It is
extremely rare for a mass shooting in America to have multiple perpetrators — and even more so for one of them to be a woman.
At a news conference Wednesday, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan identified the suspects killed in the shootout with police as Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27.
Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council for American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, told The Washington Post that Farook and Malik had been married for two years and left their 6-month-old child with Farook’s mother that morning.
The couple told the grandmother that they had a doctor’s appointment and needed her to take care of the child, Ayloush said, adding that she had been concerned Farook and his wife might be among the victims of the shooting when neither of them answered their phones. Authorities identified Farook and Malik as the gun-wielding attackers who killed 14 people and wounded 17 others before dying hours later in a shootout with police.
“I have no idea why he would do something like this,” Farhan Khan, who is married to Farook’s sister, said at a news conference held by CAIR late Wednesday night.
The police chief said that while authorities are still searching for a motive, “we have not ruled out terrorism.”
Farook was a San Bernardino County employee who had worked for five years as an environmental health specialist in the public health department, which was hosting the holiday party where the shooting occurred Wednesday. According to
state employee records, Farook’s total compensation in 2013, including salary and benefits, was $71,230.
Farook was born in the United States, Burguan confirmed. Malik was born in Pakistan and spent time in Saudi Arabia before marrying Farook, said Ayloush, the Muslim community leader.
Farook was born in Illinois after his parents immigrated to the United States from Pakistan, Ayloush told The Post.
The California couple join a long roster of convicted and alleged mass shooters from recent years. But in contrast to those who have committed such acts of violence in the past, Farook and Malik do not appear so far to have left a digital trail that could point to their motives.
Christopher Harper-Mercer, the 26-year-old who fatally shot nine people and then killed himself at a community college in Oregon in October,
left behind social media profiles that indicated an affinity with Nazism, anti-religious views and a desire to “lash out at society.”
Charleston, S.C., church shooting suspect Dylann Roof posted Facebook photos of himself wearing emblems of white supremacist movements, and owned a website containing a lengthy manifesto against racial minorities.
But where Farook and Malik are concerned, the traces of them that can be found on the Internet are benign: a
baby registry that appeared to be in Malik’s name, and an undated online
dating profile that appeared to be Farook’s, in which, among other things, he stated an interest in target shooting.
The registry page cites a May due date in Riverside, which corresponds with reports that the couple’s child is 6 months old and the fact that they were discovered by police outside a residence less than half an hour away from Riverside.
Malik’s requests are few: diapers, baby wash, swabs and convertible car seat.
The dating profile, posted to a site “for people with disabilities and second marriage,” includes a description that matches what is known of Farook so far.
The profile’s “About Him” section introduces someone who works for the county as a “health, safety and envorimental [sic] inspector.” It further states that he is from a religious but modern family of four, lives with his parents and enjoys working on cars as well as “just hang out in back yard doing target pratice [sic] with younger sister and friends.”
In interviews
with the Los Angeles Times, Farook’s co-workers in the public health department said he was “quiet and polite, with no obvious grudges.”
“He never struck me as a fanatic, he never struck me as suspicious,” Griselda Reisinger said.
Fellow inspectors Patrick Baccari and Christian Nwadike said the “tall, thin young man with a full beard” rarely started conversations, but he was well-liked and spent a lot of time in the field.
They said Farook recently traveled to Saudi Arabia, coming back with a wife he had met online. He was a devout Muslim but didn’t discuss religion at work.
Reports show that Farook inspected
public pools and
eating establishments. His job required him to check the cleanliness of food surfaces and cooling methods, analyze chlorine levels and test kitchen equipment.
Wednesday’s mass shooting was the deadliest in the United States since 2012, when a lone gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Conn.
According to CNN, of the 28 deadliest shootings in U.S. history before Wednesday, “only two have come at the hands of multiple shooters: the February 1983 killings at the Wah Mee gambling and social club in Seattle and the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado, in 1999.”
An
FBI report released last year said there were 160 “active shooter” incidents in the United States between 2000 and 2013. Among those, all but two involved a single shooter, the report states.
The exceptions, according to the FBI:
• On April 6, 2012, Jacob Carl England, 19, and Alvin Lee Watts, 32, each armed with a handgun, drove through the streets of Tulsa, Okla., firing their weapons, killing three people and wounding two others, according to the report.
• On Aug. 27, 2011, Tyrone Miller, 22, and an additional unidentified shooter(s), armed with handguns, allegedly began shooting at a house party in Queens, N.Y., according to the report. Miller was arrested two years later in North Carolina, but the unidentified suspect(s) remains at large.
The FBI’s definition excludes
the D.C.-area sniper shootings, which began Oct. 2, 2002, when John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo began shooting Washington-area residents — a string of attacks that left 10 dead and three seriously wounded.
According to the FBI report: “Active shooter is a term used by law enforcement to describe a situation in which a shooting is in progress and an aspect of the crime may affect the protocols used in responding to and reacting at the scene of the incident. Unlike a defined crime, such as a murder or mass killing, the active aspect inherently implies that both law enforcement personnel and citizens have the potential to affect the outcome of the event based upon their responses.”
The agency’s report did not include active-shooter incidents from 1999, the year two students at Columbine High School killed 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.
And one of the San Bernardino attackers was a woman, which makes the incident even more unusual: Among the 160 active-shooter incidents logged by the FBI, only six of the shooters were female, the report states.
Attacks involving multiple shooters are significantly less common because they usually require a shared ideology, according to Jeffrey Simon, a visiting lecturer in the UCLA Department of Political Science and the author of “Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat.”
It requires more plotting when multiple individuals are involved, which heightens the chance of being intercepted by law enforcement, Simon said Wednesday.
David Hemenway, professor of Health Policy at Harvard, told The Post that many active-shooter incidents are driven by suicidal individuals who want “to go out in a blaze of glory.”
Wednesday’s incident, Heneyman said, was “very unusual.”
“If you have a buddy, you’re probably less inclined to commit suicide and destroy your life, unless you have a cause,” he said. “Columbine was pretty unusual. That was like Leopold and Loeb. Most of the time people who do this are just loners.”
“This one seems very different, like an act of terrorism or something,” he added.
Burguan, the police chief, said Farook was at Wednesday’s holiday party but left “under circumstances described as angry or something of that nature.” Nevertheless, signs pointed to the attack being premeditated: The shooters were wearing tactical gear, black masks and carrying multiple weapons.
“They came prepared to do what they did as if they were on a mission,” Burguan said. “Based upon what we have seen and how they were equipped, there had to be some degree of planning that went into this. I don’t think they grabbed the guns and tactical gear on a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
The striking difference between the San Bernardino suspects and other mass shooters - The Washington Post
