Police say they’ve identified the couple who massacred 14 people at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, and while the killers’ specific motives remain unclear, sources Thursday said the husband was in touch with terrorists and may have had workplace grievances.
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Here is what we know about the attackers: Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. Police said they believe they were the only two shooters.
Farook was born in the U.S.to a Pakistani family, was raised in Southern California and had been a San Bernardino County employee for five years, according to authorities and acquaintances. “He did leave the party early under some circumstances that were described as angry or something of that nature”. The Council on American Islamic Relations, a Muslim advocacy group, said Farook has been married for two years – but wouldn’t confirm whether Malik was the wife’s name.
The shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino is the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, where 26 people, mostly children, died.
Burguan said police also discovered a device at the scene of the shooting that might have been an explosive, and authorities were working late into the night to dispose of it. Several items of concern were also located inside the SUV involved in the pursuit, and investigators were trying to determine if any of those items were explosive. Police responded to reports of an active shooter at a social services facility.
The social services center has two large buildings that require a badge to get in, said Sheela Stark, an Inland Regional Center board member.
The attackers stormed the Inland Regional Centre and began shooting at around 11am local time.
“They locked themselves in her office”. That person isn’t believed to have anything to do with the shootings, the official said.
While they were there, a black SUV with Utah plates passed by slowly, then sped up and raced off, a law enforcement official close to the investigation said.
The area surrounding the center resembled a war zone, with dozens of people walking out of the building with their hands in the air and lines of heavily armed officers aiming their weapons. “I am in shock myself”, Khan said.
Burguan said that police investigating the shooting went to a house in Redlands on Wednesday afternoon, and saw the couple take off in a black SUV.
Khan says photos from Facebook are of Farook’s brother who was at work at the time of the shooting.
Firefighters set up a triage area near the Inland Regional Center on the South Waterman Avenue, where they were treating the wounded on the street and loading others into waiting ambulances.
Denise Peraza was also inside the center when she was shot in the back.
“The information we have is they came prepared to do what they did, as if they were on a mission”, Burguan said, adding that they were “equipped to get away.”
“Pray for us. I am locked in an office”. “We don’t know if this was the intended target or if there was something that triggered him to do this immediately”, said David Bowdich, assistant director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.
The attacks rippled through San Bernardino all of Wednesday: schools were on lockdown, entire neighborhoods were urged to stay inside and people recalled cowering in nearby offices for hours.
“He never struck me as a fanatic, he never struck me as suspicious”, said Griselda Reisinger, who worked with Farook before leaving the agency in May. They were married and had just dropped off their six-month-old daughter with a grandmother before the shooting, according to family representatives.
One police officer suffered light injury during the action.
“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world, and there’s some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently”, Obama said.
In an exchange on a law enforcement radio channel, an official told a dispatcher that Farook “was acting nervous” at the banquet and left the building about 20 minutes before the shooting.
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Both were killed during a gun battle with police which followed a brief auto chase. She says one other patient left the hospital after being treated Wednesday.
