SAN BERNARDINO — The husband and wife who killed 14 people and wounded 21 at an office holiday party in Southern California’s Inland Empire were on a “mission,” renting a sport utility vehicle and stockpiling weaponry at their nearby home including four guns, thousands of rounds of ammunition and homemade bombs, authorities said Thursday.
[...] as investigators pieced together Wednesday’s massacre in San Bernardino and made grim notifications to victims’ families, they said they had still not learned what drove Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, to don tactical vests, drop off their baby with a relative, and slaughter Farook’s co-workers before being killed, hours later, in a firefight with police.
President Obama, speaking to reporters Thursday morning at the White House, said federal investigators were committed to figuring out what had happened, but added it could take time.
FBI officials who have taken over the case said they were looking into a potential dispute between Farook and one or more co-workers just before the shooting, while also exploring his travels to Pakistan.
Farook, a U.S. citizen who worked as a health inspector for San Bernardino County, had been in contact with Islamist extremists in the United States and abroad in the past, the New York Times reported, citing anonymous law enforcement officials.
An online dating site that Farook apparently used before meeting Malik described him as a Muslim from a “religious but modern family.”
Police said the pair walked into the unlocked door of a conference room at the Inland Regional Center about 11 a.m. The county public health department had rented the space for a Christmas party and luncheon.
Farook, who had worked for the health department for five years, had been at the party earlier before leaving, according to investigators, who are looking into whether he had left angry after a dispute.
The couple had apparently left their infant daughter with Farook’s mother in neighboring Redlands under the pretext that they had a doctor’s appointment, the Los Angeles Times reported.
At the couple’s rented home in Redlands, authorities said they later found 12 “pipe-bomb devices” and hundreds of tools for producing explosives.
Hours after the shooting spree, the couple were spotted driving a black Ford Expedition near their Redlands house before leading police on a chase back to San Bernardino.
Twenty-three officers from seven law enforcement agencies unloaded 380 rounds at the couple, Burguan said.
Two deputies were hurt in the confrontation — one was shot in the left leg, the other may have been cut by shrapnel or broken glass — but are recovering, Burguan said.
Last year, a person named Syed Rizwan Farook enrolled in an online graduate program in environmental engineering at Cal State Fullerton and attended for one semester, school officials said.
California’s assault weapons ban, the Roberti-Roos Assault Weapons Control Act of 1989, bans many models of semiautomatic rifles as well as rifles with certain characteristics or modifications.
