Ten Years Later, Terror Goes Unnamed

Ten years ago, on Dec. 2, 2015, Syed Farook arrived at his workplace—the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. As fellow employees prepared for a holiday party, the American-born Muslim slipped out the door. Just before 11 a.m., Farook returned in a black SUV with his wife, Tashfeen Malik, a Pakistan-born Muslim.

“Out of the blue, multiple popping sounds crackled outside,” first-hand accounts noted in a report by the Policing Institute. Inside, a door swung open and “a person clad in all black, with a mask shielding his or her face, stepped inside, wielding what appeared to be an automatic rifle.” It was Farook and Malik who “entered the room shooting.” One round hit a sprinkler pipe, causing water to pour from the ceiling as smoke filled the room. In the ensuing chaos:

The shooters walked between tables. If someone moved or made a sound, the shooters fired one or multiple shots into their body.

Many of the conference room’s occupants made it out the door that led to the rest of the building. Some continued until they were outside; others headed for other rooms that they could lock; and still more searched for a place to hide, choosing closets, cabinets, or bathrooms to take shelter.

Bullets tore holes through the interior wall of the conference room. At least one woman was struck by a bullet that had ripped through a wall, and another was shot as she tried to escape through a glass door near where the shooters had entered. Others who ran outside came across the bodies of the first two people killed by the shooters. They had been outside when the shooters arrived, and both appeared to have been killed instantly.

Farook and Malik shot dead Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Nguyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. Just months before, in May 2015, these and other staffers had thrown a baby shower for Farook’s newborn daughter. So the killers knew their victims. When San Bernardino police arrived: