Gilroy Garlic Festival Shooting Victims' Families Sue Gun Distributor

CBS San Francisco

August 2, 2022

Family members of some of the people killed or wounded during the 2019 mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival are suing the companies that distributed the rifle used in the attack, saying they did not take sufficient care to prevent misuse of the firearm.

Two similar lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in Vermont on July 28 allege that manufacturer Century International Arms and Romanian firearm producer ROMARM failed to adopt reasonable safeguards that "enabled a dangerous individual operating in and around California" to legally acquire the firearm in Nevada, take it to California and use it in the attack at the festival that killed three and wounded 17.

"Defendants knowingly breached the duty to exercise the highest degree of reasonable care in preventing the diversion of firearms to dangerous actors that they had voluntarily assumed when they entered the firearms business," said the lawsuits, filed on the third anniversary of the shooting.

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