Victor Gomes purchased the Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol in May 2017 from a licensed gun store in Central Valley City, Hanford.
He used the gun to shoot his 10-year-old son, Wyland, in his head. He then committed suicide.
Gomez purchased a California Department of Justice background check.
It appears the restraining order from Kings County Superior Court has not yet been entered into the state’s law enforcement database, which should flag Gomes as a prohibited buyer. The delay allowed him to purchase a murder weapon, despite the previous threat of killing his son being well documented in court records.
The law proposed by Congressman Katherine Stefani, a San Francisco Democrat, now aims to strengthen and speed up the process by which courts report detention orders to the state. County courts must continue to record that they have proof that they have filed their orders and that they have access to those records within a day.
Stefani said the goal is to stop people subject to the restraining order from buying guns before the documents are filed, allowing families and victims to follow the process.
Congressional Bill 1363 is named after the law of Gomez’s Son: Wyland.
“Wyland’s law ensures that the courts and the Department of Justice maintain clear and traceable records of restraining orders and that families, survivors and law enforcement can confirm that those orders have been properly infected,” Stefani said Tuesday at a press conference on bills outside of San Francisco City Hall. “It’s about accountability, transparency and safety.”
She added: “It is hard to imagine anyone subject to the suppression order to have access to firearms due to bureaucratic failure. Let me be absolutely clear. Our laws are only as strong as the systems that enforce them.”
Wyland’s mother, Christy Kamala, said, “It’s sad that it’s a law on my son’s name, because I’m just more here than I have the law of his honor.
“But with an epic plan for things,” Kamala said in an interview Monday.
In her garden, Christie Kamara paints a tribute to her 10-year-old son Wyland Gomez, who killed his father in March 2020.
(Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
After Wyland’s death in 2020, Kamala decided to find out how her ex-husband could buy a gun in California.
She rushed to the Byzantine system of sensitive databases and inconsistent data entry processes, leaving little answers as to why the suppression order was not enforced.
Her attorney, former federal prosecutor Joseph M. Arioto Jr., said Kings County Superior Court “never told the Department of Justice its restraining order.”
In an interview Monday, he said of AB 1363:
On May 18, 2017, Gomez purchased a Glock pistol from Kings Gun Center, a nationally licensed gun dealer in Hanford.
Store owner Todd Cotta told the 2023 Times that handgun buyers must provide photo identification and proof of residency. The store will then digitally submit buyer information to the state’s Department of Justice, which will perform a background check.
Despite the fact that background checks “take seconds”, buyers will have to wait 10 days to pick up the gun, Cotta said. The domestic violence control order is flagged as “if the court system puts it in,” he said.
To buy Gomez, “It all happened per state and federal law,” Cotta said. “He was approved by the California Department of Justice.”
Cotta said at the time he had a record of documenting the sale, but it doesn’t remember it or Gomez.
Almost three years later, Wyland and Gomez were dead.
After a messy divorce, Gomez and Kamala went to and from court for many years to fight over Wyland’s custody.
Kamala received a temporary restraining order in 2016. At a request to the court, she says that Gomez calls at least two friends and that he wants to kill himself and the boy, leaving his ex-wife alive so that she can “be hurt” for the rest of her life.
In March 2020, Gomez committed a murderous suicide at the home of Hanford’s parents, where he lived.
Only after she filed a record request with the city of Hanford in 2021 was Kamala learned that she had purchased a murder weapon while the restraining order was assumed to be in effect.
The proposed Wyland law is sponsored by the Gifford Law Center to prevent gun violence, established by former Arizona Rep. Gabriel Gifford, who survived after being shot in the head while greeting electors in 2011.
The bill requires county courts to confirm that they have filed restraint orders with the state Department of Justice, and similarly require that the Department of Justice maintain records showing receipt of those orders.
The bill “requires that these records be made available to the petitioner, respondent, or guardian, or their representatives, within one business day, upon oral or written request, and that these records be made available to the petitioner, respondent, or guardian, or their representative, and that they are accessible under the state’s public records laws.
Following the murderous suicide, Kamala filed a request to local and state law enforcement agencies and courts to publish documents indicating whether Gomez was listed as the owner of a prohibited firearm in the state’s accessible database.
She also requested records showing when and by whom the background check was made before getting acquiring guns and other records detailing the purchase of guns.
The California Department of Justice, which denied most of her requests, told the Times of 2023 that information from the state’s database used to track individual firearm background checks and gun purchases, as well as information from the state’s database used to track individual restraining orders, cannot be revealed under the state’s public record law.
Kamala sued the Department of Justice and Kings County Superior Court.
In a 2021 court application in response to Kamala’s case, Justice Department lawyers said some of the records could only be shared with prosecutors, police officers and other law enforcement officers, and that disclosure of other records “constituent privacy violations.”
Kamala told the Times that she felt as though the nation cares more about the privacy of a dead man than her right to know how she bought the gun that killed her son.
At a press conference Tuesday, Kamala described her son as “a quiet and kind soul” and “interesting, clever and polite.”
“I can still hear his laugh in my mind. I’ll give it anything to hear it again,” she said. “Since that horrifying day, one question has plagued me. Why does this happen when there is a restraining order that is supposed to protect us?”
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