SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — A heavily armed man and woman terrorized this city
on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and wounding at least 17 at a
social services center before leading the police on a manhunt
culminating in a shootout that left the two suspects dead, the authorities said.
Panic, chaos and rumor gripped this largely working-class community about 60 miles east of Los Angeles as the attackers carried out the nation’s worst mass shooting since the assault on an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., nearly three years ago.
Chief
Jarrod Burguan of the San Bernardino Police Department identified the
two suspects as Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27. Mr.
Farook was born in the United States. Family members say they were
married and had a 6-month-old daughter.
Chief Burguan said it was not clear if a third person taken into custody after the shootout with the police was involved.
We are reasonably confident that we have two shooters and we have two dead suspects,” he said.
Mr.
Farook, an environmental inspector, had been employed with the county
health department for five years. On Wednesday morning he attended a
holiday party for the department at the Inland Regional Center, a
sprawling facility that provides services for thousands of people with
disabilities. He left “angry” after a dispute of some sort, the chief
said, and returned with Ms. Malik around 11 a.m. — heavily armed.
“There
had to be some degree of planning that went into this,” Chief Burguan
said. “I don’t think they just ran home and put on these tactical
clothes.”
He said the motive had not been determined. “We have not ruled out terrorism,’’ he said.
The couple were armed with .223-caliber assault rifles and semiautomatic handguns.
While
shots rang out, others in the building cowered and hid, sending out
texts. Chief Burguan said that most of the victims were found in one
part of that building but it took hours to render the scene safe.
The
attackers left three explosive devices behind, and the authorities were
only starting to process the scene and could not identify any of the
victims late Wednesday.
Suspect’s Brother-in-Law Speaks Out
In a news conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday evening,
As the suspects fled in a black sport utility vehicle, large parts of the city were paralyzed throughout the day.
Residents
were told to remain indoors, and government buildings, stores, offices
and at least one school were either closed or put on lockdown. Yellow
school buses filled with survivors of the shooting were escorted by
police vans to meet anxious relatives at a church.
Late
in the afternoon, dozens of heavily armed police officers in tactical
gear descended on a residential neighborhood in pursuit of the
attackers. Witnesses described a wild scene as dozens of officers closed
in on a vehicle, with hundreds of shots fired as the people in the
vehicle battled the police.
Chief Burguan said there were at least 20 officers involved in the gun battle.
The
chief said a third person fled the scene and was taken into custody,
but the police did not know his role, if any. A police officer was
wounded in the shootout and was being treated at a hospital for
non-life-threatening injuries.
In
a year repeatedly marked by such massacres, San Bernardino joined a
tragic roster that includes Charleston, S.C.; Roseburg, Ore.; and
Colorado Springs, where just five days earlier a gunman killed three
people and wounded nine at a Planned Parenthood clinic.
Investigators were puzzling over the motives, and there were conflicting accounts of what led to the shooting.
David
Bowdich, assistant director of the F.B.I.’s office in Los Angeles,
would not rule out terrorism. “We will go where the evidence takes us,”
he said. “We are definitely making some movements that it is a
possibility.”
One
senior American official said that Mr. Farook had not been the target
of any active terrorism investigation, and he was not someone the bureau
had been concerned about before Wednesday’s shooting. Other officials
said the F.B.I. was looking into a possible connection between Mr.
Farook and at least one person who was investigated for terrorism a few
years ago.
Earlier
in the evening, law enforcement officers knocked down the door of the
small townhouse in the nearby city of Redlands that they believed to be
associated with Mr. Farook. They also secured Mr. Farook’s office.
President
Obama once again called for better background checks and new
restrictions on access to guns for people who might pose a danger.
“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. He added, “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.”
How the San Bernardino Shooting and Manhunt Unfolded
Maps and graphics of the shooting.
California has the strictest gun laws in the nation, according to the most recent report card
by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. It is among a handful of
states that ban sale or possession of many assault weapons, including
the most common models, although people who owned those firearms before
they were banned are allowed to keep them. It was not known where and
how the suspects obtained their weapons.
The
attackers drove up in a dark S.U.V. to a complex of buildings run by
the Inland Regional Center, spent “several minutes” shooting inside one
of the buildings, and then fled, Chief Burguan said. They wore masks and
body armor, he said.
“They
were dressed and equipped in a way that indicates they were prepared,”
he said at a news conference about three hours after the shooting. “They
came prepared to do what they did, as if they were on a mission.”
For
hundreds of people who worked in the Inland Regional Center or were
clients of its services, a quiet morning turned into a scene of utter
panic and bloodshed, as people fled or hid behind locked doors and under
desks, communicating with family and friends through panicked phone
calls and text messages.
Jamille
Navarro, who works with special needs children at the center, called
her mother, Olivia, saying that there were gunman in the building.
“She
was hiding in her room,” Olivia Navarro said, crying. “They turned off
the lights. She was whispering because she didn’t want to be heard. I
told her to stop talking. I said, ‘All right, I’ll be right there, turn
out the lights, don’t do a thing.’ Why would somebody want to hurt
somebody who helps children?”
Aftermath of the Mass Shooting in San Bernardino
Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times
San
Bernardino is a city of more than 200,000 people that has struggled in
recent years as the city filed for bankruptcy, residents suffered a high
rate of home foreclosures, and the commercial downtown deteriorated.
The population has swelled over the past generation with immigrants from
Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, drawn by proximity to Los
Angeles, and housing that is affordable.
After
the shooting, teams of officers searched the buildings, room by room,
for survivors or suspects, and the F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also dispatched agents.
Lavinia
Johnson, executive director of Inland Regional, said that when the
shooting started, she and her staff, in another building on the
property, remained hidden in their offices for two hours until law
enforcement officers led them to safety.
The
Inland Regional Center, which was opened in 1971, is a nonprofit agency
that serves people from San Bernardino and Riverside Counties. The
facility’s Facebook page said 670 staff members served more than 30,200 people.
Large
contingents of officers, many in body armor, cordoned off the 1300
block of Waterman Avenue, a major north-south street, and other officers
hustled survivors from the building complex across the avenue to the
golf course of the San Bernardino Golf Club. Emergency crews treated
victims lying in the street, while medical helicopters landed on the
golf course to ferry the most seriously hurt patients to hospitals.
The
radio traffic conveyed a chaotic and tense situation, as officers
guided civilians from the building and described graphic scenes as they
passed victims inside. Sometime after the attack began, an officer
radioed, “They just found another room with more victims.”
A
while later, another officer asked, “Do you need assistance on the
scene or do you need us to stay mobile in case these guys hit again?”
Gabriel
Torres said his wife, Carina, a social worker who works at the center,
spent half an hour or more on the phone with him as she hid under her
desk, crying, after her supervisor told her to take cover. Terrified,
Ms. Torres told him that he should make sure to take care of their four
daughters, ages 10 to 24, if anything were to happen to her.
Her
mother, Maria Hernandez, said: “We know she is O.K., I’m going to be
O.K., I can tell you, I’m going to pass out. These feelings — I cannot
tell you.”
Adam Nagourney and Ian
Lovett reported from San Bernardino, and Richard Pérez-Peña from New
York. Reporting was contributed by Rebecca Fairley Raney and Jennifer
Medina from San Bernardino; Julie Turkewitz from Anaheim; Marc Santora,
Benjamin Mueller, Ashley Southall, Jack Begg, Susan C. Beachy, Erik
Eckholm and Timothy Williams from New York; Michael S. Schmidt and Kitty
Bennett from Washington; and Jack Healy from Denver.
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