Essential California Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Monday, Aug. 5, and I’m writing from Los Angeles. Want to make Essential California better? Please take this reader survey. The Salazar family was supposed to be celebrating a bright, young daughter’s 14th birthday this weekend, but instead it was mourning her death. Keyla Salazar, one of three people killed by a gunman at the Gilroy Garlic Festival last Sunday, will never turn 14 or start high school at San Jose’s Latino College Preparatory Academy, as had been planned. On Saturday, Keyla’s mother learned of the shooting rampage in El Paso while holding a vigil in memory of her daughter. She shook her head and muttered, “hasta cuando, hasta cuando” — “until when, until when” — and threw her phone face down, as the news of another massacre halfway across the country added anguish to anguish for those already in the throes of grief. Holding candles in paper cups, the friends and family who were gathered to mourn Keyla held a moment of silence for the 20 dead in El Paso. [Read the story: “Memorial for girl killed in Gilroy is interrupted by news of El Paso massacre” by Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio in the Los Angeles Times] Before the night had ended, another shooter would open fire, this time in Dayton, Ohio. Nine people were killed and at least 27 injured about 1 a.m. Sunday, as bullets tore through a popular nightlife area known as the Oregon District in the second mass shooting in less than 24 hours. This timeline of the worst mass shootings in the United States in recent years has been updated twice this weekend alone. Twenty-nine lives were lost in Dayton and El Paso, with countless others surely flattened by grief and trauma. The accused El Paso shooter, a 21-year-old white man, has been tentatively linked by authorities to hate-filled, anti-immigrant writing that called the attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Meanwhile, a New York Times study found that white extremist ideology has been linked to at least four of the 10 recent deadliest active-shooter episodes in the United States. It is difficult for a person to read the news stories without being shaken by them, let alone to even begin to make sense of these events. Maybe there is no sense to be had, just an endless parade of “thoughts and prayers.” Until the next time — when we will inevitably find ourselves stringing together two simple phrases in a terrible order: “the worst mass shooting in America” and “since El Paso.”