By Matt Silverstein, Jana Winter, Helen Coster and Andrew Hay
SAN DIEGO, May 19 (Reuters) – The security guard slain at the Islamic Center of San Diego was hailed on Tuesday as a fallen hero who sacrificed his life to keep 140 school children inside the mosque safe by engaging two gunmen in a shootout that deterred the teenage suspects and helped thwart their attack.
Authorities also disclosed that the 17- and 18-year-old assailants, who took their own lives shortly after Monday’s shooting, were believed to have initially met online and apparently were “radicalized” in hate-related ideology on the internet.
A day after the gun violence at the Islamic Center, police, FBI and other officials held a news conference focused on the three men, all affiliated with the mosque, who were slain in the attack and were credited with putting themselves in harm’s way to save others.
The security guard, Amin Abdullah, also known to friends as Brian Climax, immediately recognized the two youths as a threat and opened fire on them as they ran past him outside the mosque, according to San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl. The suspects then paused to return fire, Wahl said.
Abdullah ended up fatally shot in the parking lot, along with two other men who helped distract the suspects after the gunmen stormed into the building, drawing their attention through a window, thus luring the two teens back outside as police were closing in on the scene en masse, Wahl said.
TWO MEN LURED GUNMEN OUTSIDE
The two other victims, mosque elder Mansour Kaziha, and Nadir Awad, a neighbor whose wife worked as a teacher at the school there, were cornered and shot to death in the parking lot by the gunmen when they re-emerged.
In the midst of the confrontation, it was Abdullah who transmitted the radio call that activated a security lockdown at the mosque, which Wahl also credited with preventing further bloodshed there.
The gunfight and the security alert gave others in the building time to take shelter behind locked doors, Wahl said, while Kaziha and Awad coaxed the suspects out of the building.
Minutes before officers from around California’s second-most-populous city converged on the mosque, the two suspects fled the complex by car. They were found dead in their vehicle a short time later several blocks away, apparently from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, police said.
Wahl said all three victims gave their lives to spare others from harm, but he singled out Abdullah for special praise of his “heroic action,” adding that at first, “I had no idea how heroic those actions were.”
“His actions, without a doubt, delayed, distracted and ultimately deterred those two individuals from gaining access to the greater areas of the mosque where as many as 140 kids were within 15 feet of these suspects,” Wahl told reporters.
Taha Hassane, the imam and director of the Islamic Center, called all three of the victims “our martyrs and our heroes.”
HATE-CRIME INQUIRY
Police and FBI officials have said that they are investigating the attack as a hate crime but have declined to offer details about a possible motive.
Investigators have yet to definitively conclude that the Islamic Center “was the specific target,” said Mark Remily, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Diego field office. “What I can say is (the suspects) definitely had a broad hatred towards a lot of folks.”
Remily said one of the gunmen left behind a manifesto, but he declined to characterize it in detail. Officials also said police had seized more than 30 guns and a crossbow in searches connected to the suspects.
“Anti-Islamic writings” were found in a vehicle connected to the two suspects, according to a Department of Justice official with knowledge of the investigation.
The alleged gunmen have been identified as Caleb Vasquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, the official told Reuters on Tuesday.
Clark’s mother is cooperating with authorities, the DOJ official added. Officers sprang into action on Monday, about two hours before the shooting, when she called authorities describing her son as suicidal and said he had run off with her vehicle and three of her guns, according to police.
Police initially raced to a local shopping mall and the boy’s school before calls came in about the shooting at the mosque, which ranks as the largest in San Diego County and houses the Bright Horizon Academy.
ISLAMOPHOBIA ON THE RISE
Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias in the U.S. surged to record levels last year, according to a report from a leading Muslim advocacy group.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said it recorded 8,683 anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints in 2025, the most in any year since it began publishing data in 1996. Most complaints were about employment discrimination, immigration and asylum issues, as well as hate incidents, the report said.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday referred to the shooting in San Diego as a “terrible situation” and said his administration would be “looking at it very strongly.”
(Reporting by Jana Winter in Washington, D.C. and Helen Coster in New York; Additional reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage, Mark Porter and Rosalba O’Brien)
Comments