Terrorism Too Close to Home

SAN DIEGO -- People move to California to escape the harsh winters. But this week, we learned that living here doesn't mean you escape the harsh reality of international terrorism.

In Southern California, Wednesday was just like any other day -- until it wasn't. At about 11:30 a.m., I was having lunch about a mile from my children's school when I heard about the massacre in San Bernardino, about an hour away.

In one of the deadliest mass shootings in our nation's history, 14 people were killed and 21 injured after gunmen opened fire during a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center.

The building provides office space to an organization staffed by social workers that helps individuals with developmental disabilities. The conference room, where the attack was centered, had been rented by the county health department.

A video taken just moments before the shooting shows people in a joyous mood, some of them in wheelchairs. It was an unlikely place for someone to make a political statement -- unless the plan was to choose a "soft target" to generate the greatest amount of public outrage.

Mission accomplished. At the moment, outrage is as abundant in California as sunshine. What we're missing are answers in a terrorist attack that breaks all the rules.

Within a couple of hours of the shooting, while the situation was still fluid, a cop friend messaged me:

"14 dead. Who were these [expletives]?"

The [expletives] were later identified as Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 27. Farook, a U.S.-born citizen, traveled to Saudi Arabia, where he met Malik, and brought her to the United States. The Muslim couple has a 6-month-old infant for whom they were careful to make baby-sitting arrangements before they went on their errand of death.

My friend texted, "If it was ISIS, life as we know it in California is over."

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