation.”

The girl has since been driven to the hospital, he said.

At least one person has died from the shooting, and at least 11 are injured, officials say.

Parents were scheduled to serve prison sentences

The parents fled a police traffic stop Wednesday in Kalispell, Montana, according to an FBI news release. Officers spiked the tires of the couple’s vehicle to end the chase.

When officers approached the stopped vehicle, they found Janiak dead from an apparent gunshot wound to the head and Salcido dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot, the FBI said. There were no signs of the child in the vehicle.

“The case resulted in criminal convictions and Hannah was scheduled to begin serving her sentence at the Jackson County Jail on June 11th, 2019. She did not show up for her sentencing,” police said.

Concerned relatives, who’d not heard from the family, reported them missing to Medford police the same day her sentence was set to start.

The search was conducted in Oregon and Montana.

This is “new territory” for Booker, said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, which is based in Booker’s home state of New Jersey.

“It’s not clear that it’s actually going to be productive,” Murray said. “That’s not simply because it undermines his brand identity as a positive person, but it doesn’t look like it’s having an impact with the voters you need to sway.”

For months, Booker has professed to be satisfied with being a tortoise among hares — and, until recently, he regularly passed up opportunities to draw explicit contrasts with or criticize his rivals, including Biden.

“I plan on focusing on my record.”

Underpinning Booker’s rhetorical shift is an implicit appeal to Democratic voters, particularly African Americans, that Biden is not as “electable” as his campaign has suggested — and that the party would be better served by a candidate, like Booker, with a stronger record on issues of race and justice. Booker’s argument comes as Biden continues to lead with African American voters.

“It is easy to call Donald Trump a racist now — you get no great badge of courage for that,” Booker said during remarks at a National Urban League event Thursday in Indianapolis. “The question is, what were you doing to address structural inequality and institutional racism throughout your life?”

One source close to Biden’s campaign said Booker seems to be taking a page from the “Kamala playbook” — hoping to inject life into his own campaign by drawing blood from the current frontrunner.

But Booker’s campaign points out that he has only challenged Biden selectively, on Booker’s own signature issues — which, as one of two African American candidates in the race, Booker is also uniquely positioned to speak to. It’s no dramatic strategic shift, they say, but a natural evolution as the campaign progresses.

“We’re not going down the Republican road of attacking each other on hand sizes,” one Booker campaign aide said. “We’re supposed to have this debate on policy. …You can disagree on issues and still run a positive campaign.”

For the candidate whom Kellyanne Conway likened to “a Hallmark card,” making this transition to a more aggressive phase of campaigning could be awkward. But Booker has consistently stressed his own political duality. Yes, he speaks often about love, unity, etc. Yet he came up as a young politician in hardscrabble Newark, fighting entrenched machines for a foothold on power.

In one scene, Booker wrestles with how to respond to a negative attack by James, saying: “I’m not going to lose this race because we’re afraid to punch Sharpe in the nose. I just think that there’s a way to do it with dignity.” Booker would go on to lose that race to James.

Drawing contrasts with those rivals, while hewing to his own political compass, doesn’t come naturally to Booker.

In April, a Booker campaign email to supporters implicitly criticized former Rep. John Delaney for self-funding his campaign, saying it was “something Cory just can’t and would never do.” Aside from the head-scratching target — why John Delaney? — the jab seemed at odds with Booker’s relentlessly positive message. The candidate himself seemed to agree: Afterward, Booker insisted he didn’t know anything about the email; and, moreover, he wouldn’t approve of such a hit against a rival.

“We are not taking swipes at other candidates,” Booker added. “The reality is, we need to have a Democratic Party that shows how you run a campaign by respecting people you’re running against, and so I’m going to continue to conduct myself in that manner.”

But that has not yet translated to committed support for Booker. Now, the pressure is building for Booker to begin to convert them — a process that could begin next week, when he stands adjacent to Biden on the debate stage.

Booker “is everybody’s favorite cheerleader, but he’s not seen as the quarterback,” Murray said. “He does need to do something to change people’s perceptions.”

The rainbow flag, which has become a universal symbol of hope for LGBTQ people around the world, first flew in San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza for Gay Pride Day, on June 25, 1978.

It had eight colors — two more than today’s version — and was designed by Gilbert Baker, an openly gay artist and activist. He had been commissioned to design a symbol for the LGBTQ community by his friend Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California.

Baker drew inspiration from the US national flag, which had celebrated its bicentennial in 1976, and an actual rainbow, which displays the colors of the light spectrum in roughly the same sequence as the flag. He assigned a meaning to each of the colors: hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for harmony and violet for spirit.

Gilbert Baker in 2003. Credit: AFP/AFP/AFP/Getty Images

In 2003 a record-setting 8,000 feet long by 16 feet wide rainbow flag flew in Florida. Credit: Getty Images/Getty Images North America/Getty Images

After that successful debut, Baker removed two colors from the design to make it easier to mass produced, dropping pink and turquoise and settling with the current six-hue configuration.

Baker died in 2017, aged 65. In the same 2015 CNN interview, he revealed the rationale behind the design of the flag. “We needed something to express our joy, our beauty, our power. And the rainbow did that,” he said.

“We’re an ancient, wonderful tribe of people. We picked something from nature. We picked something beautiful.”

Over the next few days, white mobs stormed the streets attacking blacks indiscriminately. Thirty-eight people were killed, 23 of whom were black, and more than 500 were injured, the commission on race relations said.

Chicago wasn’t the only city besieged by mob violence in the months after World War I. White gangs were eager to maintain Jim Crow-era laws but African-American soldiers returning from the war were demanding their rights and an end to second-class citizenship. Between late 1918 and late 1919, the US saw 10 major anti-black riots, dozens of minor, racially charged clashes and almost 100 lynchings, writes David F. Krugler, author of “1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back.”

Scores of black men and women were killed that year in racial violence. Nobody knows how many. The official death toll, Krugler says, was more than 150 people — the majority of whom were black — across the country between late 1918 and 1919. The Arkansas State Archives says 200 blacks were killed in Arkansas alone over several days in September 1919.

“Overwhelmingly, it was whites attacking blacks,” Krugler told CNN.

But for nearly 100 years, the “Red Summer” as it was called by NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson because of its explosive violence and bloodshed, went overlooked and forgotten.

“The Red Summer doesn’t fit into the stories we tell ourselves about US history,” Krugler says. “It’s also a very prominent example of another feature of American history that we don’t like to fully acknowledge.”

Until today, very little has been recorded about the violence that occurred.

“When I wrote my book, people wouldn’t talk about it,” Cameron McWhirter, author of “Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America,” told CNN. “People have spent a lot of time not focusing on it. (There’s) a lot of focus now on trying to uncover this part of history.”

A panicky time for white America

“A lot of people would think that 1919 was this heroic happy time for America because we just won the war,” McWhirter says. “But this wasn’t the case. It was a panicky time for America.”

There were strikes across the country, rising prices and unemployment, returning veterans who couldn’t find a job and the spread of Communism.

“In the midst of all that, we have America’s racial problem,” he says.

While hundreds of thousands of soldiers had been fighting across the ocean, some 5 million African Americans — including Shepherd — had migrated from the South to cities like Chicago, where factory owners welcomed the cheaper labor and where, according to McWhirter, the newcomers were being treated “slightly better.”

“Overall, it was not what we’d consider equity but it was better than what they had in the South,” he said.

But the population pump caused extreme racial tensions as black neighborhoods began to expand and blacks were no longer confined to designated areas.

Tensions grew in the South, too, where sharecroppers began making money and buying land and homes.

“So all these things that were theoretically good for black people at that time became sources of violence,” McWhirter says.

And white gangs began to attack.

They fought back

In July 1919, white veterans were galvanized by a rumor that the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., had released a black man suspected of sexually assaulting a white woman.

“Thousands of white veterans in uniform snatched black people from streetcars, sidewalks and beat them without reason or mercy. Black women cried in the streets for God to save them,” James writes.

“There were pockets of resistance (by African Americans),” Krugler says. “And that’s another reason why the backlash was so harsh.”

One of the two black leaders, Samuel L. Jones, was assaulted and beaten in July and a day later, 12 white men tried to enter his house. They were met with gunfire and one of them was beaten by a group of black men.

They returned with more guns and ammunition, found the house empty, and set it on fire, along with other black residences.

The man, Will Brown, was beaten, repeatedly shot and lynched.

“Alarmed at the Bee’s promotion of violence and racial prejudice, the Rev. John A. Williams—first president of the local chapter of the NAACP and publisher of the Monitor, a weekly black paper—called upon the editors of the Bee and the Daily News to stop their propaganda.”

Blacks across the country set up armed self-defense patrols to protect the communities the police failed to protect, Krugler says.

But they weren’t just fighting against the violence. They were fighting what Krugler calls a “three-front race war.”

They were also fighting back against false media reports that blacks were the ones inciting violence and also fought for justice in biased courts.

“We see parallels to today,” Krugler says. “We see African Americans continue all three of those fights into the 20th century and even the 21st century.”

200 dead in Arkansas

One of the deadliest tragedies of Red Summer was in Elaine, Arkansas.

“By the end of the summer, every city was just waiting for theirs to happen, it was just all a giant panic,” McWhirter says.

On September 30, as sharecroppers met to unionize against low wages, law enforcement officers drove by at night and claimed their car broke down. Soon, shots were fired.

It’s still not clear who fired first, but white men used the rumors of an uprising to crush the sharecroppers’ resistance. Hundreds of white men flocked from surrounding cities and states.

When blacks began running toward the troops to surrender, they were shot and killed.

The military reported about 20 African American deaths at the time, the university says. Similar estimates were given by local papers.

Today, the riots are known as the “Elaine Massacre” and one of the bloodiest racial conflicts in the nation.

Another 200 were jailed or put in stockades and many were tortured.

A grand jury charged 122 African Americans with crimes connected to the riots and a jury convicted 12 of them for murder, the government reports. They were later released with the help of the NAACP, according to the state archives.

The start of a movement

When Hartfield, the granddaughter of a woman who lived through the riots, began presenting around Chicago following the publication of her book, “A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919,” she said she was surprised at how many people were unfamiliar with the state’s history.

“It’s about uncovering and commemorating something that’s very tragic and ownership of something that really didn’t go well,” she said.

It’s a history the nation needs to build upon and learn from, she says.

There were seeds back then, she said, of issues American society is still grappling with today. Issues like racial inequality in the job market, the distrust between the blacks and the criminal justice system and biased news outlets.

“But I have hope,” she says.