Tragedy Tempered by Community Support at Denny’s

A month after the deadly shooting spree in Farmington, Denny’s joined forces with the San Juan Medical Foundation to fund families impacted by the tragedy. You’re watching The Local News Network, brought to you by Northern Edge Casino and Boon’s Family Thai Barbecue. I’m Hayley Opsal. On June 14th, Denny’s customers enjoyed a hearty meal while knowing that their entire purchase would contribute to supporting the community affected by May shooting.

I think it’s an amazing thing, I think it’s awesome to see players step up in the community, businesses, instead of being greedy and taking a dollar, and passing it on to people who need it, so I think it’s an awesome thing to see throughout our community.

Farmington general manager, Aaron Hernandez, inspired by Denny’s past fundraisers spearheaded the event.

Our company in the past has done other fundraisers like this in Tucson and a couple other states where they had tragedy, and our company, what they’d done in the past was help with giving them 100% of our sales during specific timeframes. Of course, you know, we do this to help the community and the families that tragedy happens to affect.

Proceeds from the busiest time of the day, from 7:00 AM to 2:00 PM, totaled about $4,000. The money was collected by Farmington Strong, a fundraising campaign organized by the San Juan Medical Foundation.

We were asked to be the fiduciary agent for the incident that happened on May 15th of this year for the shooting victims and the families of the deceased. We were asked to set up a fund, and since everybody got on board with the Farmington Strong, we decided to name it Farmington Strong, it’s a separate line item in our accounting that all the money goes directly to that that’s raised, and then we’ll go directly out to the victims and the families of the deceased.

The exact number of people impacted by May’s unfortunate event is unknown.

I mean, we did have, you know, the six shooting victims, I believe, and then the three that were deceased, but as we’ve been reaching out to the community, we’re realizing that passerbys, you know, that maybe got their vehicle shot at, and then also, the neighborhood where it occurred, there are families that homes have been shot, so, you know, damage to their homes, windows, even spoke with a woman that refrigerator got shot. So it’s really hard to say the total amount of how many people were affected by this.

A 98-year-old local woman and her daughter were among the three victims killed by the Farmington High School student who fired randomly, hitting cars and homes. Donations to Farmington Strong can be made directly online. To learn more about this and other stories, go to farmingtonlocal.news. Thank you for watching this edition of the Local News Network. I’m Hayley Opsal.