A 10-year-old was killed by his father; proposed California law aims to close gun loophole

Victor Gomes bought a Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol from a licensed gun store in the Central Valley city of Hanford in May 2017.

He used that gun to shoot his 10-year-old son, Wyland, in the head. Then he killed himself.

Gomes had passed the California Department of Justice’s background check required for the purchase — despite being under a domestic violence restraining order that prohibited him from buying a firearm.

The restraining order from the Kings County Superior Court, it appeared, had not yet been entered into state law enforcement databases that should have flagged Gomes as a prohibited buyer. The delay allowed him to purchase the murder weapon even though his previous threats to kill his son were well-documented in court records.

Now, a proposed law by Assemblymember Catherine Stefani, a San Francisco Democrat, aims to bolster and speed up the process by which courts report restraining orders to the state. It would require county courts to keep records proving they submitted the orders and to make those records accessible within one day.

The goal, Stefani said, is to stop people subject to restraining orders from being able to buy guns before the paperwork has been filed — and to allow families and victims to be able to track the process.

Assembly Bill 1363 is named after Gomes’ son: Wyland’s Law.

California

He threatened to kill his son. He was still able to purchase a gun. Now, a bereaved mother asks how

Her ex-husband was legally banned from buying a gun in California. But he did, and killed their child. How?

April 24, 2023

“Wyland’s Law ensures that courts and the Department of Justice maintain clear, trackable records of restraining orders, and that families, survivors and law enforcement can confirm those orders were properly transmitted,” Stefani said Tuesday during a news conference about the bill outside San Francisco City Hall. “It’s about accountability, transparency and safety.”

She added: “It is unthinkable that someone subject to a restraining order could still gain access to a firearm because of a bureaucratic failure. Let me be absolutely clear: Our laws are only as strong as our systems to enforce them.”

Wyland’s mother, Christy Camara, said “it’s sad it’s a law in my son’s name because I’d rather my son just be here than have a law in his honor.

“But in the grand scheme of things,” Camara said in an interview Monday, “the reason we’re doing all of this is, hopefully, to save children and save families the heartache that myself and my family have been through.”

In her garden at home, Christy Camara has a rock painted 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 find out how her ex-husband was able to buy the gun in California, a state with some of the nation’s strictest firearms laws.

She ran up against a byzantine system of confidential databases and inconsistent data entry processes that left her with few answers as to why the restraining order was not enforced.

Her attorney, Joseph M. Alioto Jr., a former federal prosecutor, said the Kings County Superior Court “never communicated that restraining order to the Department of Justice.”

In an interview Monday, he said of AB 1363: “It seems like such an obvious law to ask the court to prove that it did what it is supposed to do.”

On May 18, 2017, Gomes bought the Glock pistol from Kings Gun Center, a state-licensed gun dealer in Hanford.

Todd Cotta, the store’s owner, told The Times in 2023 that handgun buyers must provide photo identification and proof of residency. The store then submits the buyer’s information digitally to the state’s Justice Department, which performs the background check.

The buyer must wait 10 days to pick up the gun, even though the background check “takes seconds,” Cotta said. A domestic violence restraining order is flagged “if the court system put it in,” he said.

For Gomes’ purchase, “everything was done per state and federal law,” Cotta said. “He was approved by the California Department of Justice.”

Cotta said then that he had records documenting the sale but that it was so standard that he does not remember it, or Gomes.

Almost three years later, Wyland and Gomes were dead.

After a messy divorce, Gomes and Camara had been in and out of court for years, battling over custody of Wyland.

Camara got a temporary restraining order in 2016. In her request to the court, she wrote that Gomes had called at least two friends and said he wanted to kill himself and the boy while leaving his ex-wife alive so that she could “live with the hurt” for the rest of her life.

In March 2020, Gomes carried out the murder-suicide at his parents’ house in Hanford, where he had been living.

Only after she filed a records request with the city of Hanford in 2021 did Camara learn that he purchased the murder weapon while the restraining order was supposed to be in effect — a revelation she said “was shocking.”

The proposed Wyland’s Law is sponsored by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which was founded by former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived being shot in the head while greeting constituents in 2011.

The bill would require county courts to verify that they submitted restraining orders to the state Department of Justice — and that the justice department, likewise, keep records showing its receipt of those orders.

The bill would “require those records to be made available to a petitioner, respondent, or protected person, or their representative, within one business day upon an oral or written request” and to be accessible under the state’s public records law.

Following the murder-suicide, Camara filed public-records requests with local and state law enforcement agencies and courts for documents showing whether, and when, Gomes was listed as a prohibited firearms possessor in any state-accessible databases.

She also requested records showing when, and by whom, a background check was conducted before he got the gun and other records detailing the gun purchase.

The California Department of Justice, which denied most of her requests, told The Times in 2023 that records about individual firearms background checks and gun purchases — as well as information from the state’s database used to track individual restraining orders — cannot be disclosed under the state’s public records law.

Camara sued the Justice Department and Kings County Superior Court.

In a 2021 court filing in response to Camara’s lawsuit, Department of Justice attorneys said some of the records can be shared only with prosecutors, police officers and other law enforcement officials, and that disclosure of other records “would constitute an invasion of personal privacy.”

Camara told The Times that she felt as if the state cared more about the privacy of a dead man than her right to know how he bought the gun that killed her son.

During the news conference Tuesday, Camara described her son as “funny, smart and polite,” with a “quiet, kind soul.”

“I can still hear his laugh in my mind. I’d give anything to hear it one more time,” she said. “Since that horrible day, one question has haunted me: How could this happen when there was a restraining order that was supposed to protect us?”