San Diego’s Muslim Community Questions Why A Security Guard—Not Local Police—

After two teenagers opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego, a security guard helped keep nearly 140 schoolchildren from being killed while local residents say police response felt dangerously slow. Families, advocates, and civil-rights monitors are als

When Tazheen Nizam arrived at the Islamic Center of San Diego on Monday, the first images were not the bullet points that would later fill official statements. They were the bodies and the silence after two teenagers opened fire at the mosque.

Nizam was among the first people on the scene. She says she saw the body of Amin Abdullah, the security guard who saved lives—nearly 140 children were at the on-site school when the shooting began. “That’s the moment I broke down,” she said.

The next day, Nizam returned to the mosque. Lunchboxes and water bottles were scattered across the playground, an eerie, ordinary scene laid over something unthinkable.

“It’s going to be a long, drawn-out healing process,” said Nizam, the executive director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “We are never going to be the same.”

Abdullah. along with Nadir Awad and Mansour Kaziha. has been celebrated locally as a hero line—people who stopped the gunmen from reaching the schoolchildren. The two shooters killed three men before killing themselves in an attack police are investigating as a hate crime. Police have said Abdullah was instrumental in preventing the shooting from becoming a bigger massacre.

Kaziha owned a nearby store and catered for a community event every Friday. Awad lived across the street and ran into the school after he heard people with guns were on the premises. Awad’s wife is a teacher at the school.

For many San Diego residents, the shock has not faded into answers. It has settled into a sharper question: why did the defense of a Muslim community’s children appear to depend on people close by rather than the local police who are supposed to be there first?

Homayra Yusufi, a local community advocate whose nephew attends the school, described the fear still lingering beneath daily routines. “We can’t even be safe to learn and to be in community,” she said. “Our children have to live in constant fear of going to a place that’s supposed to provide that.”

Yusufi said she and others were frustrated by the pace of law enforcement. “It was our community servants, who have been serving our community, who were the ones who saved those children,” she said. “It wasn’t the police. They were too late.”

The San Diego Police Department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

In the days after the attack, local grief has continued to unfold in public, physical ways. Flowers were placed outside the Islamic Center of San Diego the day after the shooting, and a woman prayed beside them.

Khalid Alexander. the founder of Pillars of the Community. a nonprofit organization that advocates for communities and people negatively impacted by law enforcement. said police “failed by every possible rubric you can come up with.” He directed his anger at the role law enforcement was expected to play. “These folks that are supposed to be there to protect and serve,” Alexander said.

Funerals for the three victims are set to take place on Thursday.

As the community prepares to mourn, advocates are also linking what happened in San Diego to a broader atmosphere of hostility toward Muslims. Nizam said the shooting is a “direct result” of unchecked Islamophobia by elected officials.

CAIR documented 8,683 civil rights complaints nationwide in 2025—the highest single-year total since the organization began tracking incidents in 1996. Another study documented by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found a 1. 450% surge in anti-Muslim posts by Republican officials between February 2025 and March 2026.

“It’s absolutely infuriating to see the kinds of commentary that’s going out,” Yusufi said. She pointed to politics and power beyond San Diego, saying that she believes hate and vitriol were coming back. “Terrible things that have been said by Congress. by this administration. and that hate and vitriol was going to come back.”.

Investigators are also focused on the shooters’ communications. The teenage gunmen met online and left behind a 75-page document that preached hate and racism. including against Muslims and Black people. The manifesto also referenced the gunman who killed 51 people and injured 89 more in an attack on two mosques in 2019 in Christchurch. New Zealand—the deadliest anti-Muslim terrorist attack in modern history.

Even with the violence examined, the community’s central wound remains personal and immediate: who showed up in time, and who didn’t.

Back at the mosque, local organizers are already thinking about what healing has to look like long after the headlines fade. For Nizam, it begins with something as simple—and as difficult—as recognizing neighbors before hatred has a route into people’s homes.

“If we can, as a collective, know our neighbors and build our bonds, we will not learn to hate our neighbors so much that we drive down the street and shoot them,” Nizam said.

Islamic Center of San Diego Amin Abdullah CAIR hate crime Council on American-Islamic Relations police response Homayra Yusufi Tazheen Nizam Nadir Awad Mansour Kaziha Islamophobia