Author: Matt Silverstein and Steve Gorman
SAN DIEGO (Reuters) – Nine-year-old Odai Shanah’s mother immigrated from war-torn Gaza and settled in Southern California two decades ago. Dozens of children were forced into classrooms on Monday after deadly gunfire erupted at the mosque where they attended school.
In an interview hours after the early morning shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, Shaner recalled hearing a volley of gunshots coming from outside the walls of the complex, which also houses an Islamic day school.
Shaner said he and his classmates were quickly taken into a closet and huddled together, shaking with fear as 12 to 16 more gunshots rang out. At some point after the shooting stopped, they heard police SWAT team members outside the classroom yelling, “‘OK, open the door,’ and they opened the door,” the boy recalled.
As they were escorted out of the building by police, “we saw a bunch of bad stuff, people lying down, yeah, bad stuff,” said Shaner, who admitted the phrase was referring to the victims’ bodies.
“My legs were shaking, my hands and my head hurt. I felt like a rock,” he said.
Three men at the Islamic center, including a security guard who authorities credited with preventing greater bloodshed, were shot to death outside the mosque by two teenage suspects who later committed suicide a few blocks away, police said.
Shaner’s parents both allowed their son, a U.S.-born relative of the Reuters employee, to be interviewed for this article and recount the experience in his own words.
After the gunfire ended, Shaner emerged from hiding and saw police kicking open the door to an adjacent classroom and an apparent SWAT team advancing from room to room in the building.
“They made us stand in a line with our hands up,” the boy said, adding that he saw a group of younger students forming another line, waiting to be evacuated, before he and his classmates were directed through the complex to the outside.
Authorities later said the gunman never entered the interior of the mosque complex and that all students at the school, known as Bright Horizons Academy, had been located and safe.
The gun violence that has rocked the Islamic center and close-knit surrounding communities is undoubtedly particularly alarming for Shana’s mother, who fled Gaza for the United States in 2006, the year of months-long clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants in the seaside enclave. His father immigrated to the United States from Jordan in 2015.
(Reporting by Matt Silverstein in San Diego. Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
