Jose Sanchez took over as mayor just four days after the Lunar New Year shooting that killed 11 people and injured nine. The Monterey Park City Council member and longtime civics teacher had spent years studying firearm laws, helping his class of high school seniors craft gun-safety legislation that reached the House floor. He thought he knew what to expect.
Nothing could have prepared him.
He was running on two to three hours of sleep a night as he juggled the demands of teaching with the tragedy’s aftermath. Meetings with state and federal government officials. Vigils and community events. Round-the-clock emails from residents worried about safety.
The father of three small children, he started bringing his oldest child to the office so they could spend more time together. Her sixth birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, which had been set for the day after the shooting, was canceled.
Two days after a gunman opened fire in a ballroom dance studio, Sanchez was back in his classroom at Alhambra High School, trying to talk with his students about what had happened without breaking down.
“I remember at the end of that period, a student patted me on the shoulder and asked if I was OK,” he said. “It’s not that often that my students ask me how I’m doing.”
Sanchez, a Democrat, had thought about the probability of a shooting while running his first campaign for elected office. He remembers telling his wife he would make sure Monterey Park was prepared.
The city, a majority Asian American suburb outside of Los Angeles that for decades attracted immigrants with the promise of good schools and single-family homes, had largely been spared from the proliferation of shootings across the nation.
His wife warned him that he was thinking about gun safety too much, and he wondered if she was right. That issue had consumed him since 2016, when he and a group of students visiting UCLA barricaded themselves in a women’s restroom after a professor was shot and killed.
“I wish I didn’t have to think about this issue,” Sanchez said. “And now that it has happened, it makes you think, how could we have been better prepared? What can we do now to prevent another one?”