A new report recounts in vivid detail last December’s terror attack in San Bernardino, Ca., where Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people and wounded 24 others, the New York Times reports. The couple pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and died a few hours after the rampage in a shootout with the police. The report includes the first official account of how the killers were identified and tracked down. It discloses many specifics that had not been made public before, including the number of gunshots, and the horrors that officers and victims encountered.
The Police Foundation report shows how officers from multiple agencies handled a rapidly unfolding crisis, making decisions on the fly, often with little coordination or direction. The results may have saved lives but also created confusion and mistakes, though none proved fatal. More than six hours passed before officers searched a bag the killers had left at the scene of the shooting. Inside were three pipe bombs. Despite the confusion, emergency workers got all of the wounded to hospitals within 57 minutes of the first 911 call, a critical benchmark. All of them survived. Investigators spent almost three hours inspecting a package on the second floor that proved harmless, but officers did not notice the bag containing the pipe bombs until much later.