Three veteran officers who quickly responded to the mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in northern California on Sunday are “heroes,” the city’s police chief said.
Chief Scot Smithee on Thursday identified the officers as Eric Cryar, a 23-year law enforcement veteran; Hugo Del Moral, a 17-year veteran and Robert Basuino, a 13-year veteran of the Gilroy department.
The three officers who were already on the scene killed the gunman, who shot dead three people and injured more than a dozen others at the festival on Sunday.
Smithee described his officers as “incredibly humble.”
“I think they’re heroes. I don’t think they view themselves that way,” Smithee said. “I think they view themselves that they were just doing their job.”
Smithee added: “And I don’t think they’re particularly excited about being in the limelight, but I certainly think that they deserve recognition for what they did.”
See the happy, haunting moments before the shooting
The police chief said authorities also located another injured victim, increasing the number of people injured by gunfire to 16. The latest victim was slightly grazed by a bullet and sought medical attention on their own, the police chief said.
The shooter, identified as Santino William Legan, 19, cut through a back fence to get into the festival and began shooting at random with an assault-style rifle he bought in Nevada weeks earlier, authorities said.
In photos: Shooting at California garlic festival
The three victims who were killed were 6-year-old Stephen Romero, 13-year-old Keyla Salazar and Trevor Irby, a 2017 college graduate.
Authorities are still trying to determine the shooter’s motive.
“As we look at the injuries and the victims that are out there, it doesn’t seem clear that he was targeting any particular group,” said John Bennett, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco office.
Police found extremist material during a search of a Walker, Nevada, home, they believe the shooter once rented, according to law enforcement source familiar with the investigation. The location is about 100 miles southeast of Reno,
The seized material pertained to different – and at times, competing – political ideologies, and authorities have yet to nail down a clear ideology to which the shooter subscribed, the source said.
“We’ve not yet determined the ideology,” Bennett said, “if ever.”
CNN’s Sarah Moon, Josh Campbell and Eliott C. McLaughlin contributed to this report.
