San Bernardino a year later
Listen to this articleIt’s been a year since a man and woman went into a Holiday party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, murdering 14 people and injuring 22 others. Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik killed the people Farook had worked with for five years. Both had become self-radicalized terrorists, although neither were formally a part of any terror groups. Malik had professed her allegiance to ISIL, and her husband had copies of the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire.
That they were able to amass a large arsenal, using a friend as a proxy, says something about our still lax gun laws, even here in California. Another suspect, Enrique Marquez, Jr. had helped Farook buy the two assault weapons used in the shooting, but that was years earlier and the FBI has determined Marquez didn’t have any knowledge of the attack a year ago.
A year later the FBI knows little more than that, information we learned in the week following the shooting. They were able to hack Farouk’s iPhone, but apparently it offered little evidence. They still don’t know for sure if the two acted alone or were part of a larger plot. Those questions may never be answered.
But there are 14 families still grieving in the San Bernardino area. So let’s remember the victims of this horrendous act: Shannon Johnson, Isaac Amanios, Robert Adams, Sierra Clayborn, Aurora Godoy, Tin Nguyen, Damian Meins, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Juan Espinoza, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Yvette Velasco, Nicholas Thalasinos and Mike Wetzel.
These are wounds that will never fully heal, for the victims that survived as well as their families and those of the people who were killed.
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