Seventeen days ago, in the Times of San Diego, I wrote that no San Diego house of worship is safe until all of them are. I named the Islamic Center of San Diego specifically.
I wrote that it had been flooded with hate flyers. I wrote that a local Imam already needed armed security simply to hold Friday prayers. I called those things signals, and I wrote that when institutions and community members fail to act on signals, people get hurt.
On Monday, people got hurt. Three adults were killed at the Islamic Center. A security guard is among the dead — a man who stood his post at the largest mosque in this county and did not survive it. Children were inside. Teachers were inside. They are safe tonight only by the mercy of timing and the courage of people who put themselves between a gunman and a classroom.
I take no satisfaction in having been prescient. I am writing again for one reason only: to say plainly what we should do now, while this county is still listening.
What I wrote about on May 1 was not prophecy. It was pattern recognition, and the pattern was available to anyone willing to look. Antisemitic incidents in this county rose 150% in a single year. Anti-Muslim incidents nationally hit a 30-year high. Religion accounted for 49% of every hate crime committed in the city of San Diego last year.
The Islamic Center had already been targeted with hate material. None of this was secret. None of it required a security background to see. It required only that we treat it as real.
But we did not. And here is the hard part, the part I hope San Diego will sit with rather than scroll past: the gap between a hate flyer and three dead is not as wide as we tell ourselves. It is a continuum.
Surveillance becomes harassment. Harassment becomes vandalism. Vandalism becomes shooters outside a mosque on a Monday. Every stage on that continuum is a place where intervention is still possible — and every stage we wave off as “just a flyer” is a stage we surrender.
On May 1, I wrote that our leaders had said the right things. San Diego Police pledged increased patrols around houses of worship. The Sheriff’s Office declared it does not tolerate hate. The DA maintains a hate crimes unit. San Diego City Council adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
But I wrote then that words are inputs, not outcomes, and that the public was owed results — documented investigations, prosecutorial follow-through, transparent accounting. I was asking, on May 1, for accountability before a tragedy. I am now asking for it after one, and the questions are sharper.
So I will put them directly to the people responsible for answering them. To San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl, to Sheriff Kelly Martinez, to District Attorney Summer Stephan, to Mayor Todd Gloria and every member of the Board of Supervisors: the Islamic Center of San Diego had been the target of documented hate activity. What was opened, investigated and tracked in the weeks before Monday? When the patrols around houses of worship were announced, did they include this mosque, and at what level?
The county has a hate crimes apparatus on paper. Tell the public what that apparatus actually did with the warning signs at this specific address — and if the honest answer is “not enough,” say so, because the families burying three people this week are owed the truth and not a press conference.
This is also the moment the rest of San Diego County decides what kind of city and county it is. The Islamic Center serves roughly 5,000 members. They are our neighbors. Their children go to school in this county. Tonight they are afraid, and the question for everyone who is not Muslim is whether that fear is theirs to carry alone. It is not.
What happens to one house of worship is a warning to all of them. The synagogue, the gurdwara, the church — every one of them should treat this attack as an attack on their own front door, because the hatred that reached the Islamic Center does not check identification before it picks a target.
I will end where I ended last time, because the instruction has not changed — it has only become more tragic to ignore. Hate does not begin with violence. It begins with a flyer, a slur, a figure casing a sanctuary. When those signals go unreported, the window for prevention closes. It closed today, in Clairemont, and three families will never be whole again.
See something. Say something. And to the officials who answer to this county: this time, mean it. Show us the investigations. Show us the results. Show us that the warnings brought something more than just another news article.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
