Memorial bell-ringing for Dec. 2 San Bernardino terror attack victims both solemn and cleansing
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On a bright Sunday afternoon about 40 people gathered at Cal State San Bernardino to memorialize the 14 victims of the Dec. 2, 2015 terrorist attack, but especially the five who graduated from the school’s College of Natural Sciences.
Friends, family, professors and at least one co-worker gathered to hear a bell ring 14 times — one ring for each victim — in the Peace Garden, a groomed outdoor space of trees, boulders, and a low wall, perfect for sitting and visiting.
“Every year I come out here, I say the same thing, that somehow today will be easier than the year before. And it’s not,” Bill Van Dyke, an adjunct professor at the university, said before the bell-ringing, his voice breaking.
Time does not take away the pain, he said. “Every year we come here and we feel the same thing and the hurt never stops.”
Cal State San Bernardino and its College of Natural Sciences is intimately tied to the victims of the shooting.
All but one of the 14 who died in the attack worked for San Bernardino County’s Environmental Health Services Division.
They had gathered at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino for a training event and holiday party when co-worker Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, a health inspector, and Tashfeen Malik, his wife, began shooting.
The Redlands couple died later that same day in a gunfight with law enforcement.
The slain county health services workers who were Cal State San Bernardino alumni include Robert Adams (public health education, 2011); Juan Espinoza (biology, 2002); Shannon Johnson (environmental health science, 2004); Yvette Velasco (environmental health science, 2013); and Michael Wetzel (biology, 2001).
Since 2016, when the garden was dedicated, each graduate who died in the attack has had their name and school information affixed to an individual plaque, one for each of the five sides of a slate-rock pedestal that serves as a base for a pole holding a memorial bell.
It is rung 14 times, only once a year on Dec. 2, College of Natural Sciences Dean Sastry G. Pantula said.
The pedestal was laden with flowers Sunday, placed there by the visitors who either brought their own or took one offered to them as the arrived.
One woman, who declined to give her name, was a co-worker in the room during the shooting, both she and Pantula said. She placed a flower on each side of the pedestal.
“I appreciate that the university has gone through the diligence,” said Michael Nguyen, 29, who took classes with Velasco and had the honor of ringing the bell. “This is such a small community. It’s hard to forget them,” he said of the natural sciences school.
Nguyen, the environmental health and safety administrator for the San Bernardino Community College District, said the Cal State San Bernardino program has a reputation for producing highly sought environmental health specialists
The losses “had a profound reach throughout Southern California, ” he said.
Van Dyke, an assistant district manager for the Corona-based Northwest Mosquito and Vector Control District, told the gathering to take comfort from the memorial.
“We are here today to remember, and to allow our souls the time to contemplate the beauty and the grace we felt in the presence of the people we loved,” said Van Dyke.
And the ceremony journeyed from tearful and heart-wrenching to warm and social, with the attendees staying long after the bell was rung.
Children played and shouted amid the boulders while adults talked, hugged and visited along the sitting wall, which bears an inscribed quote from Albert Einstein, “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.”
Robert Velasco, 62, of Fontana, said he and his family come to the Peace Garden on occasions other than Dec. 2 to remember daughter Yvette, who was born on an Easter Sunday.
The family has a picnic, and the young nephews play, as they did on Sunday. The ceremony was special, Velasco said, but “we remember her every day.”