At least two attackers opened fire at a holiday party for county employees in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and injuring 17 others in the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre three years ago this month.
Hours after the shooting, law enforcement officials said two attackers — a man and a woman — had been killed and a third suspect had been detained after fleeing from police.
A senior U.S. law enforcement official identified one male suspect as Syed Farook, 28. The official said that it appears based on witness statements that two people entered building, including Farook, while another acted as a getaway driver. Farook was not under FBI investigation, the official said.
The motive for the shooting remained unclear throughout the evening, but law enforcement officials said they could not rule out terrorism.
“One of the big questions that will come up repeatedly is ‘Is this terrorism?’ ” said David Bowdich, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office. “And I am still not willing to say we know that for sure. We are definitely making some movements that it is a possibility . . . but we don’t know that yet and we’re not willing to go down that road yet.”
The FBI has determined that one of the attackers worked at the Inland Regional Center, the social services agency where the shooting occurred, according to a U.S. law enforcement official.
Public records show that a man named Syed Farook works for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health as a health inspector; the department hosted the holiday event Wednesday at the center.
The attack spawned a tense, confusing and terrifying day in Southern California as the attackers, dressed in what police called tactical gear, fled the scene and eluded capture for hours.
Five hours after the shooting, law enforcement officials swarmed a residential neighborhood not far from the complex where the shooting occurred after police “located what appeared to be the suspects’ vehicle,” Sgt. Vicki Cervantes, a San Bernardino police spokeswoman, said during a news conference.Officials exchanged gunfire with the suspects, she said, after finding a dark SUV that appears to match a description given by police earlier in the day. Two suspects were killed during this shootout, Jarrod Burguan, chief of the San Bernardino Police Department, said during an evening news conference.
A third person was seen running away, and it is unclear if that person was involved in the shooting today, Burguan said. That person was in custody late Wednesday afternoon, he said. Authorities were still working on seeing if there was a third person involved in the shooting or possibly any other people, he said..
Police had been told that before the shooting, there was one person who left the holiday party at the complex after some kind of incident, Burguan said, but he said it was unclear if this was related to the shooting.
“Somebody did leave, there was some type of dispute or something when somebody left that party,” Burguan said. “But we have no idea if those are the people that came back.”
During the shootout involving the SUV, one officer was injured with what Cervantes described as a non-life-threatening injury and taken to an area hospital.
News helicopters captured footage of dozens of police cars swarming the SUV in the middle of the road, near a white picket fence, as law enforcement officials stalked residential streets and fanned out throughout the neighborhood.
Officers surrounded the disabled SUV with armored, military-style vehicles, as police officers and vehicles with flashing lights packed the roadway farther down the street.
Multiple devices were thrown from the SUV during the chase, law enforcement officials said. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said it had recovered two rifles and two handguns and is conducting “urgent traces” to determine where the weapons were bought.
The number of suspects and their locations remained unclear for hours on Wednesday afternoon, as Cervantes said two suspects were “being dealt with” and said it appeared there could still be a suspect on the loose.The mass shooting Wednesday erupted at the Inland Regional Center, a complex that houses a conference center and a facility that serves people with developmental disabilities. Jarrod Burguan, chief of the San Bernardino Police Department, said at an earlier news conference that the person or people who opened fire were believed to have fled in a dark SUV.
Earlier in the day, officials said they did not know a motive for the shooting or know the identities of any of the suspects. But Burguan said that “at minimum, we have a domestic terrorist-type situation that occurred here.”
Late Wednesday, the greater Los Angeles area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations held a press conference in response to the shooting.
No one from CAIR gave the name of the suspect during the press conference, but Ojaala Ahmad, the organization’s communication’s director, said that the conference was in response to media reports that a man named Syed Farook is a suspect.
“I cannot express how sad I am today,” said Farhan Khan, who was introduced as the brother in law of the suspect.
Khan said he spoke to his brother-in-law a week ago, but would not answer other questions or give the man’s name. He would not comment on whether his brother-in-law is a religious person.
“I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “I am in shock myself.”
Burguan described the number of people killed as a preliminary total, adding that some of the people wounded in the shooting have serious injuries. The number of people injured had risen to 17 shortly after 3 p.m., according to Cervantes.Sherry Esquerra held back tears Wednesday as she desperately tried to reach her daughter and son-in-law after shooters killed 14 people and wounded as many more at the building where her daughter works with children with disabilities.
Esquerra had Thanksgiving with her daughter last week and expected to see her Friday. She was hoping the two turned up safe at a community center where people who were unharmed were being bused, but she was having no luck reaching her by cellphone.
"Nothing, I just get her message," she said. "Straight to voicemail."
More than 600 people work at the Inland Regional Center, which serves 30,000 people with disabilities ranging from autism to cerebral palsy to epilepsy, from newborns to people in their 90s. Social workers help the adults find jobs, housing and transportation, said Stacy McQueen, a member of the center's board of trustees.
"It's terrible. It's a terrible thing that's happened here," said McQueen, who was trying to find out why the center was attacked. "All of us are heartbroken."
At the time of the shooting, the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health was holding a banquet in a conference room.
Hundreds of law enforcement officers and SWAT teams swarmed the area around the two office buildings for hours and it took several hours before they provided a briefing with casualty counts.
Those inside the building who reached family members described a tense situation, hiding behind locked doors and turning off lights so they wouldn't be found."She was whispering," said Olivia Navarro, whose daughter, Jamile Navarro is a case manager at the center. "She was whispering and she said they were in a room, locked up because there were shooters."
Navarro's voice quivered as she described how her daughter told her she was going to turn off the lights and hang up in case the shooters arrived.
"I said, 'All right, I'll be there, turn off the lights, don't make a sound.' And that was it."
Her daughter eventually made it out safely.
Marissa Gutierrez said she began crying when she got a text message from her aunt, Regina Kuruppu, at 11:10 a.m. saying there was a shooting at work and she was scared.
Gutierrez tried calling for more than an hour, but couldn't reach her as she hid in a closet. Police eventually found her there and she got out safely.
Sheela Stark, a board member at the center, was trying to reach more than a dozen colleagues and workers, but had only heard back from one early in the day.
She was trying to stay positive by watching the news on TV and looking for familiar faces. By late afternoon she had managed to reach most everyone.
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