Three Died at a San Diego Mosque. The Teen Who Spread the Video Is Charged With Murder
Three people were killed in May when two teenagers opened fire at the Islamic Center of San Diego and streamed the attack live. On Aug. 31, prosecutors charged a 17-year-old girl roughly 2,000 miles away with their murders, saying she had agreed beforehand to record and spread the livestream and to publish the manifesto meant to justify the killings.
A 17-year-old girl in North Carolina has been indicted on murder charges over the mass shooting at a San Diego mosque in May, even though she was some 2,000 miles away when the gunfire began. A Forsyth County grand jury returned three counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder against her on Aug. 31, CNN reported. Prosecutors allege she had agreed, before the attack, to record and disseminate the gunmen’s livestream and to publish the writings they left behind, according to CBS News.
What prosecutors allege
The teenager was arrested last week and indicted the following Monday, Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill said, according to PBS News. Prosecutors say she worked with the two shooters to record and spread a livestream of the assault and later published their manifesto, and that she bought and sent one of the gunmen a patch bearing a white-supremacist symbol that he wore during the attack, CNN reported. The indictment further alleges that she had conspired with the pair to attack a Jewish house of worship and Black students at a high school, according to NBC News. She will be tried as an adult, and the charges have not been proved in court.
The massacre in May
The shooting took place on May 18 at the Islamic Center of San Diego, one of the largest mosques in the region, according to CNN. Two teenagers — Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18 — opened fire outside the center, killing a security guard and two members of the congregation before dying by suicide nearby, PBS News reported. The three men who died were later remembered as heroes who shielded others from the gunfire, NPR reported. As many as 140 children were on the grounds when the shooting began, according to CNN. The attackers broadcast the assault live as it unfolded, according to NBC News.
A killing built to be broadcast
Investigators say the two gunmen met and were radicalized in online spaces where extremist material circulates, and that they left behind writings expressing anti-Muslim, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ hatred, PBS News reported. Their manifesto referenced Brenton Tarrant, the gunman who livestreamed the 2019 mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 people — a template that accelerationist networks online have repeatedly celebrated and sought to copy, according to NBC News. For such networks, researchers say, the livestream and the manifesto are not incidental to the violence but the purpose of it, engineered to spread across platforms and inspire the next attacker, NBC News reported.
The same crime as the attack
The indictment tests how far criminal responsibility reaches into the online machinery of a mass shooting — treating the person who allegedly agreed to capture, broadcast and publish it as a principal to murder rather than a distant onlooker. “A person who aids and abets another to commit a crime is guilty of that crime ... just as if he or she had personally done all of the acts necessary to constitute the crime,” O’Neill said, according to PBS News. Under North Carolina law, the aiding-and-abetting counts carry the same penalties as the killings themselves, CBS News reported. If the theory holds at trial, it would mean that agreeing to record and spread an attacker’s video and manifesto can carry the same charge as pulling the trigger.