Investigators looking into the motivations of two men accused of killing three people at a San Diego mosque Monday are trying to authenticate a document posted online that purportedly details their motivations, three senior law enforcement officials said.
The 75-page document has sections apparently written by Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, the suspects identified by law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation.
The writings are filled with extremist material espousing anti-Islamic, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ views. The authors refer to accelerationism, a white supremacist ideology that promotes violence to speed the formation of a white ethnostate.
The material includes Nazi iconography, extreme misogyny and racist sentiments about Black people and other minority groups, law enforcement officials said. The authors blame the Jewish community for what they say are the problems of the modern world.
The document also includes views that are hostile to President Donald Trump, and the authors describe themselves as anti-MAGA, according to the law enforcement officials.
The authors list Brenton Tarrant — the man who carried out the 2019 shooting at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — as one of their “heroes.”
The Christchurch massacre killed 51 people.
At a briefing Tuesday, the FBI confirmed that writings had been found online.
“We are dedicating every resource the FBI has to conduct a thorough analysis of that manifesto to try to learn what led to this, but I think also more importantly, how can we stop future attacks,” said Mark Remily, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Diego field office.
“They didn’t discriminate on who they hated. It covered a wide aspect of races and religions, more than just the Islamic people.”
Vazquez and Clark are believed to have died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds after the attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego, described on its website as the largest mosque in San Diego County. The mosque is in San Diego’s Clairemont neighborhood, roughly 8 miles north of downtown.
Monday was the first day of Dhul Hijjah, the final month of the Islamic calendar and one of its most sacred periods.
Officials have said that without the “heroic” actions of Amin Abdullah, a security guard who was fatally shot protecting children and staff members inside the mosque, Monday’s death toll could have been worse.
“I want to be very clear: All three of our victims did not die in vain,” San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said Tuesday. “Without distracting the attention, without delaying the actions of these two individuals, without question, there would have been many more fatalities yesterday.”
Abdullah exchanged gunfire with the attackers and alerted everyone inside to go into lockdown, officials said.
Abdullah’s alert and the deadly gunfire with the gunmen allowed children and staff members to take shelter, police said.
The teens managed to get inside the center after they killed the guard but failed to find any other potential victims in the mosque because they were in hiding, police said.
Security video inside the center showed the gunmen looking out a window to spot the two other men, Mansour Kaziha and Nader Awad, who were killed.
“When they drew, obviously inadvertently, the attention of those gunmen out of the door and out into the parking lot, where they subsequently died, what was coming seconds away was hundreds of police officers that everybody that was there yesterday could see,” Wahl said of the victims. The gunmen “immediately ran to their vehicle and fled the scene. At that point, I truly believe, that’s what saved the 140 kids that were just inside.”
Remily said the gunmen were “radicalized online.”
“The victims who lost their lives yesterday were there to help others be part of a community that came together in peace,” he said.
“Instead, they were confronted by teenagers who appeared to have been radicalized online to believe that they didn’t belong because of how they looked or whether they worshipped,” he said.
