Three people were killed on Monday in an attack on a mosque in San Diego, California, carried out by two teenagers who then committed suicide, authorities said. The two shooters entered the Islamic Center of San Diego in the late morning, which houses the largest mosque in this city of 1.4 million inhabitants, as well as a school for children.
They killed three people, including a security guard, and were found dead in a car near the place of worship. “At this stage, it appears that the suspects died from gunshot wounds they inflicted on themselves,” said San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl at a press conference. The alleged shooters were ages 17 and 18, he said during a second briefing, after initially stating that the older one was 19.
The motivations behind the attack remain unclear. However, the police are currently treating this incident as an Islamophobic attack. “There was clearly hate speech involved,” Wahl explained. “There was no specific threat, particularly no specific threat to the Islamic center, it was just a general type of hate speech that covered a wide range.”
The shooting led to a heavy deployment of heavily armed police officers. When the first responders arrived, four minutes after the initial alerts, they found “three dead bodies” outside the Islamic center, according to Wahl. Among the victims, a security guard played a crucial role in preventing the situation from escalating further. The children were evacuated from the school and placed in safety, authorities said.
Before taking their own lives, the two shooters also targeted a neighborhood gardener, but failed to harm him, the police reported. One of the shooters had been reported to the police as a “runaway minor” by his mother earlier in the morning, Wahl explained. She described her son as “suicidal” and said he had disappeared with his car and several weapons.
According to her description, her son left with a friend and both were dressed in camouflage gear. This prompted the police to deploy around his high school, before reports of shots fired at the mosque. The teenager left a note behind, the content of which Wahl refused to disclose. However, the police chief doubted the claim that the teenager was suicidal. “A suicidal person does not carry three weapons,” he emphasized.
As the investigation progresses, San Diego and the United States are in shock. Especially since this attack occurred on the first day of Dhou al-hijja, a sacred period for the Muslim community. President Donald Trump lamented a “terrible situation.” “My community is grieving. This is something we never imagined would happen,” said one of the imams at the center, Taha Hassane, warning against “religious intolerance and hatred” unprecedented in the United States.
“California has no place for hatred, and we will not tolerate any acts of terror or intimidation against religious communities,” reacted California Governor Gavin Newsom. With more guns in circulation than people, the United States has the highest gun-related mortality rate among all developed countries.
Mass shootings remain a recurring scourge that successive governments have so far failed to contain, as many Americans remain deeply attached to their weapons. In 2025, nearly 15,000 people, excluding suicides, were killed by firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
