San Diego’s Muslims are still processing the loss of three beloved community members in Monday’s attack on the Islamic Center of Diego.
Friends of the men described them as unfailingly helpful and kind.
Community members are hailing the victims — Amin Abdullah, 51, Mansour “Abu Ezz” Kaziha, 78, and Nadir Awad, 57 — as heroes for saving nearly 140 students in class at the Islamic Center’s Al Rashid School during the shooting.
The two attackers, aged 17 and 18, were later found dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a vehicle several blocks away. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime linked to white supremacist extremism.
Khalid Alexander, a San Diego City College professor and president of Pillars of the Community, a criminal justice advocacy organization, said he considered all three of the victims friends, particularly Amin Abdullah, who he has known since 1995. The two met after Alexander converted to Islam.
“We basically became Muslim, and grew up in Islam together,” Alexander said, describing him as “one of the nicest people you’ve ever met, and one of the most spiritually rooted brothers.”
Sarah Youssef, a college freshman and member of the Islamic Center, attended the elementary school on campus from kindergarten through the eighth grade.
“I have a very personal connection to each of the victims,” Youssef said. “Brother Amin was such a kind soul. He was always smiling, always saying hi to us… greeted us every single time we entered the mosque, and he was just someone who was always there.
“We counted on him, we knew he was always going to be there for us, and he was.”
Youssef also knew Mansour Kaziha, affectionately as Abu Ezz. He ran the Islamic Center’s store and also served as a cook, handyman, and general caretaker on the campus.
“Every single day after school, we would run out of school and go and visit him,” Youssef said. “If we forgot to ask our parents for money, he’d be like, ‘Don’t worry about it, you can pay me later.’ I just remember always seeing him smiling, and being so excited to see him, and going to the store with my friends.
“The fact that the next time I walk into the mosque, I’m not going to see him is something I haven’t been able to digest yet.”
Youssef recalled seeing Awad, the husband of her kindergarten teacher. “I remember him coming and assisting us in school and always being at the mosque,” Youssef said. “These are core people in our community, and literally the purest souls.”
Youssef leads Team ENOUGH San Diego, a youth-led gun violence prevention group. She also produced and narrated the PBS documentary “Run, Hide, Fight: Growing Up Under the Gun,” about how gun violence affects young Americans.
Youssef says her years of advocacy against gun violence didn’t prepare her for an attack so close to home.
“It’s surreal… I have seen shooting after shooting after shooting on the news,” she said. “I was a student journalist in high school, and reported on how gun violence affects youth in America, as it is the number one killer of children.
“But for it to hit home like this is a completely different feeling, and I unfortunately now feel like I understand this issue at a deeper level.”
Leaders and community members argued years of dehumanizing rhetoric and propaganda contributed to the attack, citing comments made by President Donald Trump, the Muslim Ban in his first administration, increasingly common anti-Muslim sentiments by elected officials, like those made by Rep. Chip Roy and Rep. Randy Fine as evidence that hate speech and white supremacist ideology have been normalized.
The Council on American Islamic Relations says it recorded 8,683 anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints in 2025 — the highest since it began publishing data in 1996, and up from 8,658 in 2024.
Marwa Abdalla has lived in San Diego for nearly two decades and works as an instructor at San Diego State University and at UC San Diego. She also works as a community educator and activist on racial and religious discrimination, focused on anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Abdalla pointed to the fact that a majority of Americans polled in studies say they have never met a Muslim, or that they do not know a Muslim.
That information vacuum, she said, is filled in by media depictions, often in the form of news coverage, commentary of people talking about Muslims and rhetoric from elected officials. It also can appear in film, television, and social media discourse about Islam and Muslims.
“All of those are pieces of this, and the attacks that happened at the Islamic Center of San Diego did not occur in a vacuum; they occur against the backdrop of all of this,” Abdalla said.
Words matter, she said, particularly from elected officials and other public figures whose stances can strongly affect public opinion.
“The two young people who carried out these attacks obviously internalized this hateful rhetoric.”
“I don’t know that you can heal something like this and I don’t know that it should be healed,” she added.
“I think if anything is going to move us to meaningful systemic change, it’s going to be the wound itself.”
