A heavily armed couple, identified by police as 28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik, entered a social services building in San Bernardino Wednesday and killed at least 14 people and seriously wounded at least 17 more before being killed in a shootout with police.
San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said the shooters were carrying “assault style weapons” and were dressed in “dark tactical gear.” Meredith Davis, an agent with the US Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told KTLA News the suspects were carrying AR-15 rifles as well as handguns.
“They came prepared to do what they did, as if they were on a mission,” Burguan told reporters Wednesday afternoon.
Authorities said Farook was born in Illinois, but raised in California where he had worked for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health for five years.
WATCH: Brother-in-law of San Bernardino shooting suspect left in shock
Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, held a press conference Wednesday evening with members of Farook’s family. He said the two had been married for two years and left their six-month-old child with Farook’s mother that morning. He added that Malik was born in Pakistan and the two spent time in Saudi Arabia before marrying.
“I cannot express how sad I am for what happened,” Farhan Khan, Farook’s brother-in-law, said during the press conference. “I have no idea” why Farook would do this, he said.
READ MORE: ‘God Isn’t Fixing This:’ NY Daily News skewers response to San Bernardino shooting
While police are still searching for a motive in the shooting, the couple have joined a long list of mass shooters in 2015. According to shootingtracker.com, a crowd-sourced website, there have been 355 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.
Multiple shooters are rare
But what separates the San Bernardino tragedy from other active shooter incidents in the U.S. is that it’s extremely rare for there to be multiple shooters, and even more so for one of them to be a woman.
READ MORE: Investigators search for couple’s motive in California massacre
The FBI released a report in Sept. 2014 listing 160 active shooter incidents in the United States between 2000 and 2013: only two involved more than one shooter.
- On August 27, 2011, Tyrone Miller, 22, and an additional unidentified shooter(s), armed with handguns, began shooting at a house party in the Queens, N.Y., according to the report. No one was killed but 11 people were injured. Miller was arrested two years later in North Carolina, but the unidentified suspect(s) remains at large as of Sept. 2014.
- On April 6, 2012, Jacob Carl England, 19, and Alvin Lee Watts, 32, each armed with a handgun, drove through the streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma firing their weapons, killing three people and wounding two others, according to the report. They were both arrested the following day.
The report also found that of the 160 shooters listed only six were female.
READ MORE: Why do Americans keep shooting each other to death
The D.C. sniper shootings, which began on Oct. 2, 2002, when John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo began shooting Washington-area residents, leaving 10 dead and three wounded, was off the list as it did not meet the FBI criteria for an active-shooting.
The infamous Columbine High School shooting in Colorado that saw two students kill 12 fellow students and teachers was left off the list as it occurred in 1999 one year before the report.
*With files from the Associated Press
Comments