It was 11am on a brisk, blue December morning in Southern California when the first emergency call came in: at least two people wearing ski masks and military gear, armed with assault rifles and handguns, had stormed into a Christmas party for employees of the San Bernardino county health department and opened fire indiscriminately.
Shortly after yesterday’s attack, 24-year-old Kevin Ortiz called his father from the bloody scene, in a conference room at the Inland Regional Centre, to tell him that he had been shot three times but that the police had stormed the building and he would survive. Many were not as lucky: 14 people lay dead and a further 17 had been wounded.
The media and multiple law enforcement agencies quickly descended on San Bernardino, a city of some 210,000 people, 60 miles east of Los Angeles, to begin the grimly familiar routine of responding to a mass shooting. But this incident broke from the norm: the shooters had fled the scene, and there was more than one of them.
A little over four hours after the attack, as police followed a tip to a property in the nearby town of Redlands, a black SUV believed to be related to the shooting sped away from the house. The pursuit took police back into San Bernardino, where they finally cornered the vehicle and exchanged fire with the two suspects inside, who also flung pipe bombs.
News choppers circled as squad cars and armoured SWAT vehicles swarmed into the area. The gun battle was soon over, leaving a police officer wounded and both suspects dead: a man and a woman. The local residential neighbourhood was closed off for hours as officers went from home to home in case any further suspects were on the loose. A third person seen running from the scene was later detained, but the authorities said they thought it unlikely he was involved in the attack.
Elizabeth Garcia, 23, an employee at a public transport office a block from the shootout, said she and her colleagues had heard the gunfire. “We knew what had happened earlier in the day, so we all just ran to the back of the room,” she said, as she waited at the police cordon at dusk to collect her four-year-old daughter, whose day-care centre was still on lockdown.
The dead male gunman was identified last night as Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, an American citizen. The dead woman was his wife, 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik. The couple reportedly left behind their six-month-old daughter with Mr Farook’s mother. At a press conference, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said the authorities had yet to rule out terrorism as a motive for the attack.
However, it also emerged that Mr Farook was employed as an environmental health specialist with the county health department, that he had been present at the Christmas gathering yesterday morning, and that he left shortly before the shooting after getting into an argument with one or more of his fellow attendees. Chief Burguan nonetheless told reporters he thought it unlikely to have been a spur-of-the-moment attack. "There has to be some degree of planning," he said.
The incident was both remarkable and routine in its violence: the most deadly mass shooting in the US since the murders of 20 young children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut three years ago, yesterday’s attack was also the 355th mass shooting in the US in 2015.
