Ten years ago — here in San Bernardino — a gunman opened fire at the Inland Regional Center that aids people with developmental disabilities. Fourteen people were killed in what the FBI later called a terrorist attack. The community was left reeling. Today, its impact weighs heavily on survivors and families who say they’re still looking for answers.
Southern California News Group reporter Beau Yarbrough joins us to talk about what we’ve learned about the shooters and the lasting impact.
The attack was carried out by a man named Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. What do we know about Farook’s life leading up to the attack?
BEAU YARBROUGH: He had been an employee of San Bernardino County for five years as a restaurant inspector. He was born in Chicago and raised in Riverside, and his parents were Pakistani immigrants. It was not a happy home. His mother filed multiple requests for restraining orders over the years, and in those she said that her husband was bipolar, wasn’t on his medication. He was an alcoholic. He would beat her. In the restraining-order reports, there's numerous accounts of the kids having to physically intervene to protect mom from dad — all of which is a really traumatic thing for him to grow up with.
Syed was a quiet kid, and he mostly focused on working on cars in his garage. He and his neighbor, Enrique Marquez — who, of course, got swept up in this plot — would work on cars together. But, they would also go online and look at Al-Qaeda stuff; they would go look at ISIS stuff. Syed Farook sort of got swept into the most dangerous, vile stuff you can find on the internet, which, of course, fed these fantasies of committing violence in Riverside County that never came to fruition. But then, of course, in time, he found Tashfeen, and they turned it on his co-workers.
Co-workers and other people were worried about Syed Farook's behavior before the shooting. What concerns did those people raise?
YARBROUGH: So it's hard to know, because according to the county, there weren't any complaints filed with them. However, the FBI, in a friends-and-family briefing after the attack, told them that they had been told by numerous people they interviewed that they had filed complaints — specifically about an argument that he had with a co-worker. The FBI redacted a lot of the reports you'll see online, including embedded in my story, but the complaints were about religion.
I spoke to somebody who said that it was very specifically about a terrorist attack on the Paris train earlier in 2015, and it got pretty ugly. The person that reportedly was in the fight with him was somebody who had very strong feelings about Islam. And according to my reporting, Farook may have been disciplined — if it wasn't a formal write-up, because according to the county there was nothing in his file that said something like that. But he was apparently sent home for a few days and told not to come by the office. In the map that was recovered by the FBI from the shredding of it — the map of the conference room where the shooting took place — it labels managers on there. And a bunch of the witnesses told the FBI, before the map came out, that they thought the shooters were shooting at the managers at the meeting.
Wow…Some survivors and the families of the victims have pushed for more answers about Farook since the attack. Have they gotten any?
YARBROUGH: Not really. The records we got released in mid-November were the first time they actually got anything out of Farook's personnel file. California law has a lot of protections for public employees, and the county is interpreting that as still being in effect for Farook even though he's dead. Our lawyer at the newspaper does not feel that way, but we weren’t able to get the whole file. We were able to get some stuff. It's not the most satisfying stuff, but we were able to get some things at least.
You mentioned that you covered the shooting extensively during that time, along with your colleagues. What did you personally take away from that experience?
YARBROUGH: I don't want to compare my pain to the people who were more directly affected, but I had a conversation with somebody earlier that we don't often talk about how this kind of violence impacts the whole community. You know, people in San Bernardino, people in Redlands, were deeply impacted by it. And the closer you were to it, I think the more traumatic it was.
I had a co-worker who became a police reporter two days before the shooting. She was a brand-new reporter just out of college, and got thrown into the deep end. She lasted a month — she quit at the end of December because she was so traumatized by this. And another co-worker who had been with us for a number of years — she and I later covered the Las Vegas mass shooting a year and a half later, and she quit a few months after that.
It was just really traumatic and really hard. And it's important work, and I'm very proud of the work we did. We handled it, I think, really responsibly through a local lens, as opposed to people parachuting in from outside the region or outside the country, in some cases. But it was really, really hard, and it's permanently affected, I think, everybody who covered it well.
Beau Yarbrough is a reporter for the San Bernardino Sun, which is one of several newspapers owned by the Southern California News Group. You can read Beau’s full story online.
