WEST VALLEY CITY, Utah — It might not be the weather you think of for gardening, but for people who gathered in Centennial Park in West Valley City Tuesday night, it was just right.
Residents planted 450 daffodil bulbs, each for one individual who lost their lives to gun violence in the state of Utah in 2024.
When the daffodil blooms, Siolo Toala won’t see pretty petals — he’ll see his brother.
“I lost my brother Malu in 2016 due to gun violence, so this is a space I want to remember him,” Toala said.
Nine years later, he sees the bulbs as a new start.
“I just thought that that's how things go. But because of my brother's death and because I was impacted, and now that I'm in the community, it's a little different,” Toala said.
Toala took that grief and turned it into action, working with Day Won Utah to help lead the youth in the right direction.
“I had to really take accountability on the way I raised him. I wasn't a very good brother… That's what led me to do Day Won… trying to be a better brother and continue my little brother's life that way,” Toala said.
Ashley Mendoza, co-chair for the Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah, who held the event, said it’s important to share these moments.
“The news cycles are so short. We forget things so quickly. Every week, there's a new thing that everybody's focusing on, but doing events like this provide semiannual or annual reminders to our community that we have not given up on this cause,” Mendoza said.
Organizer Jason Hamula is also a family physician and said it’s an issue he gets reminded of daily
“What I do day to day, taking care of patients, I think a lot about preventive care and preventive deaths, and gun violence victims are kind of the quintessential preventable death, if you ask me,” Hamula said.
Toala said he will continue to work to make sure future generations make better decisions.
“They don't have a safe space, and they really don't have any other options,” he said. "A lot of our kids right now, they are desensitized, I guess. We grow up playing video games where you've got 100 lives, and so these young people are living in that space."
Toala is finding his purpose now and can’t wait to see that little reminder of his brother sprout.
“He was just such a free spirit and just such a loving young man. I could have done a better job being his older brother, but like I said, my brother was just a loving young man, and I miss him,” Toala said.
