Garden helps county residents heal from mass shooting

Key Takeaways

Six years ago, on Aug. 3, a white supremacist opened fire at an El Paso County, Texas Walmart, killing 23 people and injuring 22. The racist attack was the deadliest mass shooting against Hispanics in U.S. history, in a county where more than 80% of the population is Hispanic. 

The county built a healing garden in its largest park to provide a place for people to gather in memory of those who lost their lives. Each year, on the anniversary of the tragedy, the county holds a memorial ceremony at the garden. To make sure that the dead are not just reduced to a number, the 23 names are read aloud, followed by the release of 23 paper lanterns. 

The garden is shaped in a circle, which El Paso County Administrator Betsy Keller said makes you “feel like you’re walking into a hug.” The trees surrounding the garden were planted by family members of the deceased. 

Because there was so much shock and grief following the tragedy — people were looking for a way to come together, and creating a healing garden was the county’s way of providing that.

“Something like that had never happened,” El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego said, of the mass shooting. “We’re such a united, close community and so it just sort of stayed inside of me, this idea that there had to be something tangible.”

More than 75% of the funding for the healing garden came from donations, and the remaining 25% was paid for by the county. El Paso is a tight-knit community — one where you immediately ask someone what high school they went to as a way to find a mutual connection — and everyone was affected by the mass shooting in some way, whether directly or indirectly, so the garden is a space for people to heal in a communal way, Samaniego said. Immediately after the shooting ended, Samaniego rushed to the hospital, where he held a man’s wounded grandson, a baby, as he received the news that the man’s son didn’t survive. 

“Somehow, someway everybody experienced it,” he said. 

Pastor Michael Grady, whose daughter survived the shooting, was expected to lead the prayer at the Aug. 3 anniversary ceremony. His daughter was shot three times and subsequently endured 22 operations. It’s important to continue to uplift the 22 people who were injured, in addition to those who died, as the community works to heal, Samaniego said.

“I don’t want anybody to ever forget the wounded that continue to struggle, like Pastor Grady’s daughter,” he said. “She always reminds me, ‘We don’t get the coverage, we don’t get the hugs, like the other families do, and we went through a lot.’”

In 2022, the garden was designated as a national memorial. The mass shooting devastated the El Paso community, but Samaniego said he also often thinks about its effect on Hispanic people across the country.

“I always say there’s this young man in Chicago who’s Hispanic, wondering why anybody would not want [someone to be] Hispanic, or why they would go against Hispanics?” Samaniego said. 

“We know that the healing is not just our community. I would say the entire United States got impacted, because of the disbelief of what happened, so I feel, with a tremendous amount of passion, that the healing has to continue.”

A beautiful thing that has come out of the tragedy is connection — not just within the community, but with communities across the country that have dealt with mass shootings, Samaniego said. People from Houston who experienced the Santa Fe High School mass shooting in 2018 reached out to El Paso County, asking how they could help, and Samaniego said he reached out to local government representatives in Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, N.Y. after their mass shootings.

“I think just every community that has gone through that feels a sense of responsibility to help another community and always reach out and make a call,” he said. “I encourage every community who has gone through that to continue to help each other and, hopefully that never happens again to anybody, but if it does, they can reach out to us and we can reach out to them to see how we can help them.”

The garden broke ground exactly one year after the mass shooting and opened to the public on its second anniversary. At the opening ceremony, labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta — co-founder of the United Farm Workers union alongside Cesar Chavez—delivered a speech.

The fifth anniversary marked an unveiling of the garden’s “eternal flame” installation, which burns 24/7 and was donated by a local gas company, and a mural painted by three local artists. Samaniego envisions the memorial as a space that will continually evolve.

“We haven't recovered internally. I think we're still dealing with it,” Samaniego said. “… I always feel that we’ve got to keep this as a reminder, but a very beautiful reminder, of how a community can move forward and come out stronger.”