One of the two white supremacists who killed three people at a mosque in San Diego on Monday had been flagged by the FBI as a potential threat last year, US media reports have revealed. Caleb Vazquez, 18, and his friend Cain Clark, 17, attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, where they fatally shot a security guard and two other men before dying from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
According to the New York Times, local officials were so alarmed by Vazquez's idolisation of mass shooters and Nazism that they seized his father's guns a year before the attack. Bloomberg reported that Vazquez had been flagged by the FBI as a “potential threat” last year. The Associated Press said the pair were radicalised online, where they first met, and shared white supremacist and pro-Nazi views, calling for Muslims to be “exterminated”.
Online materials purportedly written by Vazquez showed a far-right “accelerationist” ideology promoting extreme violence. NPR noted similarities with the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre in New Zealand. Vazquez had been placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, and a court ordered his father to surrender 26 guns after concerns about his son.
After the attack, officials found at least 30 guns, ammunition and a crossbow at two residences. It is unclear if the weapons used came from Vazquez's home. The Vazquez family apologised in a statement, blaming his autism diagnosis and online radicalisation, saying they “stand firmly against the ideology and actions that led to this tragedy”.
The attackers arrived at the mosque and tried to barge in, but a security guard opened fire, forcing them back. The guard called for a lockdown, and the shooters fatally shot him in the lobby but could not reach anyone else. They then killed two other men in the parking lot who had drawn them away from the building. The mosque's imam said the community had received hate mail in the past.
