Gunmen and Motives Revealed in Deadly San Diego Mosque Shooting
The details are even darker than first reported.
This article originally appeared on ZeroHedge and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Tyler Durden
The two young alleged gunmen who descended upon a San Diego Islamic facility on Monday -- killing three men and themselves -- have been identified, along with early indications of their motives. Police sources have told multiple outlets that 17-year-old Cain Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Velasquez -- driven by hate -- scrawled racist themes on their weapons and carried a gas can emblazoned with a Nazi SS sticker. One of them left a suicide note emphasizing “racial pride.”
The attack was carried out on the Islamic Center of San Diego, which is roughly eight miles north of downtown and is home to the county’s largest mosque, and Bright Horizon Academy, a K-12 Islamic school. While the shooting began around 11:40 am, one of the shooter’s mothers contacted police at 9:42 am. She told them her son was missing, that he was suicidal, and that her firearms and her car were gone. She also reported that he was with a companion, both of them dressed in camouflage clothing. Police tried to track them down using license plate readers, at one point responding to a possible matching plate near a shopping mall. Other officers were dispatched to a high school that one of the alleged shooters attended.
Police say that, after leaving the Islamic center, the alleged young murderers fired shots at a landscaper two blocks away, with one of the rounds grazing his helmet. He wasn’t wounded. Soon after, the two were found dead inside a white BMW another block away from the Islamic center, having apparently died of self-inflicted gunshots. Inside the vehicle, investigators found some type of anti-Islamic writing. In addition, the BMW contained a gasoline can that had a Nazi SS sticker on it, and police say unspecified “hate speech” was written on their firearms. They haven’t described the weapons yet.
The attack was carried out on the Islamic Center of San Diego, which is roughly eight miles north of downtown and is home to the county’s largest mosque, and Bright Horizon Academy, a K-12 Islamic school. While the shooting began around 11:40 am, one of the shooter’s mothers contacted police at 9:42 am. She told them her son was missing, that he was suicidal, and that her firearms and her car were gone. She also reported that he was with a companion, both of them dressed in camouflage clothing. Police tried to track them down using license plate readers, at one point responding to a possible matching plate near a shopping mall. Other officers were dispatched to a high school that one of the alleged shooters attended.
Police say that, after leaving the Islamic center, the alleged young murderers fired shots at a landscaper two blocks away, with one of the rounds grazing his helmet. He wasn’t wounded. Soon after, the two were found dead inside a white BMW another block away from the Islamic center, having apparently died of self-inflicted gunshots. Inside the vehicle, investigators found some type of anti-Islamic writing. In addition, the BMW contained a gasoline can that had a Nazi SS sticker on it, and police say unspecified “hate speech” was written on their firearms. They haven’t described the weapons yet.
Clark wrestled for Madison High School, which is only a mile from the Islamic center, but never attended there in person, instead enrolling in the San Diego Unified School District’s iHigh Virtual Academy. He was set to graduate this month. Outside their home, Clark’s grandparents told CNN that he had been “a good kid,” with the incident leaving them shocked. “We’re trying to process this,” they said, adding that they were “very sorry for what happened.” No biographical details about Velasquez have emerged yet; nor have any photos of him been shared by reliable sources.
Police have thus far refused to share specifics about the hate speech associated with the slogans on the weapons, the writing in the car and the suicide note. “There was definitely hate rhetoric that was involved,“ Wah said at a press conference, suggesting that more information may be revealed later. “There was generalized hate rhetoric and speech,” but no specific threat to “any facility or any place.”
One of three dead men was security guard Amin Abdullah, who’s being credited with curtailing the carnage. “I think it’s fair to say his actions were heroic,” San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl told reporters. “Undoubtedly, he saved lives today.” He was a father of eight children. An online fundraiser rapidly raised more than $1.2 million and counting.
“My community is mourning,” said Taha Hassane, the director an imam of the Islamic center. “The religious intolerance and the hate that unfortunately exists in our nation is unprecedented.”
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In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved the narrator notes that, like the South, the Civil War era northern states also hated Black people but happened to hate slavery more. Of course, this succinct summation of the callousness, if not ugliness, of the politics of difference and scale is applicable elsewhere: for example, they may hate libertarians but hate liberals more; hate Hispanics but abhor Chinese people even more; and loath Jews but despise Muslims far more, etcetera, etcetera.
Racist and other bigoted sentiment is typically environmentally developed/acquired during childhood, often enough even passed down generationally, if not also genetically. Especially if it’s deliberate, exposing very impressionable cerebrally-developing children to such an environment of baseless contempt and overt bigotry amounts to a formidable form of child abuse.
If the parents won’t do it for plain moral reasons, they then should do their own children a big favor by NOT passing down onto them such destructive anti-social/-societal sentiments and perceptions (including stereotypes and ‘humor’), since such rearing can readily make life much harder for those children. It fails to prepare them for the practical reality of an increasingly diverse and populous society and workplace. It also makes it so much less likely those children will be emotionally content or (preferably) harmonious with their multicultural and multi-ethnic/-racial surroundings.
Children reared into their adolescence and, by extension, young adulthood this racially-charged way can find themselves seemingly always feeling angry yet not really knowing exactly at what. They also may feel self-compelled to move to another part of the land, where their own ethnicity/race predominates, preferably overwhelmingly so. This serious social/societal problem can/should be proactively prevented by allowing preferably-all young children to become accustomed to other races/cultures/faiths, etcetera, in a harmoniously positive manner.
P.S. I consider myself lucky in having had a mother who, unlike many other people I’ve met over my lifetime, did not even subtly express prejudiced or disdainful sentiments about people of other races and cultures. On the contrary, she, though being of Croatian heritage, openly enjoyed watching/listening to the Middle Eastern and Indian subcontinental dancers and musicians on the multicultural channel. Most memorable for me was being emphatically told at a very young and therefore impressionable age by her about the exceptionally kind and caring nature of our Black family doctor. I believe that in doing so she had a positive and lasting effect on me.