Slain security guard of California mosque engaged gunmen in shootout, hailed as hero

By Matt Silverstein, Jana Winter, Helen Coster and Andrew Hay

SAN DIEGO, May 19 (Reuters) – The security guard slain at the Islamic Center of San Diego was hailed on Tuesday as a fallen hero who sacrificed his life to keep 140 school children inside the mosque safe by engaging two gunmen in a shootout that deterred the teenage suspects and helped thwart their attack.

Authorities also disclosed that the 17- and 18-year-old assailants, who took their own lives shortly after Monday’s shooting, were believed to have met online and apparently were “radicalized” in hate-related ideology on the internet. 

The alleged gunmen have been identified as Caleb Vasquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, a Department of Justice official told Reuters. 

A day after the gun violence, police, FBI and other officials held a news conference focused on the three men, all affiliated with the mosque, who were slain in the attack and credited with putting themselves in harm’s way to save others.

The security guard, Amin Abdullah, also known to friends as Brian Climax, immediately recognized the two youths as a threat and opened fire on them as they ran past him outside the mosque, according to San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl. The suspects then paused to return fire, Wahl said.

Abdullah wound up fatally shot in the parking lot, along with two other men who distracted the suspects after they stormed into the building, drawing their attention through a window, thus luring the two teens back outside, Wahl said.

TWO MEN LURED GUNMEN OUTSIDE

The two other victims, mosque elder Mansour Kaziha, and Uber driver Nadir Awad, a neighbor whose wife worked as a teacher at the school there, were cornered and shot to death in the parking lot by the gunmen when they re-emerged.

In the midst of the confrontation, it was Abdullah who transmitted the radio call that activated a security lockdown, which Wahl said also prevented further bloodshed there.

The gunfight and the security alert gave others in the building time to take shelter behind locked doors, Wahl said, while Kaziha and Awad coaxed the suspects out of the building. Kaziha also was the first person to call 911 emergency before he was shot, police said.

Minutes before officers from around California’s second-most-populous city converged on the mosque, the two suspects fled by car. They were found dead in their vehicle a short time later several blocks away, apparently from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, police said.

Wahl singled out Abdullah for special praise of his “heroic action,” adding that at first, “I had no idea how heroic those actions were.”

“His actions, without a doubt, delayed, distracted and ultimately deterred those two individuals from gaining access to the greater areas of the mosque where as many as 140 kids were within 15 feet of these suspects,” Wahl told reporters.

Taha Hassane, the imam and director of the Islamic Center, called all three of the victims “our martyrs and our heroes.”

Addressing a separate news conference at a local park, the security guard’s daughter, Hawaa Abdullah, offered prayers and paid a tearful tribute to her father as a man who doted on his family and was so dedicated to his job that he would not break for meals when he was on duty.

She called on people of all faiths to honor him by coming together and being kind. “He stood against any form of hate,” she said.

HATE-CRIME INQUIRY

Police and FBI have said that they are investigating the attack as a hate crime but have declined to offer details about a possible motive.

Investigators have yet to definitively conclude that the mosque “was the specific target,” said FBI special agent Mark Remily. “What I can say is (the suspects) definitely had a broad hatred towards a lot of folks.”

Remily said one of the gunmen left behind a manifesto, but he declined to characterize it in detail. Officials also said police had seized more than 30 guns and a crossbow in searches of dwellings connected to the suspects. Wahl said all those weapons were registered to the parents of one of the youths.

“Anti-Islamic writings” were found in a vehicle connected to the suspects, the DoJ official with knowledge of the investigation said. 

The mother of Clark, one of the suspects, is cooperating with authorities, the official added. Officers sprang into action on Monday, about two hours before the shooting, when she called police describing her son as suicidal and said he had run off with her vehicle and three of her guns, police said. 

Police initially raced to a local shopping mall and the boy’s school before calls came in about the shooting at the mosque, which ranks as the largest in San Diego County and houses the Bright Horizon Academy.

Anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias in the U.S. surged to record levels last year, according to a report from a leading Muslim advocacy group.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations said it recorded 8,683 anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints in 2025, the most in any year since it began publishing data in 1996. Most complaints were about employment discrimination, immigration and asylum issues, as well as hate incidents, the report said.

(Reporting by Matt Silverstein in San Diego, Jana Winter in Washington, and Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico. Additional reporting by Helen Coster in New York; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage, Mark Porter and Rosalba O’Brien)