Tweet
San Bernardino Gunmen Kill at Least 14, Wound 17
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Hours after as many as three gunmen stormed a service center for people with disabilities here on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and wounding at least 17 others, the police engaged in a shootout in nearby surburban neighborhood, that officials said left one suspect dead, one likely wounded in an S.U.V. and a third suspect on the run.
After sightings of the men were reported, dozens of heavily armed police in tactical gear descended on the neighborhood in pursuit of the gunmen. Witnesses described a wild scene as the police closed in on the vehicle, with hundreds of shots being fired. Dozens of police officers rushed to the scene, many with their guns drawn, as the people in the vehicle battled the police. When the guns fell silent, the police swarmed out into the neighborhood and hunted for one person believed to be on the run.
Video footage from television helicopters circling overhead showed a bullet-riddled black S.U.V., similar to the one witnesses described seeing the suspect flee in earlier in the day.
One suspect was killed after a gun battle with the police on a suburban street near where the shooting took place earlier in the day, his body strewn on the pavement, the county sheriff’s office said.
Another suspect remained in the car but that person’s condition was unclear. A manhunt continued for the third person, with law enforcement setting up a perimeter around the area where the shootout took place.
“There were shots fired, officers were involved, and a suspect is down,” a police spokeswoman, Sgt. Vicki Cervantes, said.
Earlier three gunmen pulled up in a dark sport utility vehicle at the complex of buildings occupied by Inland Regional Services, a service center for people with disabilities, spent “several minutes” shooting inside one of the buildings, and then apparently fled, said Chief Jarrod Burguan of the San Bernardino police. He alluded to reports that the men may have worn masks and body armor.
According to people who work at the facility, the shooting occurred inside a building that houses a conference center that is often rented to other groups, and on Wednesday it was being used by the San Bernardino County Health Department. Chief Burguan said most of the victims were found in one part of that building, as if that had been the gunmen’s focus, but it was not clear whether they had specific victims in mind, or who they were.
“We have no information at this point to indicate this is terrorist related in the sense that people may have been thinking,” the police chief said, adding that at minimum, “we have a domestic terrorism-type situation that occurred here.”
The shooting took place about 11 a.m., and by late afternoon, the suspects were still at large, the subjects of a manhunt involving several law enforcement agencies. As the search went on, stores, office buildings and at least one school were locked down, and roads were blocked off.
The gunmen “were dressed and equipped in a way that indicate they were prepared, and they were armed with long guns, not handguns; I do not know what type of long guns,” Chief Burguan said at a news conference about three hours after the shooting. “They came prepared to do what they did, as if they were on a mission.”
Asked if there might be more victims inside who had not been found yet, he said, “I think that could be a possibility.”
“We do not have any identification on who those suspects are,” Chief Burguan said. “We do not have any motive for the shooting at this point.”
David Bowdich, assistant F.B.I. director, who was on the scene, said, “We do not know if this is a terrorist incident.”
The attack came just five days after a gunman killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs — the latest in a long string of mass shootings that have rocked the country and prompted debates about the easy availability of firearms. President Obama has lamented previous mass shootings, in increasingly emotional terms, and did so again Wednesday, in a previously scheduled interview with Norah O’Donnell of CBS News.
“We should come together in a bipartisan basis at every level of government to make these rare as opposed to normal,” he said.
For hundreds of people who worked in the buildings or were clients of its services, a quiet morning turned into a scene of utter panic and bloodshed, as people fled or hid behind locked doors and under desks, communicating with loved ones through panicked phone calls and text messages. Jamille Navarro, who works with special needs children at the center, made a panicked call to her mother, Olivia, saying that there were gunmen in the building.
“She was hiding in her room,” Olivia Navarro said, crying. “They turned off the lights. She was whispering because she didn’t want to be heard. I told her to stop talking. I said, ‘All right, I’ll be right there, turn out the lights, don’t do a thing.’ Why would somebody want to hurt somebody who helps children?”
After the first reports of gunfire, the building was soon surrounded by officers from several local law enforcement and emergency medical agencies, as teams of officers searched room by room for survivors or suspects. The F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also dispatched agents. The search was slowed by the discovery of some unidentified objects that officers feared could have been explosives left behind by the gunmen, and officials said bomb disposal crews were helping clear the scene. It was still not certain whether the items were dangerous.
Officials said it appeared that the gunmen fled either before the police arrived or shortly after; either way, officers did not see them. Radio traffic among police officers indicated that there might have been a pursuit of a fleeing vehicle, but Chief Burguan said there was only one active scene in the investigation, where the shooting took place, and that investigators did not know where the gunman were.
Lavinia Johnson, executive director of Inland Regional, said that when the shooting started, she and her staff, in another building on the property, sheltered in place, remaining hidden in their offices for two hours, until law enforcement officers led them to safety. The center routinely has employees of a variety of social service organizations working there, both private ones, and local and state government agencies.
Large contingents of officers, many in body armor, cordoned off the 1300 block of Waterman Avenue, a major north-south in this city of more than 200,000 people, about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, and other officers hustled survivors from the building complex across the avenue to the golf course of the San Bernardino Golf Club. Emergency crews treated victims lying in the street, while medical helicopters landed on the golf course to ferry the most seriously hurt patients to hospitals.
Loma Linda University Medical Center reported that it had four patients from the shooting and expected at least three more, and Arrowhead Regional Medical Center said it had six.
The radio traffic conveyed a chaotic and tense situation, as officers guided civilians from the building and described graphic scenes as they passed victims inside. Some time after the attack began, an officer radioed, “They just found another room with more victims.” A while later, another officer asked, “Do you need assistance on the scene or do you need us to stay mobile in case these guys hit again?”
Gabriel Torres said his wife, Carina, a social worker who works at the center, spent half an hour or more on the phone with him as she hid under her desk, crying, after her supervisor told her to take cover. Terrified, Ms. Torres told him that he should make sure to take care of their four daughters, ages 10 to 24, if anything were to happen to her.
Her mother, Maria Hernandez, said: “We know she is O.K., I’m going to be O.K., I can tell you, I’m going to pass out. These feelings — I cannot tell you.”
Terry Pettit told KABC that his daughter had texted from inside the building. “Shooting at my work,” he recounted, his voice choking up. “People shot. In the office waiting for cops. Pray for us.”
Sandra Wood told KNBC that she had heard 25 to 30 shots.
Peter Asten, a member of the board of trustees at Inland Regional, said there was “not a lot” of security at the campus, and that he did not believe there were on-duty security guards. He said he knew nothing about the attack or the victims beyond what had been reported on the news.
“It befuddles me how someone could be so sickened and depraved,” he said. “Who’d have ever thought that this would be a place that would get attacked?”
Inland Regional Services, which was open in 1971, is a nonprofit agency that serves people from San Bernardino and Riverside Counties. The facility’s Facebook page said 670 staff members served more than 30,200 people.
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. — Hours after as many as three gunmen stormed a service center for people with disabilities here on Wednesday, killing at least 14 people and wounding at least 17 others, the police engaged in a shootout in nearby surburban neighborhood, that officials said left one suspect dead, one likely wounded in an S.U.V. and a third suspect on the run.
After sightings of the men were reported, dozens of heavily armed police in tactical gear descended on the neighborhood in pursuit of the gunmen. Witnesses described a wild scene as the police closed in on the vehicle, with hundreds of shots being fired. Dozens of police officers rushed to the scene, many with their guns drawn, as the people in the vehicle battled the police. When the guns fell silent, the police swarmed out into the neighborhood and hunted for one person believed to be on the run.
Video footage from television helicopters circling overhead showed a bullet-riddled black S.U.V., similar to the one witnesses described seeing the suspect flee in earlier in the day.
One suspect was killed after a gun battle with the police on a suburban street near where the shooting took place earlier in the day, his body strewn on the pavement, the county sheriff’s office said.
Another suspect remained in the car but that person’s condition was unclear. A manhunt continued for the third person, with law enforcement setting up a perimeter around the area where the shootout took place.
“There were shots fired, officers were involved, and a suspect is down,” a police spokeswoman, Sgt. Vicki Cervantes, said.
Earlier three gunmen pulled up in a dark sport utility vehicle at the complex of buildings occupied by Inland Regional Services, a service center for people with disabilities, spent “several minutes” shooting inside one of the buildings, and then apparently fled, said Chief Jarrod Burguan of the San Bernardino police. He alluded to reports that the men may have worn masks and body armor.
According to people who work at the facility, the shooting occurred inside a building that houses a conference center that is often rented to other groups, and on Wednesday it was being used by the San Bernardino County Health Department. Chief Burguan said most of the victims were found in one part of that building, as if that had been the gunmen’s focus, but it was not clear whether they had specific victims in mind, or who they were.
“We have no information at this point to indicate this is terrorist related in the sense that people may have been thinking,” the police chief said, adding that at minimum, “we have a domestic terrorism-type situation that occurred here.”
The shooting took place about 11 a.m., and by late afternoon, the suspects were still at large, the subjects of a manhunt involving several law enforcement agencies. As the search went on, stores, office buildings and at least one school were locked down, and roads were blocked off.
The gunmen “were dressed and equipped in a way that indicate they were prepared, and they were armed with long guns, not handguns; I do not know what type of long guns,” Chief Burguan said at a news conference about three hours after the shooting. “They came prepared to do what they did, as if they were on a mission.”
Asked if there might be more victims inside who had not been found yet, he said, “I think that could be a possibility.”
“We do not have any identification on who those suspects are,” Chief Burguan said. “We do not have any motive for the shooting at this point.”
David Bowdich, assistant F.B.I. director, who was on the scene, said, “We do not know if this is a terrorist incident.”
The attack came just five days after a gunman killed three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs — the latest in a long string of mass shootings that have rocked the country and prompted debates about the easy availability of firearms. President Obama has lamented previous mass shootings, in increasingly emotional terms, and did so again Wednesday, in a previously scheduled interview with Norah O’Donnell of CBS News.
“We should come together in a bipartisan basis at every level of government to make these rare as opposed to normal,” he said.
For hundreds of people who worked in the buildings or were clients of its services, a quiet morning turned into a scene of utter panic and bloodshed, as people fled or hid behind locked doors and under desks, communicating with loved ones through panicked phone calls and text messages. Jamille Navarro, who works with special needs children at the center, made a panicked call to her mother, Olivia, saying that there were gunmen in the building.
“She was hiding in her room,” Olivia Navarro said, crying. “They turned off the lights. She was whispering because she didn’t want to be heard. I told her to stop talking. I said, ‘All right, I’ll be right there, turn out the lights, don’t do a thing.’ Why would somebody want to hurt somebody who helps children?”
After the first reports of gunfire, the building was soon surrounded by officers from several local law enforcement and emergency medical agencies, as teams of officers searched room by room for survivors or suspects. The F.B.I. and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives also dispatched agents. The search was slowed by the discovery of some unidentified objects that officers feared could have been explosives left behind by the gunmen, and officials said bomb disposal crews were helping clear the scene. It was still not certain whether the items were dangerous.
Officials said it appeared that the gunmen fled either before the police arrived or shortly after; either way, officers did not see them. Radio traffic among police officers indicated that there might have been a pursuit of a fleeing vehicle, but Chief Burguan said there was only one active scene in the investigation, where the shooting took place, and that investigators did not know where the gunman were.
Lavinia Johnson, executive director of Inland Regional, said that when the shooting started, she and her staff, in another building on the property, sheltered in place, remaining hidden in their offices for two hours, until law enforcement officers led them to safety. The center routinely has employees of a variety of social service organizations working there, both private ones, and local and state government agencies.
Large contingents of officers, many in body armor, cordoned off the 1300 block of Waterman Avenue, a major north-south in this city of more than 200,000 people, about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, and other officers hustled survivors from the building complex across the avenue to the golf course of the San Bernardino Golf Club. Emergency crews treated victims lying in the street, while medical helicopters landed on the golf course to ferry the most seriously hurt patients to hospitals.
Loma Linda University Medical Center reported that it had four patients from the shooting and expected at least three more, and Arrowhead Regional Medical Center said it had six.
The radio traffic conveyed a chaotic and tense situation, as officers guided civilians from the building and described graphic scenes as they passed victims inside. Some time after the attack began, an officer radioed, “They just found another room with more victims.” A while later, another officer asked, “Do you need assistance on the scene or do you need us to stay mobile in case these guys hit again?”
Gabriel Torres said his wife, Carina, a social worker who works at the center, spent half an hour or more on the phone with him as she hid under her desk, crying, after her supervisor told her to take cover. Terrified, Ms. Torres told him that he should make sure to take care of their four daughters, ages 10 to 24, if anything were to happen to her.
Her mother, Maria Hernandez, said: “We know she is O.K., I’m going to be O.K., I can tell you, I’m going to pass out. These feelings — I cannot tell you.”
Terry Pettit told KABC that his daughter had texted from inside the building. “Shooting at my work,” he recounted, his voice choking up. “People shot. In the office waiting for cops. Pray for us.”
Sandra Wood told KNBC that she had heard 25 to 30 shots.
Peter Asten, a member of the board of trustees at Inland Regional, said there was “not a lot” of security at the campus, and that he did not believe there were on-duty security guards. He said he knew nothing about the attack or the victims beyond what had been reported on the news.
“It befuddles me how someone could be so sickened and depraved,” he said. “Who’d have ever thought that this would be a place that would get attacked?”
Inland Regional Services, which was open in 1971, is a nonprofit agency that serves people from San Bernardino and Riverside Counties. The facility’s Facebook page said 670 staff members served more than 30,200 people.
One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter
Comment