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Scenes From San Bernardino, Calif.

The carnage happened at the Inland Regional Center, which helps people with disabilities find work, get treatment, housing and transportation.

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Wearing military-style gear and wielding assault rifles, Syed Rizwan Farook, a 28-year-old county restaurant inspector, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 27, slaughtered 14 and wounded 17 in the attack at a social service center shortly after he slipped away from an employee banquet he was attending there.

A motive in the shooting has not been determined, Burguan said.

As the shooting investigation unfolded, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued a reminder that people can take steps to try to protect themselves in an active-shooter situation.

Farook had a profile set up on iMilap.com, which describes itself as “a site for people with disabilities and second marriage”.

Co-workers told the Los Angeles Times that Farook was a devout Muslim but didn’t talk about religion at work.

The couple then escaped in a dark-colored SUV. CNN reported that they were throwing pipe bombs out the window as they were being pursued by police.

Police say two suspects, one male and one female, are dead after the shooting at a social services centre.

An armored vehicle with a battering ram attached “very slowly and methodically” broke down the door of the house in Redlands on Wednesday night a witness told the LA Times. They asked “immediately adjacent” neighbors to evacuate until they were sure the place was safe. He wished victims a speedy recovery and said he was in shock over the shooting, according to member station KPCC. He also urged lawmakers to ban people on the “no fly list” from purchasing firearms. “There had to have been some degree of planning that went into this”. Either it didn’t work because of distance or they didn’t do it. Officials later rendered the explosive devices safe.

Farook was an environmental specialist with the county health department who sometimes worked at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. The report found an average of 22.4 mass shootings a year from 2009 to 2013, compared with 20.2 shootings in the previous five years.

“I have no idea why he would do something like that”, Farook’s brother-in-law Farhan Khan said.

“If I hadn’t been in the bathroom, I’d probably be laying dead on the floor”, he said. “We should come together in a bipartisan basis at every level of government to make these rare as opposed to normal”, he said in a previously scheduled interview with CBS News. But we never engaged him in conversation. And they were unloading people out of the back of the pickup truck that had been shot.

San Bernardino police Sergeant Vicki Cervantes says an officer was hurt in the shootout and went to the hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. He emphasizes that the attackers’ motives remain unknown. Hundreds of shots were fired and the two people – a man and a woman – in the vehicle were killed. Intuition, however, is the least of it: a large body of evidence has accumulated conclusively showing that higher gun ownership means more murder and other sorts of gun-related death.

In 2015, there have been more than 350 shootings in which four or more people were wounded.

Most of the victims were “centrally located in one area of the facility”, said Burguan.

“This is not what we stand for”, she said. The city came to a standstill, with residents advised to stay indoors, government buildings, shops, offices and schools were shut or put on lockdown.

Loma Linda University Medical Center received four patients in its trauma center and expected three more, spokeswoman Briana Pastorino said. Relatives have said the two were married.

“It is something that our staff understands”, he said.

The center was hosting a holiday party.

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Farook and Malik didn’t appear to have left behind a note, a law enforcement official said.

Reports of up to 20 victims in mass shooting in California city of San Bernardino