SAN DIEGO — Two teenage gunmen opened fire outside the Islamic Center of San Diego just before noon Monday, killing three men including a mosque security guard before fleeing in a white BMW and turning their weapons on themselves, leaving a city shaken and law enforcement agencies across the country moving to increase patrols at mosques in response to what police called a hate crime.
San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl identified the dead suspects as a 17-year-old and a 19-year-old. Officers found them in their vehicle, stopped in the middle of a street a few blocks from the mosque, dead from what appeared to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The attack lasted less than 10 minutes from the first emergency call to the discovery of the suspects.
Three men were shot and killed outside the Islamic Center on the 7000 block of Eckstrom Avenue in the Clairemont neighborhood. One was identified as Amin Abdullah, a security guard at the mosque. Wahl credited Abdullah with likely limiting the death toll. “He played a pivotal role in assisting — this could have been worse,” a San Diego police officer said at the news conference.
All children attending the Al Rashid School, an elementary school on the mosque’s campus that offers instruction in Arabic language, Islamic studies, and the Quran, were accounted for and safe. Aerial footage from television helicopters showed more than a dozen children holding hands as they were walked out of the parking lot, surrounded by scores of police vehicles.
The FBI was called in to assist with the investigation. Wahl said investigators were still piecing together what precipitated the attack and how the violence unfolded.
The Timeline
At 11:43 a.m., the San Diego Police Department received reports of an active shooter at the Islamic Center. Officers arrived four minutes later and found three adult men shot dead outside the building. They immediately entered the mosque and the adjacent school to search for the gunmen.
At 11:52 a.m., new calls came in from two blocks away on the 7100 block of Salerno Street, where a landscaper had been fired upon. He was not hit. Officers were then directed to the 3800 block of Hatton Street, where they located the white BMW stopped in the road with both suspects dead inside.
At 1:06 p.m., the San Diego Police Department posted on X: “The threat at the Islamic center has been neutralized.”
Between 50 and 100 officers swarmed the building and surrounding neighborhood in the interval between those two timestamps. Law enforcement went door to door through adjacent streets. The mosque’s adult occupants were evacuated. Three nearby schools, the Islamic School of San Diego, Clairemont Canyons Academy, and Kavod Charter School, were placed on alert given their proximity to the scene.
Community Response
Mosque Imam Taha Hassane sent a video to community members confirming that everyone inside was safe. “We are safe, the entire school is safe. All the kids, all the staff, and the teachers are safe and out of the Islamic Center,” Hassane said in the video, which circulated among California’s Muslim community.
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria posted on X that he was monitoring the situation and receiving updates from law enforcement. “Emergency personnel are on scene and actively working to protect the community and secure the area,” Gloria wrote.
Tazheen Nizam of the Council on American-Islamic Relations San Diego chapter said in a statement that no one should ever have to fear for their safety while attending prayers or studying at an elementary school. “CAIR is working to learn more about this incident and we encourage everyone to keep this community in your prayers,” Nizam said.
CAIR also confirmed in a separate release that school children were inside the building during the attack and that at least one mosque member was killed.
The Islamic Center of San Diego is the largest mosque in San Diego County. It sits in a neighborhood of homes, apartments, and strip malls with Middle Eastern restaurants and markets, and its campus serves both a worshipping community and a school population.
Law Enforcement Response Across the Country
The attack rippled outward almost immediately. Law enforcement agencies in other cities, including the New York Police Department and the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia, announced they were increasing patrols at mosques as a precautionary measure. The coordinated response reflected a recognition that a targeted hate crime attack on a house of worship carries implications beyond the immediate jurisdiction where it occurred.
Wahl did not provide details at Monday’s news conference about what the investigation had established regarding the suspects’ motivations, saying investigators were still working to reconstruct events. The FBI’s involvement signals the federal government’s entry into a hate crime investigation that could produce federal charges against the suspects’ estates or accomplices if any are identified.
Hate Crime, Children Present, a Guard Who May Have Saved Lives
The San Diego mosque shooting carries several elements that place it among the more disturbing targeted attacks on a religious community in recent American history. The victims were killed outside a house of worship that also housed an elementary school. Children were inside during the attack. The security guard who died at the scene may have engaged or diverted the shooters in a way that prevented the violence from reaching those children.
That last point deserves attention. Amin Abdullah died at his post. Police credited him publicly with likely preventing additional deaths. What the full circumstances of his final moments were remains part of an active investigation. But the chain of events — armed teenagers arriving at a mosque, a security guard present, and fewer than three deaths in a facility that was occupied by dozens of people including children — suggests that Abdullah’s presence and actions mattered in ways that the death toll alone does not capture.
Hate crime attacks on mosques in the United States have increased in frequency over the past decade, tracking a broader rise in religiously motivated violence against Muslim communities. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has documented this trend in annual reports, and the law enforcement response Monday, with agencies across the country immediately moving to increase mosque patrols, reflects an institutional acknowledgment that such attacks create fear and security concerns that extend far beyond the site of any individual incident.
The suspects being teenagers adds a dimension that investigators will now have to examine carefully. What radicalized them, where they obtained their weapons, whether they were acting alone or were influenced by networks online or in person, and whether there were warning signs that were missed or reported and not acted upon are all questions that the FBI’s involvement suggests will be pursued aggressively.
For the community at the Islamic Center of San Diego, Monday’s events leave a wound that will not close quickly. Three men came to their mosque and did not come home. A security guard who showed up to protect his community died doing his job. And hundreds of children who went to school on a Monday morning were walked out of a parking lot holding hands, past police vehicles, past the place where those men fell.
AP/Reuters/NYPost
