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You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Late Night Nightmare Reads: The San Bernadino Shootings, A Year Later

Late Night Nightmare Reads: The San Bernadino Shootings, A Year Later

by Anne Laurie|  December 4, 20161:48 am| 17 Comments

This post is in: domestic terrorists, Open Threads, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Security Theatre

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Couple who carried out San Bernardino massacre googled "who is the leader of ISIS?" on morning of attack, ABC News reporting

— Mohamad Bazzi (@BazziNYU) December 1, 2016

The Washington Post, doing journalism:

… “The brutality of the attack’s perpetrators could not have been in starker contrast to the selflessness and generosity that characterized those taken from us,” the White House said in a statement marking the anniversary Friday and honoring the victims of the attack. Using another acronym for the Islamic State, the message continued: “In the year since this tragedy, we have mourned those we lost, just as we have continued to confront the violent ideology behind this attack as well as the terrorist groups, including ISIL, that propagate it.”

In a new interview broadcast this week, the police chief in San Bernardino said authorities believe that the specifics of the attack — targeting that particular gathering at that time — may have been motivated by the holiday party set to take place in the same room after the training ended. The chief, Jarrod Burguan, cited comments made by the female attacker before the shooting.

Malik had said online “that she didn’t think that a Muslim should have to participate in a non-Muslim holiday or event,” Burguan told ABC News.

The room where the training occurred — the same room where the health department had held active-shooter training earlier that year — was filled at the time with Christmas decorations, including a large Christmas tree, ornaments and items on the walls….

If it weren’t for all the dead people, jokes would be made about the virulence with which many of us regard enforced holiday ‘jollilities’ at our workspaces. Or discussing the weight of microagressions.

But this is the real heartbreaker — again, from the WaPo:

Maybe the child would be hers one day, so Saira Khan began preparing the house for her niece’s next visit. She sanitized the baby toys and double-checked the child safety locks. She cleaned the nursery where the girl had never been allowed to spend a night and tidied the crib that had been recovered and moved from a crime scene. It had belonged to the baby’s parents, and it was in the apartment where they had left her one morning last December before driving to an office party in San Bernardino, armed with pipe bombs, handguns and AR-15s.

Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik had killed 14 people that day and injured more than 20 others before dying in a shootout with police. They had also orphaned their own 6-month-old daughter. Now that baby had become a toddler who was just beginning to walk, and she was still living in foster care under the official custody of San Bernardino County. Saira, who was Farook’s older sister, had spent 11 months trying to adopt her niece, but so far the county would only agree to grant her regular, six-hour visits.

“Do we have her alone this time, or is someone coming to check on us?” asked Farhan Khan, Saira’s husband.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“More questions? More investigators?”

“Probably,” she said.

They had spent the past year trying to make sense of a shooting in which there were still so many unanswered questions, and lately the one that consumed them most was what would happen to the baby. They were her closest surviving relatives. Maybe caring for their niece, Saira thought, would restore some small bit of order not only to the baby’s life, but also to their own…

Now Saira walked into the small room in their house that she had set aside for her niece, a nursery wallpapered in blue and pink. She straightened the children’s books on the shelf. She set out some of her niece’s favorite toys and then opened her closet.

The clothing rack was filled with dozens of outfits that had been recovered from Farook and Malik’s apartment. Most of them were frilly dresses with the tags still attached, ranging in size from 9 months to 6 years. The couple had kept the clothes hidden in a suitcase, which the FBI had found in the closet of their apartment. At the same time that Farook and Malik had been stockpiling thousands of rounds of ammunition, they had also been assembling a future wardrobe for the child they did not plan to raise.

“Age four. Two. Three. Six,” she said, reading the sizes. “What kind of parent makes plans to abandon their child? How were they capable of something like that and we didn’t know?”…

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Reader Interactions

17Comments

  1. 1.

    Keith P.

    December 4, 2016 at 2:20 am

    Damn, heartbreaker is the right description of that last story.

  2. 2.

    Yutsano

    December 4, 2016 at 2:22 am

    We’ll never know what motivated them because they’re not alive to tell us. I think they went into this hoping for martyrdom while skipping over the part of the Qu’ran that says to not harm innocents.

    The part with their daughter just tore me up. And the treatment of the aunt sounds like pure discrimination to me.

  3. 3.

    Mnemosyne

    December 4, 2016 at 2:23 am

    The San Bernardino massacre was the one that made ne realize that, in America, “ISIS” had basically become a meaningless hashtag that disgruntled assholes were using to excuse the horrible crimes they wanted to commit anyway.

    If the killers had been Christians, it would have been a lot easier for people to recognize that it was a workplace shooting gussied up as “jihad” by a couple of very disturbed people.

  4. 4.

    Major Major Major Major

    December 4, 2016 at 2:25 am

    Heartbreaking, indeed.

  5. 5.

    Mnemosyne

    December 4, 2016 at 2:28 am

    @Yutsano:

    Unfortunately, even in California, sometimes social workers are bigoted assholes. There was a really tragic case in LA about a decade ago where doctors and social workers got tired of a mother who complained that her severely asthmatic son was not getting enough treatment, so they accused her of abusing him via Munchausen’s by Proxy and put him in a foster home. A few weeks later, he died at the foster home from an asthma attack.

    Did I mention that the “abusive” mother who was pushing the system too hard was black? But you had probably already guessed that.

  6. 6.

    Redshift

    December 4, 2016 at 2:35 am

    If you want some hope to go with that nightmare, here is my friend Karen, whose ex-husband, my friend Hal, was killed in the attacks:

    A year later, family of San Bernardino shooting victim is speaking out against fear and hate

  7. 7.

    NotoriousJRT

    December 4, 2016 at 2:51 am

    @Redshift:
    Decency still lives and walks abroad.

  8. 8.

    opiejeanne

    December 4, 2016 at 3:57 am

    @Redshift: Thanks for sharing; Karen is good people and I feel for her and her daughters.

  9. 9.

    Keith P.

    December 4, 2016 at 4:19 am

    An interesting coincidence I hadn’t heard before but noticed recently – Eagles of Death Metal were playing at Bataclan during that attack. They were playing “Kiss the Devil”. Two tracks later is “San Berdoo Sunburn,” which is about…San Bernadino (a main lyric is “We’re headed out west to San Bernardino”)

  10. 10.

    opiejeanne

    December 4, 2016 at 4:43 am

    @Keith P.: I remember seeing that and wondering if they’ve ever been to San Berdoo. It’s kind of a crappy place these days.

  11. 11.

    WereBear

    December 4, 2016 at 6:28 am

    @Mnemosyne: If the killers had been Christians, it would have been a lot easier for people to recognize that it was a workplace shooting gussied up as “jihad” by a couple of very disturbed people.

    Except our country has too many “authorities” pushing against recognizing white, evangelical, militant, terrorism. Even though it has been going on for decades with the protests at women’s health centers, and the murders of practioners.

    I’ve come to see all terrorism as simply an excuse to create mayhem. The French Resistance wasn’t about randomly targeting masses of people for death. That was what the Nazis did.

  12. 12.

    JPL

    December 4, 2016 at 6:59 am

    @Redshift: She is an amazing woman.

  13. 13.

    Dmbeaster

    December 4, 2016 at 8:25 am

    @opiejeanne: San Berdoo has always been kind of a crappy place. Maybe worse now than before, but it never had far to fall.

    “Ghettos” in SoCal are these blighted inland communities that are strangely isolated from urban centers.

  14. 14.

    Matt McIrvin

    December 4, 2016 at 8:39 am

    When these incidents happen, Trump seems to be banging on the idea that they could have been prevented by keeping the perpetrators out of the country as children, or even by keeping their parents out of the country so they wouldn’t get born here in the first place.

    This idea that you can somehow productively do pre-crime prevention by ethnically filtering the right babies out of your country is pretty much the definition of bigotry, and decent people shouldn’t be having with it.

  15. 15.

    m.j.

    December 4, 2016 at 8:42 am

    the same room where the health department had held active-shooter training earlier that year

    “…active-shooter training…,”

    This is so insane, yet we are supposed to believe this is an acceptable situation. America, America, god sheds his grace on thee. Fuck.

  16. 16.

    aimai

    December 4, 2016 at 8:54 am

    I’m in a majority-minority elementary school right now–lots of the kids are african (christian) and also african (muslim). They are doing an immigration section right now–starting with the pilgrims, including the jews and other immigrants (so funny to read these books and really who among the teaching staff share my great grandparents journey to the US, and then the kids are exploring their own immigrant histories for story boards about coming to america, freedom, religious freedom, etc… But they are not putting up any “Christmas” ornaments or even pictures of christmas trees. Too complicated.

  17. 17.

    Gvg

    December 4, 2016 at 9:50 am

    As a former foster mom I will comment that a year delay indescission is not especially unusual. It doesn’t have to be bigotry. It can be of course and my experience is in Florida, but the system just does not do quick well. There are the usual problems of not enough workers or money, stupid rules and good rules that take time. I think though there is the problem that social workers and judges know they can’t read minds plus the consequences of misreading people’s inner heart being so bad and it adds up to slow and unsure.
    This case would be hard to know what is right. Sister is presented sympathetically here but case workers would wonder if it’s a true face, plus if they turn radical later the blowback from the bigoted public would be severe. They might wonder if an anonymous adoption wouldn’t be better for the child. Not fair of course. Frankly those parents are really bad parents and the rest comes from them.

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