Vigil held for Pleasanton Home Depot employee killed in shooting

A crowd of nearly 100 friends, family and community members gathered last Friday for a candlelight vigil to honor the life of Blake Mohs, the 26-year-old Tri-Valley resident who was shot and killed last month while working at the Home Depot in Pleasanton.

The evening vigil, which was hosted by the Boy Scouts of America’s Golden Gate Area Council in front of their offices on 6601 Owens Drive, featured a number of speakers who shared stories and celebrated who Mohs was as a person and dedication to the Scouts.

“He was a goofball at heart,” said Matt Lindberg, who is the council program director and a close friend of Mohs.

Lindberg met Mohs when they both attended Camp Royaneh, a Boy Scouts camp where Lindberg is now also director.

During the vigil he talked about Mohs’ nickname — D.K. — at camp and how it stood for the famous Super Mario character, Donkey Kong, because of the fact that Mohs would dress up in a gorilla costume for performances during camp.

“Blake loved getting into this outfit,” he said. “And it wasn’t for his own sense of self worth … he did it because he loved to be such a goofball, he did it for the kids.”

He said Mohs was the reason he kept coming back to camp and that Mohs made the camp experience feel like a second home and a second family.

The vigil took place 10 days after Pleasanton police allege Benicia Knapps, a 32-year-old Oakland resident, shot Mohs as she tried to take a large yellow Dewalt box without paying from the Home Depot on Johnson Drive on April 18.

Mohs, who died later that day at an area hospital, was a loss prevention employee at the store and attempted to stop Knapps whom police allege fled the scene in a getaway car that was being driven by David Guillory, 31, with Knapps’ 21-month-old child in the car as well. After her arrest, Knapps admitted holding the gun but claimed it fired accidentally, according to a police report filed with the court.

“When I first heard the news, it was a complete shock to me,” Charlie Utecht, another one of Mohs’ camp friends, told the Weekly on Friday. “I had just spoken with him a week before. Hearing this news and hearing the details was just devastating.”

Utecht, who met Mohs 10 years ago at camp, also spoke during the vigil and recounted all the fun times he and Mohs had — like when they accidentally scared all of the horses in the feeding pad to the pasture by cracking a whip they found one night.

“Blake was just this amazing person,” Utecht said. “He would walk into a room and just fill it with positivity … He loved to make people laugh, loved to help people, always the first to shoot up his hand to volunteer for something.”

Utecht said that even though he hadn’t seen Mohs in a very long time, he always considered him to be a close friend and like a brother.

“He had so much life left in him and he had so much life in him in general. It’s a tragedy that he got taken from us so soon,” Utecht said. “I know that he was doing his job, but it’s just so sad.”

Edward Gabrielson, who worked with Mohs at various scout BB gun ranges for the last five to six years, told the Weekly that he only had one word for how he felt when he got the phone call about Mohs’ death — disbelief.

“He was such a genuine Eagle Scout,” Gabrielson said. “Everything they described was an Eagle Scout, that was Blake.”

He said that they were even set to work together on one of the ranges later that month and that Mohs had told him just a couple of years ago that Mohs wanted to take over Gabrielson’s position.

“We got to the point where we were literally finishing each other’s sentences,” he said during the vigil. “It’s stunning to hear what happened.”

But while he was grieving with the rest of the crowd, he also touched on remembering Mohs for the giving person he was and how the Scouts will have to carry on without Mohs — even if it is going to be difficult.

“It’s just going to be very hard this coming week to get it together … but we pride ourselves on whatever happens — continuing,” Gabrielson said. “This is probably the worst one we’re going to have to deal with, but we will deal with it and we will have a good camp and hopefully the campers won’t even notice that we’re all walking around like zombies.”

And as the crowd prepared their candles for a moment of silence for Mohs, many even joked saying that the wind that kept blowing out the candles was his last goofball prank to his friends and family.

The Mohs family, along with members of the Boy Scouts, asked at the end of the ceremony for contributions honoring Mohs to be made to Camp Royaneh, where he spent a lot of his time and where he met his fiancee. To donate, you can visit www.eagles.ggacbsa.org.

A Go Fund Me account has also been set up in his memory and as of publication, has raised over $42,000 with 565 people having donated. According to the organizers, the money is going straight to Mohs’ mom to help pay for memorial services as well as his mom’s goal of preventing anything like what happened to her son from happening to anyone else.

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