For two hours Monday morning, San Diego police raced to head off disaster before it struck.
And it all started with a call for help from a concerned mom.
In two afternoon news conferences following the shooting deaths of three people at the Islamic Center of San Diego, San Diego police Chief Scott Wahl recounted the series of events that led up to the late morning attack.
The mother, fearing her son was suicidal, contacted authorities and asked for help. But police almost immediately began to suspect that they would have to scramble to prevent a bigger tragedy.
Wahl, emotional during the first news conference, around two hours after the shootings, and stoic in the second, shortly before 5 p.m., shared the timeline leading up to the attack on the mosque, including how the suspects allegedly fired on people both outside the center and in the community and how one man lost his life while protecting others.
It all began in the mid-morning.
9:42 a.m. Monday: “We received a call of a runaway juvenile,” Wahl said. But what the woman on the line shared, according to Wahl, “began to elevate the threat level that we were perceiving with this information.” The woman said several of her weapons were missing, along with her car, and she couldn’t find her son.
Worse, when she last saw him, he and a companion were dressed in camouflage gear.
“That is not consistent with what we would typically see from someone who was suicidal,” Wahl said.
Police focused on two sites initially, Madison High School – one of the suspects, Wahl said, is associated with Madison – and the Fashion Valley shopping center in Mission Valley, because a license plate reader detected the car they were seeking near the mall.
San Diego Unified spokesperson James Canning confirmed the suspect was a student at iHigh Virtual Academy, but had previously been a member of Madison’s wrestling team, because that is his neighborhood school.
The mosque is just over a mile southeast of Madison. Wahl said no one informed police of a threat to the faith center or the school located there.
Police dispatched officers to the high school, Wahl said, but just as they entered the campus, the department received more calls.
11:43 a.m.: Other officers had continued to question the mother who feared her son was suicidal, “trying to piece together” where he and his companion might be. The location is, Wahl said, “just a few blocks away” from the Islamic Center. So when the 911 call came in that an active shooter had targeted the mosque, those officers left the woman and rushed to the center.
They immediately came upon three dead bodies, including a security guard. Because of what the officers had seen at the mosque, and “because we know this is a large gathering facility with kids, adults, community members … officers immediately began to enter the facility, utilizing active shooter protocol looking for a suspect or two,” Wahl said.
The victims’ names have yet to be released by law enforcement. But Wahl called the guard – the Islamic Center identified him as Amin Abdullah – “heroic,” adding that “undoubtedly he saved lives today.”
11:52 a.m.: Just nine minutes later, another 911 caller informed police that someone in a vehicle on Salerno Street, blocks from the mosque, had opened fire on a landscaper. The man escaped unharmed, but he may have been struck, Wahl said. Police were trying to confirm if his helmet saved him.
Shortly afterward, police received another call, this time from a community member in the 3800 block of Hatton Street. The person saw a car with two bodies inside. Wahl said they were the young suspects, ages 17 and 18, and had apparently died from from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
1:55 p.m.: The police hosted their first news conference of the day, with a visibly emotional Wahl saying “all of the kids are safe,” referring to the children at the school on the Islamic Center grounds. The FBI’s Mark Remily, the special agent in charge of the San Diego office, told reporters that investigators are “considering this a hate crime until it’s not.”
To the loved ones of the three victims, Wahl added, “Our hearts go out to all of the families being notified.” But his department, said Wahl, a 28-year police veteran, engaged in “the most dynamic and impressive response I have ever seen in policing.”
4:50 p.m. – The investigation continued, with Wahl, joined by the FBI’s Remily and Mayor Todd Gloria, telling the press that authorities were in the process of serving search warrants. “It will continue tonight into tomorrow,” he said.
The chief repeatedly deflected questions, though, on the specifics of what had prompted investigators to regard the shootings as a hate crime.
Wahl declined to respond to a question about reports that anti-Islamic writings were found in the car, but confirmed that “hate rhetoric” was involved in the crime.
It is going “to take more time to develop” that information further, he said. He also allowed that police had discovered “general hate kind of speech,” not a specific threat to the Islamic Center.
“We are focused on figuring out what has happened and what we could have done to prevent this,” he said.
