Hail Marys and lives forever changed: Reliving Ventura County’s first mass shooting
Sometimes 30 years feels like minutes.
Carol Wilson dove to the floor and started crawling a moment after the shotgun blasted at a state unemployment office just before noon on Dec. 2, 1993. Coworkers at the counter she just left fell from the gunfire. Wilson, who helped people file for unemployment benefits, kept moving on all fours toward a back room and a phone.
“I was praying and crawling. Because I am a Christian, I was calling on the Lord," she remembered. She made it to the room, dialed 911 with trembling fingers and dictated the horror as it happened to a police dispatcher. “We talked for 14 minutes. It felt like 14 hours.”
Three people — Phillip Villegas, Anna Velasco and Richard Bateman — died from shots fired in the California Employment Development Department office on Oxnard’s North C Street. At least four others were injured. Oxnard Police Officer James O’Brien was shot and killed minutes later after a 100-mph chase down Victoria Avenue.
The killer died after being shot by officers at least nine times in the parking lot of an unemployment office in Ventura. He carried a loaded rifle. Police believe he planned on continuing the rampage.
Wilson, now 67, relived the day in a phone interview Monday, a few minutes before one of her regular shows, “Jeopardy.” In some ways, everything has changed. She’s gone through years of counseling. She and her husband have retired in Texas. She has five grandchildren and one great-grandson with another on the way. Life is good.
Sometimes everything rushes back. She’ll be walking through a store and will see a man with a long, wild bush of a beard like the gunman's. Her mind races back to C Street, blood covering a blue rug, coworkers hiding under their desks.
“Oh yeah,” she said, a hitch in her voice, noting conversations about what happened are a trigger too. “I visualize things as we talk. It seems like after 30 years, you could forget. … I've learned to deal with it.”
Everything stopped
It was Ventura County’s first random mass shooting, so early in the still-rising trajectory of gun violence that “active shooter” was an uncommon phrase. The shooting and the grief it unleashed dominated everything else happening in the region.
Jason Benites remembers the silence. Now Oxnard’s police chief, he had been hired by the city as an officer in November. He was training in an academy near the Camarillo airport when news of the shooting emerged.
“Everyone was just quiet. There was a bit of grief and tension in the air,” Benites said. He was 25 and just starting his career. “I was processing it, trying to determine how often did something like this happen. It made me realize there are some very inherent dangers in this profession.”
About 5,000 people attended O’Brien’s funeral. Another 5,000 lined the streets on the route to the Catholic cemetery in Oxnard where he was buried.
Some of the officers who chased the gunman on Dec. 2 ended up leaving the force. Others wondered what they could have done differently.
“It’s a layer of scar tissue that everyone affected by it will always have. It will stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Benites said.
Hail Marys and an empty gun
Bulletproof glass was added at the EDD office. A security guard was hired, too, at the urging of employees. When the office was moved, computers were added to the lobby so workers no longer had to meet one-on-one with clients to help them fill out claims.
Some employees never returned to work. Catherine Stinson, who was shot eight times in her legs, became physically sick in the parking lot when she tried to come back.
Those who returned faced constant reminders. The rug that had been soaked with blood remained, the soiled parts cut out and replaced. The tragedy hung in the air.
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“The dynamics in the office were so different — very leery, very cautious,” said survivor Cathie Jimenez. “Someone drops their coffee cup and you’re like ‘Oh my God.'”
Jimenez worked at the office for more than 39 years. She retired in 2020, the last of the survivors to leave. Some of the group still see each other on occasions like the funeral last year for Ramona Alamillo, a coworker who also survived the shooting.
Jimenez thought life would return to something closer to normal. It never did. Even now she searches to find exit signs in stores and struggles occasionally with flashbacks.
The gunman had been to the EDD office many times to pursue job leads that never panned out. He had been searching for a job for nearly eight years, the failures documented in a cardboard box of papers he dropped off at the Ventura County Star-Free Press office in Ventura on Dec. 2, before he went to the unemployment office on North C Street, near the intersection of Gonzales Road and Oxnard Boulevard.
Some of the documents focused on a former employer that challenged the man's claims for benefits through the EDD. He didn't get anything,
When he started firing a shotgun and then a revolver in the EDD office, Jimenez was under her desk like everyone else. The gunman aimed at her and pulled the trigger. She heard only clicks. He had run out of bullets. She started praying Hail Marys loudly. Scenes from her life raced through her mind — her wedding day, the birth of her children and other milestones.
The gunman reloaded and aimed elsewhere. Thoughts of what could have happened stay with Jimenez.
“You learn to appreciate everything more, something as simple as a warm, nice meal,” she said. “You realize that every time you walk out the door, tomorrow’s not guaranteed.”
Her son Andrew Jimenez is working on a film on the shooting that could be completed late next year. She thinks some people have forgotten what happened or weren't born yet.
Many remember. Flowers are added to gravesites. Oxnard police officers will drive in a motorcade to the memorial site for a moment of silence on Saturday.
Officer Ed Castruita wasn’t working on Dec. 2 but rushed to the police department after hearing about the shooting on a country radio station. Now he takes his Boy Scout troop to a spot near where O’Brien was shot. They clean trash from around the memorial street sign that bears the fallen officer’s name.
The power of healing
At Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church in Selma, Texas, Catherine Stinson has asked Mass be celebrated in honor of the four victims — Villegas, Velasco, Bateman and O’Brien.
Stinson worked at the EDD office. She was shot by the gunman four times in each leg. She was rushed to the hospital and placed in a medically induced coma for 10 days. When she regained consciousness, she had almost no memory of what happened.
“They had just taken me off the respirator,” she said. “They told me what happened. I started crying.”
She endured 28 surgeries but still walks and gardens. She even danced at her 50th high school anniversary.
At age 70, she’s always busy, knitting prayer shawls for people recovering from surgery, facilitating a weekly Bible study and exercising on a stationary bike at the YMCA.
She thinks at times about Dec. 2, 1993. She doesn't dwell on it.
“I’m thankful for each and every day,” she said. “I can witness to the power of healing.”
The biggest flashpoint
Anna Velasco, who died that day, was a devoted Catholic with a sweet tooth. Phillip Villegas married his high school sweetheart and loved watching their son, Phillip Jr., play baseball. Richard Bateman was a part-time counselor at Arc of Ventura County and worked with people who had intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Jim O’Brien was a police officer who investigated graffiti crimes, loved pranks and practiced karate. He was also Tom O’Brien’s little brother. They put each other in headlocks as kids and laughed together at silly jokes.
Tom, a longtime educator and football coach who now works as a substitute teacher, thinks about what his brother would be like if he was still around.
“He would be an old fart like me, hopefully as bald as I am, probably spoiling his grandkids,” Tom said. He has erected a memorial in the living room of his Ventura home. It shows a picture of Jim in his Oxnard police uniform, a poem, a painting of Jesus and an etching of Jim's name from a memorial for fallen officers in Washington, D.C.
Mostly, Tom smiles and laughs when talking of his brother. There are still flashpoints that bring tears, sometimes sobs, like family holiday cards and the song “Hero,” released by Mariah Carey in 1993, the year Jim died.
“It’s amazing how much emotion comes up,” he said. “That’s part of the process of mourning.”
Reports of other mass shootings are flashpoints, too, for O’Brien, Stinson and pretty much everyone impacted by the tragedy. The shootings come so often that one blurs into the next.
“People are desensitized to them. It’s sad. Unless it happens to someone close, they can’t quite get it,” Stinson said.
When they learn of shootings, the EDD survivors say prayers for those involved. Jimenez wishes she could talk to them and explain what no one told her.
“You’re never going to be your old self again and it’s OK if you’re not,” she said. “Your whole view of the world shifts. It’s just a different reality.”
Tom Kisken covers health care and other news for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tom.kisken@vcstar.com or 805-437-0255.
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This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Reliving Ventura County’s first mass shooting 30 years later
