By Matt Silverstein, Jana Winter, Helen Coster and Andrew Hay
SAN DIEGO, May 19 (Reuters) – The security guard slain at the Islamic Center of San Diego was hailed on Tuesday as a fallen hero who sacrificed his life to keep 140 school children inside the mosque safe by engaging two gunmen in a shootout that deterred the teenage suspects and helped thwart their attack.
The security guard was publicly identified by police as Amin Abdullah, also known to friends as Brian Climax, who opened fire on the two gunmen on Monday as they ran past him in the parking lot of the mosque complex and then paused to return fire, according to San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl.
Abdullah was ultimately fatally shot in the parking lot, along with two other men who helped distract the suspects after they entered the building and drew them back outside as law enforcement officers were closing in on the scene en masse, Wahl said.
In the midst of the confrontation, it was Abdullah who transmitted the radio call that activated security lockdown protocols at the mosque, which Wahl also credited with preventing further bloodshed at the complex.
The gunfight and the security alert gave others in the building time to take shelter behind locked doors, Wahl said.
Minutes before officers from around California’s second-most-populous city converged on the mosque, the two suspects, aged 17 and 18, fled the complex by car. They were found dead in their vehicle a short time later several blocks away, apparently from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, police said.
Wahl said all three victims, including an elder leader of the mosque community, played a role in preventing more lives from being lost, but he singled out Abdullah for special praise of his “heroic action,” adding that at first, “I had no idea how heroic those actions were.”
“His actions, without a doubt, delayed, distracted and ultimately deterred those two individuals from gaining access to the greater areas of the mosque where as many as 140 kids were within 15 feet of these suspects,” Wahl said at a morning news conference.
Taha Hassane, the imam and director of the Islamic Center, called all three of the victims “our martyrs and our heroes.”
Police and FBI officials have said that they are investigating the attack as a hate crime but have declined to offer details about a possible motive.
FBI special agent Mark Remily said on Tuesday that one of the suspects did leave behind a manifesto, but he declined to characterize it in detail.
“Anti-Islamic writings” were found in a vehicle connected to the two suspects, according to a Department of Justice official with knowledge of the investigation.
The alleged gunmen have been identified as Caleb Vasquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, the official told Reuters on Tuesday.
Clark’s mother is cooperating with authorities, the DOJ official added. Officers sprang into action on Monday after a call from one of the boy’s mothers, who described her son as suicidal and said he had run off with her vehicle and three of her guns, according to police.
Police initially raced to a local shopping mall and the boy’s school before calls came in about the shooting at the mosque.
The Islamic Center is the largest mosque in San Diego County, California, and houses the Bright Horizon Academy.
(Reporting by Jana Winter in Washington, D.C. and Helen Coster in New York; Additional reporting by Andrew Hay in New Mexico. Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage, Mark Porter and Rosalba O’Brien)
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