In the Islamic Center of San Diego’s Monday attack, police praised a security guard for moving quickly to reduce danger in the mosque’s front area, while community members described how his radio call helped teachers lock classrooms and shield young children.
SAN DIEGO — The Islamic Center of San Diego is still absorbing the shock of Monday’s attack, mourning three people killed inside the mosque, including a security guard whom police say helped keep the violence from spreading further.
San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said the guard, who was inside the mosque, was “able to minimize the situation to the front area of the mosque” and saved lives. “His actions were heroic,” Wahl said.
The guard’s name has not been released. Still, the mosque honored him in a Facebook post, describing him as “a courageous man who put himself on the line of the safety of others, who even in his last moments did not stop protecting our community.”
Authorities have not identified the other two people killed by name. Mosque members said the man who ran the grocery store and the husband of one of the school’s teachers were also killed.
Wahl said the guard’s actions helped contain the attack to the front area. The mosque complex itself is more than a place of worship. Inside are classrooms, an office, praying halls, a multipurpose room, a library, a kitchen, and a grocery store where children frequently buy snacks after school.
Shaykh Uthman Ibn Farooq, a family friend, said the guard had worked at the mosque for several years. “He wanted to defend the innocent so he decided to become a security guard,” Ibn Farooq told the Associated Press.
For people who have spent decades at the center, the details of those final moments are inseparable from the scale of loss. Suzan Hamideh said she was trying to come to terms with what unfolded at the mosque she’d been visiting for decades.
Right now, she said, she’s angry — at the loss of life, at the thought that children will carry the trauma from this attack for the rest of their lives, and at what she called the “rampant misunderstanding of the Muslim religion” that she suspects led to the violence.
“Why should this be happening to begin with? And then in schools and places of worship. There is so much hatred,” Hamideh said. “It needs to change, and it starts with educating people about Islam. It’s a religion of love and peace.”
Hamideh said she heard from people inside the mosque that. as soon as the shooters entered the house of worship. the security guard radioed to the rest of the staff that there was an active shooter. That warning, she said, gave teachers time to lock classrooms that house students in kindergarten through third grade.
Odai Shanah, 9, was inside his third-grade class at the Islamic Center of San Diego when the shooting began. He said he wasn’t sure what the sound was at first. thinking it might be a tree branch snapping in the wind and hitting the ground. When he realized what was happening. he hid in the classroom closet with the rest of the class until the SWAT team arrived. kicking down the door and instructing the students to file out with their hands up.
As the children left, they walked past the bodies of those killed, according to his family.
“We saw a bunch of bad stuff,” Odai said. “I felt scared. My legs were shaking.”
San Diego Islamic Center of San Diego mosque attack security guard police chief Scott Wahl SWAT Odai Shanah Suzan Hamideh active shooter classrooms