STOCKTON — The sun was beginning to set Sunday when members of a Stockton family pulled open the metal door of a banquet hall that a day earlier had been the venue for a 2-year-old’s birthday party — a joyful affair that ended in violence and heartbreak.
Inside, the family confronted a scene of horror.
A grandmother put a hand over her mouth and looked like she might faint. A woman picked up a child’s shoe, which had ended up between a bouncy house and a wall splattered with blood. A father began to grimly gather birthday presents, still in their festive party wrapping and, remarkably, untouched by the gore and carnage strewn around them.
In an act that left this gritty San Joaquin Valley city in a state of numb fear, a gunman or gunmen had crashed their child’s birthday party Saturday night. They had unleashed a barrage of gunfire from an automatic weapon across a room filled with children in their best party finery, playing amid balloons and a swan-shaped bouncy house.
Bullets tore through the event space just as people were sitting down to dinner. Four people were killed, including three children. Eleven others were wounded. Panicked guests tried to perform CPR on their loved ones or fled over fences and down country lanes shaded by 100-year-old trees. Some had been shot and trailed blood as they scrambled to safety.
The gunmen disappeared into the darkness.
San Joaquin County sheriff’s officials are continuing to search for them. The department suspects that multiple shooters were involved. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and FBI are assisting in the investigation.
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the shooting, saying that it is an active investigation. Authorities have asked the public for tips and surveillance video, offered a $50,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest, but said there is no continuing threat to the community.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office called the shooting “horrific” in a statement posted to X. “Our hearts break for their families and the entire Stockton community,” Newsom said in a separate post.
Stockton Mayor Christina Fugazi described the shooting as an act of gang-related terrorism.
Fugazi said she spoke with Newsom after the shooting and asked for more funding for youth employment, which she believes would help prevent gang violence.
“We had 1,400 kids apply for a summer youth program. We only had money for 100,” she said. “It sure would be nice if we could give every kid that wants a job a job. They’re very money-motivated, and and gangs make it enticing for them to do that instead of being a kid.”
The mayor also said she asked the White House for a dedicated U.S. attorney who could prosecute gang related crimes.
In a statement, Newsom’s office said the state is “working closely” with Stockton to investigate the shooting. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the hours after the shooting, many in the neighborhood were kept awake as sirens from ambulances and police cars wailed, their lights flashing eerily in the dense tule fog.
In the morning, with the fog still hanging heavy over the empty streets blocking out the sun, the mayor and other elected officials came to decry the violence. A spokeswoman for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office told television reporters it was an ongoing investigation, and pleaded for information that might lead to the killers. Ministers gathered to try to offer comfort, as members of the community brought candles and flowers. One woman walked wordlessly through the neighborhood, wafting a smudge stick of burning sage.
Amid it all, once police finally finished cataloging the bullet holes and gathering shell casings and reopened the area, the family members returned to the horrible scene to try to retrieve their cars and their possessions.
They did not want to give their names. They warned nearby television cameras not to film their cars, worried that whoever had shot up the birthday party might try to find them and do more violence.
Many were still wearing the clothes they had fled in the night before. They appeared stunned. They hugged one another and recounted slightly discombobulated stories of bullets ricocheting off cellphones and even someone’s teeth.
One man whose child had been shot but survived wandered through the parking lot with a vacant look in his eyes. His brother had been killed. A relative tried to keep him away from the media, worried that he was in too much of a state of shock to understand or give consent to an interview.
After a few minutes, the family approached the door of the banquet hall. It was pockmarked with bullet holes. Police had tried to mark each one with a little label as they cataloged the crime scene, but there were too many and a few holes appeared to have been missed.
Family members pulled on the main door but it was locked. Finally, one man yanked open an adjacent garage-style door. He revealed a room still brightly lighted.
At first, it simply appeared like the scene of a birthday party that had ended abruptly. Plates of half-eaten pancit, a Filipino noodle dish, were arrayed across tables. Balloons in every color of pastel — pink, lavender, periwinkle blue — bobbed along the hall. The presents were piled up in a corner.
Then, however, the eye was drawn to the blood streaked across the floor. To the shoes that appeared to have been scattered amid a mad flight. And finally, inexorably, to the words “Happy Birthday” spelled out in gold balloons along the wall and, beneath them, to a large smear of blood.
“Who thinks this would happen at a baby birthday party,” said a woman who identified herself as a great-aunt of the birthday girl. The woman asked not to be named because she said the family fears for their safety. “This don’t make no sense. A mass killing is that this was. Senseless. Crazy. Find the people who did it.”
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