Vigil mourns Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay victims


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Varun Soni, dean of Religious and Spiritual Life, other Religious Life faculty members and President Carol Folt spoke at the vigil. “I find that the best thing we can do during times of tragedy is just be together,” Soni said. (Tomoki Chien | Daily Trojan)

USC Office of Religious and Spiritual Life held a candlelight vigil Wednesday night for the victims of the Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay mass shootings that occurred this past weekend. The vigil was held in the courtyard of the University Religious Center, just as another vigil was being held in Monterey Park on the same night. 

“We wanted to host this [vigil] for our students who might not have been able to make it out there,” said Varun Soni, dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at USC. 

Primarily, Soni said, the vigil was meant to be a space where students could gather and be heard amidst the past few years which have seen a rise in anti-Asian sentiment and “scapegoating for COVID.”

“The Monterey Park massacre hit very close to home for us,” Soni said. “It’s a community that’s 12 miles away and a place where over one thousand Trojans call home … These latest mass shootings have really exacerbated the feelings our students have of fear and despair. And so really what we want to do today is just bring people together just to let them know that they’re seen and they’re heard. I find that the best thing we can do during times of tragedy is just be together.” 

Multiple members of USC’s religious life gave speeches at the vigil, including Soni, Associate Deans of Religious Life Vanessa Gomez Brake and Reverend Brandon Harris, pastor at Our Savior Parish and the Caruso Catholic Center Father Richard Sunwoo and USC Hillel Executive Director Dave Cohn. 

President Carol Folt also gave a speech, thanking those assembled for coming together as a community to comfort one another. She noted the symbolism of the candles held by attendants as a metaphor for the light and kind words that people bring to each other in times of distress. 

Among other faculty speakers were two residents of Monterey Park: Katherine Chan Guevarra, a program specialist working at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences’ Comparative Literature department and Jacob Ardron, Director of the Alpha Omega Campus Ministry. Guevarra spoke about how she had been processing her grief and shock over the last few days and how she felt having her “boring” city become spotlighted by the news media in the aftermath of the shooting. 

“There’s so much comfort in what I thought was this banality of the city,” Guevarra said. “My neighbors and I refuse to let this tragedy define us.”

Katelyn Do, a sophomore majoring in journalism, said she heard about the vigil via Instagram, where she follows many Asian clubs and social organizations at USC. She said that she attended the vigil to give herself space to feel her own emotions about the shootings after having spoken about them in classes the past few days. 

“Being a journalism student, we have been talking about this event a lot, but in the perspective of how the media has been covering it and how the media in general covers tragedies,” Do said. “Because I, myself, am Asian American, I’ve been caught up in the whirlwind of analyzing this event instead of really processing how the event is emotionally impacting me.” 

Do said that being at the vigil was “emotional” for her, and that she appreciated the ability to come together after a few days when everyone could gather their thoughts. 

“It made me think a lot more deeply about how this event has impacted me,” Do said.