Two people allegedly entered and shot 31 people at a holiday party for the San Bernardino Department of Public Health at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino on Wednesday around 11 a.m.
Fourteen people have been reported killed and another 17 were injured, according to the FBI Los Angeles Assistant Director in Charge David Bowdich in a press conference. Authorities have yet to report a motive for the attacks.
The shooters were armed with assault rifles and semi-automatic handguns and were reportedly wearing “dark tactical gear,” according to San Bernardino Chief of Police Jarrod Burguan. He also reported that police found at the Inland Regional Center three devices that they believed to be explosive that he described as a “pipe-bomb type design.” Those devices were disposed of.
The shooters were not apprehended at the scene. According to Burguan, the initial investigation led police to a residence a couple hours later in nearby Redlands, where the officers spotted a vehicle matching the description of one at the scene. This led to a police pursuit back into San Bernardino.
The suspects were stopped roughly two miles from the Inland Regional Center, according to the Los Angeles Times. After a shootout with police, two suspects, identified by San Bernardino police has a man and a woman, were killed during the confrontation.
At a press conference at around 10 p.m., Burguan reported the two suspects as 28-year-old Syed Rizwan Farook and 27-year-old Tashfeen Malik. Farook was working as an environmental specialist for the city of San Bernardino for around five years. The Los Angeles Times reported that co-workers said Farook had returned from Saudi Arabia recently with a new wife, whom he had met online. The L.A. Times also reported that Farook and Malik had a 6-month-old child.
Burguan reported that one officer was shot during the confrontation, but was expected to be in a stable condition.
San Bernardino police detained a third suspect after residents reported seeing him running from the shootout. It has yet to be determined if that person was actually involved in the shootout however.
“This is a marathon not a sprint,” Bowdich said at the second news conference following the shooting. “We will go where the evidence takes us.”
After the shootout with police, SBPD searched a surrounding neighborhood for any additional suspects. Burguan said that several residents called to report hearing somebody jumping fences in the neighborhood.
“We don’t know if that was possibly responding officers, but we took a cautious approach, we locked down the neighborhood, we asked people to shelter in place and we searched that neighborhood extensively,” Burguan said.
Burguan said that no suspects were found in the neighborhood and the area was reportedly opened back up a few hours later. He also included that there was “some degree of planning.”
Bowdich added that any assertions that the shooting was an act of international terrorism were still premature.
“I know one of the big questions that will come up repeatedly is, ‘Is this terrorism?’” Bowdich said. “We don’t know that yet, and we aren’t willing to go down that road yet.”
Though no motive has been found by authorities, Burguan confirmed reports that Farook left the party angrily, which is what led police to the residence in Redlands.
This is the deadliest shooting in the United States since the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newton, Connecticut.