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May 23, 2021Mass killings — those with four or more deaths — decreased in California in 2020 during coronavirus lockdowns. But it’s not that simple.
Toni McAllister, Patch Staff
Posted Fri, May 21, 2021 at 5:47 pm PT
CALIFORNIA — At least 255 people have died in 50 mass killings in California since 2006, according to data compiled by The Associated Press and made available to Patch.
Nationally, more than 2,400 people have died in 457 mass killings — defined by The AP as incidents in which four or more people died — in the past 15-year, four-month period.
They died by gunfire nearly 80 percent of the time (stabbings were the second-most frequent cause of death, occurring in 7 percent of cases); and victims died at the hands of family members almost as often as they did in school, workplace and other public venues.
The danger people face inside their homes at the hands of family members is echoed in a recent study by the Council on Criminal Justice showing that domestic violence spiked by 8.1 percent in the United States following the imposition of stay-at-home warnings to control the spread of the coronavirus.
“I’m just thinking of the toll that it’s taken on victims of domestic violence, and then the children in the house who experience and witness that violence,” researcher Alex Piquero, a professor in the department of sociology at the University of Miami and a criminologist who co-authored the study, told U.S. News & World Report.Subscribe
Over the period analyzed by The AP, 998 people died in 219 mass killings committed by family members.
In California, there have been 18 mass killings committed by family members since 2006, resulting in 93 deaths.
Guns were used in 40 of the 50 mass killings in California.
Mass killings in California since 2006 include:
The 2021 Orange County shooting deaths in a commercial building: After locking the courtyard gate, the gunman entered the office of United Homes, a mobile homes real estate business and opened fire, killing the owner Luis Tovar, 50; his daughter Genevieve Raygoza, 28; longtime employee Leticia Solis Guzman, 58; and 9-year-old Matthew Farias, who was Genevieve’s half brother. Matthew’s mother, Blanca Tamayo, who is also Genevieve’s mother, was wounded. She also worked at Unified Homes. When police arrived, they found Tamayo’s arms wrapped around her son. Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez, 44, was identified as the suspected shooter. He knew all of his victims, according to police.
The 2020 slayings of seven people, all of Laotian descent, who were shot at a Riverside County residence authorities believe was being used “to manufacture and harvest an illicit marijuana operation,” was the state’s only 2020 mass killing. Six of the victims were killed at the scene and a seventh was hospitalized and died later the same day. Sheriff Chad Bianco said the operation was run by a local Laotian organized crime syndicate he believes is based in the United States.
In 2019, Gerry Dean Zaragoza, 26, went on a shooting rampage in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley killing four (including his father and brother) and injuring two others (including his mother). The other two slain victims were a mother of four with whom Zaragoza had been obsessed for some time and a man whom he shot on a bus. The shooting spree started in Canoga Park, then to North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys where Zaragoza was arrested.
In 2014 in Isla Vista, a 22-year-old college student frustrated over sexual rejections promised in a video to “annihilate” women “on the day of retribution.” Elliot Rodger, who was found dead, is suspected of the shootings that killed six and wounded seven others.
The AP database does not come close to measuring the enormous scope of gun violence and its toll on victims and their families, witnesses, first responders and society in general.
Much of the focus on mass killings has been on instances when a shooter opens fire in a crowded public place, as multimillionaire Stephen Paddock did in 2017 when he fired upon a concert crowd on the street below his Mandalay Bay hotel room, killing 60 people (two of the victims died years later from their injuries). Of the 867 people injured, 411 were by gunfire.
But experts say mass killings with high death counts are only a part of America’s problem with gun violence, overshadowing the increase in domestic and interpersonal violence.
Lisa Geller, state affairs manager at the nonprofit Coalition to Stop Gun Violence in Washington, told NBC News those shootings and killings are often seen as “private events.”
“If we’re talking about mass shootings, those tend to be left out because they’re seen as private events,” Geller said. “Some of these high-lethality events are inherently random, but if you include some of the events in private spaces, the role of domestic violence in mass shootings is large.”
What happened in 2020, a year many Americans spent isolated in their homes to control the spread of the coronavirus, bears that out.
Last year, there were 108 mass killings. That’s fewer than half the total of 237 in 2019, but the number of mass killings committed by family members increased.
In 2020, there were 31 such killings that left 136 people dead, compared with 20 mass killings that left 88 people dead in 2019.
The trend so far in 2021 is alarming, and if it continues at the current pace, the year will be as deadly as previous years. The AP database, current through April 28, shows a dozen mass killings with 68 total victims, five of them committed by family members and leaving 23 people dead.
The AP database does not include those who died in a spate of mass killings already in May, including those at a deadly Colorado birthday party over the weekend.
