Victor Gomes bought a semi-automatic pistol Glock 17 in a firearm store under license in the city of the Hanford Central Valley in May 2017.
He used this pistol to shoot his 10 -year -old son Wyland, in the head. Then he committed suicide.
Gomes had adopted the audit of the history of the Ministry of Justice of California required for the purchase – although it was under a domestic violence ban which forbade it to buy a firearm.
The prohibition order of the Superior Court of Kings County, it seemed, had not yet been adopted in databases of the application of state laws which should have reported Gommes as a prohibited buyer. The delay allowed him to buy the murder weapon even if his previous threats to kill his son were well documented in the judicial archives.
Now, a proposed law of the member of the Assembly Catherine Stefani, a Democrat in San Francisco, aims to strengthen and accelerate the process by which the courts signal state deduction orders. The county courts should be the files proving that they have submitted orders and make these files accessible during the day.
The objective, said Stefani, is to prevent persons subject to restraint orders to be able to buy firearms before the documents are deposited – and to allow families and victims to be able to follow the process.
Bill 1363 of the Assembly is appointed according to the son of Gomes: the law of Wyland.
“Wyland’s law guarantees that the courts and the Ministry of Justice maintain clear and traffic archives of content orders, and that families, survivors and police can confirm that these orders have been properly transmitted,” said Stefani on Tuesday during a press conference on the bill outside the Hôtel de Ville de San Francisco. “These are responsibility, transparency and security.”
She added: “It is unthinkable that someone submitted to a prohibition order can always access a firearm due to bureaucratic failure. Allow me to be absolutely clear: our laws are as strong as our systems to apply them.”
Wyland’s mother Christy Camara said: “It is sad that it is a law in the name of my son because I prefer that my son is just here to have a law in his honor.
“But in the big scheme of things,” said Camara in an interview on Monday, “the reason why we do all of this is, hopefully, save children and save families the sorrow and my family have crossed.”
In his garden at home, Christy Camara has a painted rock in honor of her 10 -year -old son, Wyland Gomes, whose father killed him in March 2020.
(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
After Wyland’s death in 2020, Camara was determined to discover how her ex-husband was able to buy the weapon in California, a state with some of the country’s most stringent firearms.
She clashed against a Byzantine system of confidential databases and inconsistent data entry processes which left her little answers to explain why the restraint order was not applied.
His lawyer, Joseph Mr. Alioto Jr., a former federal prosecutor, said that the Kings County’s Superior Court “had never communicated this deduction order to the Ministry of Justice”.
In an interview on Monday, he declared about AB 1363: “It seems that such an obvious law to ask the court to prove that he did what he is supposed to do.”
On May 18, 2017, Gomes bought the Glock Pistol from Kings Gun Center, a state -of -the -art arms dealer in the state in Hanford.
Todd Cotta, the owner of the store, told Times in 2023 that the buyers of handguns had to provide identification of photos and proof of residence. The store then submits the information from the digitally buyer to the Ministry of Justice of the State, which verification of the history.
The buyer must wait 10 days to pick up the pistol, even if checking the history “takes second,” said Cotta. An order to ban domestic violence is reported “if the judicial system has put it,” he said.
For the purchase of Gomes, “everything was done by federal and federal law,” said Cotta. “It was approved by California Department of Justice.”
Cotta then declared that he had files documenting the sale but that he was so standard that he does not remember, or Gomes.
Almost three years later, Wyland and Gomes died.
After a disorderly divorce, Gomes and Camara had been in front and out of court for years, fighting against the Wyland guard.
Camara obtained a temporary ban order in 2016. In her request to the court, she wrote that Gomes had called at least two friends and said that he wanted to commit suicide and the boy while leaving her ex-woman living so that she could “live with the injury” for the rest of her life.
In March 2020, Gomes achieved the murder-suicide with his parents in Hanford, where he lived.
It was only after having submitted a request for files to the city of Hanford in 2021 that Camara learned that he had bought the murder weapon when the restraint order was supposed to be in force – a revelation that she said “was shocking”.
The proposed Wyland law is sponsored by the Giffords Law Center to prevent armed violence, which was founded by the former representative of Arizona, Gabrielle Giffords, who survived the head while saluting the voters in 2011.
The bill would force the county’s courts to verify that they have submitted prohibition orders to the State Department of Justice – and that the Ministry of Justice, in the same way, retains the files showing its reception of these orders.
The bill “would require that these files be made available to a petitioner, a defendant or a protected person, or his representative, within one working day on an oral or written request” and to be accessible under the State Act of the State.
Following the murder-suicide, Camara filed requests for public records from local organizations and states of the application of laws and courts for documents showing if, and when, Gomes was listed as a possessor of firearms prohibited in databases accessible to the State.
She also asked for files showing when, and by whom, a check of the history was carried out before he obtained the weapon and other files detailing the purchase of firearms.
The California Ministry of Justice, which denied most of its requests, told Times in 2023 that the records of firearms and purchases of firearms – as well as information from the state database used to follow individual prohibition orders – cannot be disclosed under the law on public archives.
Camara continued the Ministry of Justice and the High Court of the County of Kings.
In a judicial file in 2021 In response to Camara’s trial, lawyers of the Ministry of Justice declared that certain files can only be shared with prosecutors, police and other officials of the application of laws, and that the disclosure of other files “would constitute an invasion of private life”.
Camara told Times that she had the impression that the state cared more about the intimacy of a dead than his right to know how he bought the weapon that killed his son.
Tuesday, during the press conference, Camara described her son as “funny, intelligent and polite”, with a “calm and kind soul”.
“I can still hear his laughter in my mind. I would give anything to hear it once again, “she said. “Since this horrible day, a question haunted me: how could it happen when there was a ban on a ban which was supposed to protect us?”
California Daily Newspapers
