Survivor of 2018 shooting at Yountville Veterans' Home strives to raise awareness of trauma, gun violence

It happens less often now than when it started, but Devereaux Smith still finds herself asleep and dreaming that she can't breathe.

It's one of the lingering effects of surviving the violence that resulted in the deaths of three friends and co-workers at The Pathway Home in Yountville two years ago - that and spontaneous crying just “any old time.”

Smith was the last to leave the room alive when a former resident of the program for traumatized veterans turned up on a violent mission two years ago Monday during a farewell party for two staff members.

A few minutes later, in a disturbed act of vengeance, he cut short the lives of the program's three main mental health care providers - beloved women known for their passion and skill.

Smith wants to make sure that people remember the women who lost their lives that day: Executive Director Christine Loeber, 48; Dr. Jennifer Golick, 42, a therapist; and Dr. Jennifer Gonzales Shushereba, 32, a psychologist with the San Francisco Department of Veterans Affairs Healthcare System. Shushereba's unborn child died, as well.

And after two years of confiding about her grief and anguish only to family members and her closest friends, she is finally sharing some of her experience in hopes she can put it behind her.

Smith wants to encourage others who are dealing with the aftereffects of trauma to know that time heals.

And she wants, in some way she's not sure of yet, to contribute to a world that is more sensitive to the damage inflicted by gun violence upon those who survive.

“Think about all the people now in this situation,” Smith said. “It's so pervasive now that I think it's something we need to think about - and by pervasive, I mean shootings have become so part of the norm.”

Many of Smith's neighbors in the Napa Valley are among those unintended, sometimes invisible victims - people connected to The Pathway Home or to the tragedy that unfolded March 9, 2018, when a former Army infantryman crept into a door he had propped open a day earlier to allow him to carry out his plan.

Albert Cheung Wong, who had served nearly a year in Afghanistan, reportedly had bristled over some of the program rules while a Pathway Home resident and threatened members of the core staff. They were working on his transition to another program when he left some weeks before the shooting, investigators said.

It's not clear who was notified of the threats or what, if any, additional security precautions resulted.

Smith said she was unaware there had been any trouble when she saw Wong, 36, arrive at the farewell party in the upstairs meeting room, heavily armed and wearing protective gear for his eyes and ears.

Invasion and lockdown

It took her a moment to realize he hadn't come on a friendly visit, but only a moment. The threat he represented was otherwise clear to all present, she said.

There were Pathway Home residents and about seven staffers in the room, and space was relatively tight. But everyone had the impulse “to stand up and just sort of step back,” she said.

Wong then released the program residents, and one by one, named the staffers who were allowed to leave the room. Smith, who had joined the program just a few months earlier, recalls being last to leave the room, walking past the three victims.

“It was tough,” she said. “They were all standing.”

Those who fled used cellphones to call 911, including Smith, who ran out of the building and hid near a shed outside The Pathway Home to wait for help.

She used her key card to help Napa County Sheriff's Deputy Steven Lombardi, a 26-year veteran and the first law enforcement officer on the scene, to enter the building, and then showed him the way upstairs to the room where Wong held those who have come to be known locally as the Three Brave Women.

Smith was outside by the shed again when she heard the deputy and Wong exchange gunfire. Deciding she needed to find a safer place, she fled to the closest building and the Hero's Cafe inside.

In a surreal moment, she ran into an office to alert a staff member to an active shooter, prompting a lockdown that would last more than seven hours, with everyone in the building gathered inside the coffee shop.

There, Smith and about 30 Veterans' Home residents were glued to a large TV screen watching news coverage of the siege, as an army of law enforcement personnel gathered. Reporters occasionally interviewed her husband, Larry Kamer, who was serving as spokesman for The Pathway Home.

She assumed throughout that, despite the upheaval, “they're going to figure it out. They're going to get him. It's going to be fine.”

But when those in the cafe were alerted late in the day that authorities were preparing to storm The Pathway Home building, Smith suddenly realized, with sickening clarity, that her friends must be dead.

Hearing the fatal shots

Investigators would later determine that Wong had shot them within 12 minutes of his arrival, right after the exchange of gunfire with Lombardi, investigators said. He then shot and killed himself.

“I was right next to the building when all of the shots were exchanged,” Smith said, “so I know exactly when they died.”

The 10-year-old treatment center was suspended in the wake of the violence and later closed, its eight residents offered help to transition to another program. Smith isn't sure where they are now.

Though some might turn in on themselves in the aftermath, Smith did the opposite, she said. She soon dived into new fundraising work before realizing she couldn't be successful, a difficult realization.

Under the standard protocol for post-traumatic stress, most insurance providers will pay for six therapy sessions, an astonishingly deficient allocation, Smith said. She was able to continue with a trauma therapist “that's been super helpful.” But she has struggled with aftereffects that include difficulty being in crowds, disrupted sleep - particularly because of the dreams in which she cannot breathe - and crying that erupts unexpectedly.

Unseen community effects

All of it has gotten much better, and she credits intimate supporters like her sister-in-law and her best friend, and social groups that provided a safe space to go when she was still at her most tender, like Rotary Club and Leadership Napa County.

But she said it's only been recently that she's been able to “get out of my own way” enough to recognize the vast number of people who suffered when the violence struck, beginning with her own adult children, both Oakland residents.

“Just this week I called our son to say, ‘How did you even find out about the shooting?' “ Smith said. Both her kids are signed up for Napa County emergency notices through the Nixle public alert system, which is how her son learned of the attack. “It had never even occurred to me to ask him about that.”

She said she received a note a few days after the shooting from a 7-year-old neighbor who had been on lockdown at the nearby elementary school. Two years later, the girl is still deeply troubled by her knowledge of the events, “which was shocking to me.”

She pointed as well to the tearful, halting delivery of a resolution by Yountville Mayor John Dunbar at a Town Council meeting last week, in which Dunbar, a former Pathway Home board member, and other council members memorialized the shooting victims' “legacy of compassion, professionalism and commitment to serving others.”

“The effect that it has on the community, you don't really see,” Smith said.

Veterans' services lost

Rep. Mike Thompson, a Yountville resident, Pathway Home supporter and chairman of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, echoed her thoughts.

Upon arriving at the Veterans' Home to monitor the situation that dreadful day, Thompson learned his son, a local sheriff's deputy, was in the building. Golick was a longtime family friend, and the congressman knows “the hole that is never filled” for her husband, daughter and parents.

“My community, my home community, was absolutely rocked by something like this,” Thompson said. “The veterans' community was set back because of a very important service that they no longer had. It just goes on and on.”

Smith said she looks around at the incidents in which people experienced so much more acute violence than she did.

“How are they getting through it?” she said. “I really would like more attention in the universe to the people who are left behind after these events, but honestly, I'm not even sure what that means.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.