tashfeen malik

Mandy Pifer, a therapist, was with a client in Los Angeles on Dec. 2, 2015, when she received a text about a mass shooting in San Bernardino. Her fiance, Shannon Johnson, was a restaurant inspector there.

She didn’t panic until, driving home, she heard on the radio that the victims were employees of the desert city’s environmental health department. She grabbed her phone and dialed Shannon’s number over and over, but it kept going straight to voicemail. That’s when, she said, she knew, “in my bones,” he was gone.

She was right. Earlier that morning, the man she loved and planned to marry used his body to shield a 27-year-old co-worker in what would become the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. His last words, as he held his terrified colleague close, were, “I got you.”

Johnson’s death “changed the whole trajectory of my life,” Pifer said through tears in a recent interview. “Everything now is before or after ‘the event.’”

Tuesday marks the 10th year since restaurant inspector Syed Rizwan Farook, a U.S. citizen, and his Pakistan-born wife, Tashfeen Malik, walked into his office holiday party with military-style assault rifles and shot more than 30 people, killing 14.

The unspeakable violence, apparently inspired by jihadist propaganda online, thrust the often-overlooked, and financially bankrupt, city of San Bernardino into the global spotlight.

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1. Police and emergency vehicles line Waterman Avenue in front of the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, scene of a mass shooting on Dec. 2, 2015. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times) 2. Then-San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan speaks during a press conference after a mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center on Dec. 2, 2015. (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times) 3. San Bernardino County sheriff‘s deputies draw guns and crouch behind a minivan on Richardson Street during a search for the suspects involved in the mass shooting. (Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)

The U.S. has suffered deadlier shootings since San Bernardino — including the 2016 massacre at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in which another American inspired by online terrorist propaganda killed 49 — but the December 2015 California attack had the most sweeping impact on American politics, and ushered in the nation’s current era of divisive immigration enforcement.

Less than a week after the killings, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump used the tragedy to call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

His proposed “Muslim ban” was widely criticized, including from members of his own party. But Trump stood by his words, saying on “Good Morning America” that “we are now at war.”

That proposal was so popular with Republican voters, it helped propel Trump to the party’s nomination the following summer and helped win him the election in November 2016. A week after taking the oath of office in January 2017, Trump imposed a ban on people traveling from seven majority Muslim countries, but not Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, where Malik had lived.

Trump’s stance was hardened by last week’s attack on two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C. An Afghan national — who was granted asylum in the United States after working with the CIA in his native country — has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting, which killed one of the soldiers and left the other in critical condition.

The president said he wants to “permanently pause migration” from poorer nations and expel millions of migrants from the United States by revoking their legal status.

A painful day for survivors and family members

The Curtain of Courage memorial at the San Bernardino County Government Center honors the 14 people slain in the Dec. 2, 2015, terrorist attack at the Inland Regional Center.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

At 10:59 that December morning, San Bernardino police dispatchers received their first report of a “possible active shooter” at the Inland Regional Center. Farook and Malik had walked into the Christmas party and opened fire, killing and wounding dozens of his co-workers.

They escaped out a side door and died hours later in a spectacular gunfight with police on a busy roadside less than two miles away.

A decade later, survivors, family members, police and terrorism experts are still sorting through the wreckage the couple left behind. They are trying to draw useful lessons and to put shattered lives, and a shattered community, back together.

For some residents who lost loved ones, this day is so painful they have told county officials they’d prefer if there were no public memorial each year.

For homeland security analysts, the San Bernardino attack was a wake-up call. At the time, they were still intensely focused on preventing terrorists trained in foreign lands from infiltrating America’s porous borders — as the 9/11 hijackers had. Now they were confronted with the grave threat that American citizens were being radicalized online.

Members of the Arias family — Junior, 2, and Jenesis, 5 — say a prayer with their parents, Robert and Sierra, as the family pay their respects on Dec. 3, 2015, to victims of the San Bernardino attack.

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

A month earlier, terrorists trained by Islamic State in Syria had killed 130 people in a string of suicide bombings and a mass shooting in the center of Paris. That set security forces around the world on high alert for military-age young men who had recently traveled to the war-torn Middle East nation.

But Farook was an American citizen born in Chicago and raised in Riverside. Malik was born in Pakistan and had lived most of her life in Saudi Arabia. Like many other couples, they met online and she emigrated to the U.S. on a fiancee visa in July 2014. They married and, at the time of the attack, had a 6-month-old baby girl.

Understandably, they were not on any security force’s radar and had no apparent links to international terror networks — until Malik pledged allegiance to the ISIS leader on Facebook shortly before the attack.

Investigators later discovered that the two had discussed jihad and martyrdom in private online chats for at least two years before that fateful day, and that they had drawn inspiration from Islamic State’s robust social media, which included videos depicting a Jordanian pilot being burned to death inside a locked cage and the beheadings of two American journalists. The group had also posted videos showing children horribly maimed by U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East, exhorting sympathizers around the world to rise up and take revenge.

“That really got the FBI’s attention and galvanized them to start looking at the propaganda ISIS was putting out” on YouTube and through other online platforms, said Robert Pape, a professor who studies terrorism and other security threats at the University of Chicago.

None of the family members of San Bernardino shooting victims interviewed for this story supported the ban on people traveling from Muslim countries.

“I disagreed with it completely,” said Renee Wetzel, who was 32 years old when her husband, Mike, was killed in the attack, leaving her to raise their six kids without him.

Wetzel said she was shocked that the entire populations of those countries — amounting to millions of people — could be banned from traveling to America because of an evil act committed by two individuals, one of whom was born and raised in the U.S. and another who didn’t come from any of the countries on the list.

“That just blows my mind,” Wetzel said. For a lot of people who immigrate, America is a “last resort,” she said. “When did we stop caring about other people?”

In Muslim communities, alarm and dread

Muslims including Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, center, pray at Dar Al Uloom Al-Islamiyah of America, a mosque in San Bernardino, on Nov. 26, 2025.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

For many Muslims in and around San Bernardino, the attack provoked fears of violent backlash. In response, Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, organized a news conference within hours. He brought Farook’s brother-in-law, Farhan Khan, who stood before TV cameras to denounce the violence and offer condolences to the victims.

Still, Farook’s family and the broader community were so frightened that during a visit to Khan’s house shortly after the attack, Ayloush heard children crying. He was stunned to learn the family was hungry because they were too scared to leave the house and buy groceries.

Community members listen to speakers at a candlelight vigil at San Manuel Stadium in San Bernardino on Dec. 3, 2015, honoring the victims of the mass shooting at the Inland Regional Center.

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Ayloush bought some for them, adding: “It broke my heart because no one there in that house was guilty of anything.”

Burying the shooters became a separate ordeal. Local cemeteries refused to take the bodies because they had received threats, said Ayloush, who spent several days trying to find a place that would take them.

In San Bernardino, there “were people camping outside the mortuary,” Ayloush said, so the bodies had to be spirited out a back exit.

The name of the out-of-town cemetery that eventually accepted them, Ayloush said, was made public, and it was vandalized just after the attackers were buried. Still, because of community efforts, the region largely avoided “this becoming an act that pitted people against each other on the basis of religion or nationality.”

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1. Muslims pray at Dar Al Uloom Al-Islamiyah of America, a mosque in San Bernardino. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times) 2. Religious books inside the mosque. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times) 3. Dr. Tariq Jamil, a pulmonary specialist in San Bernardino, puts his shoes back on after prayer at Dar Al Uloom Al-Islamiyah of America. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times) 4. Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, is photographed at Dar Al Uloom Al-Islamiyah of America. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

For the county’s Division of Environmental Health Services, the immediate challenge was helping surviving employees cope with their trauma. When the shooting occurred, employees had gathered for a training session and holiday celebration in a conference room at the Inland Regional Center.

Several survivors had trouble returning to their workspace on the second floor of the San Bernardino County Government Center.

“We couldn’t let people come back to their cubicles because there were so many people missing,” said San Bernardino County Assessor Josie Gonzales, who was a county supervisor at the time.

The workers were temporarily moved as their floor was completely remodeled. Some who were present that day still work for the county, she said. Others never came back to work. Some moved away.

Outside the San Bernardino County Government Center, there’s now a Curtain of Courage — 14 bronze alcoves, each curved like a protective wall and dedicated to one of the victims. It was completed and unveiled in 2022.

Textbook response by law enforcement

Det. Shaun Sandoval is photographed at the San Bernardino Police Department on Nov. 18, 2025. Sandoval was one of the first police officers to enter the Inland Regional Center on Dec. 2, 2015.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

For law enforcement, the quick and decisive response to secure the scene — so the surviving victims could begin receiving aid — became a global model for how to handle mass shootings. The need for prompt confrontation became painfully obvious years later when a Texas police department failed to follow San Bernardino’s example during the Uvalde school shooting, with tragic results.

Shaun Sandoval, a patrol officer with the San Bernardino Police Department, was one of the first to arrive. The scene was pure chaos: thick smoke from gunpowder still hanging in the air, water cascading from ruptured pipes in the ceiling, alarms blaring, strobe lights flashing.

But none of that compared to the sight of so many people on the ground, “in agony and pain, screaming for help,” Sandoval recalled.

Mike Madden, now retired from the San Bernardino Police Department, is photographed in Beaumont, Calif. He was one of the first rescuers to enter the Inland Regional Center after the shooting on Dec. 2, 2015. .

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

As three other officers arrived, they realized how ill-equipped they were: None of them had a rifle, one had no body armor. If the shooters were inside waiting for them, they’d be hopelessly outgunned. But if they didn’t go in, people on the ground were going to bleed to death.

So they drew their pistols (Sandoval also had a shotgun), gathered in a defensive diamond formation, and started inching their way past the outstretched, pleading arms of injured people, focused solely on finding and confronting the shooters.

“I remember the victims reaching out, I remember people asking for help and crying,” Sandoval said. “Unfortunately, even after all this time, those sounds are not forgotten.”

It took only a few minutes — which felt like “eternity,” Sandoval said — to determine the shooters had fled through a separate exit. That meant other police and paramedics who were waiting outside could rush in and start saving lives.

Jarrod Burguan, former San Bernardino police chief, is photographed in La Quinta on Nov. 22, 2025. Burguan led the Police Department during the attack 10 years ago.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Since then, the actions of those four officers have become a textbook example of how to respond, taught in law enforcement training seminars around the world. “I think the old way of standing outside and waiting forever for more and more people to come before you go in, those days are long gone,” Sandoval said.

That lesson was brutally reinforced in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, when a lone gunman entered an elementary school and shot 19 children and two teachers. Some of the injured died while police — who had plenty of armor and high-powered rifles — waited more than an hour to enter the classroom and confront the shooter.

Retired San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said the heroism of his officers that day provided a recruiting boost to the beleaguered department, which had lost more than a third of its members due to municipal bankruptcy.

“In a strange way, there was a silver lining for the psyche of the organization,” Burguan said. “It restored a little bit of pride.”

“Thought we were going to be together forever”

A memorial bench in San Bernardino honors those who lost their lives or had lives changed in the terrorist attack.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

For some victims’ family members, it provided a purpose.

Tina Meins, whose father, Damian, who was shot five times and died at the foot of the party’s Christmas tree, vowed to make something good come of the tragedy.

“So I quit my job, I went and I got a public policy degree from Georgetown,” she said in a recent interview.

She’s now a senior program manager at Everytown for Gun Safety, a national advocacy group that lobbies for gun control. The work is rewarding, she said, but always tinged with regret.

“Every victory is a little bittersweet,” Meins said, because she can’t share it with her dad. “He’s the person you want to tell. And every challenge is a little harder because he’s not around.”

Like everyone else interviewed for this story, Meins said she has noticed that interest in the San Bernardino shooting has waned significantly over the last decade.

“It’s possible people are just so desensitized because mass acts of violence are commonplace, ubiquitous,” Meins said.

With the roar of gunfire long faded, and the urgent call to action colliding with the slow grind of politics as usual, what’s left for most survivors is a profound sense of loss, an emptiness that nothing quite fills.

“We thought we were going to be together forever,” Wetzel said last month. But her kids, who ranged from 1 year old to 14 at the time of the shooting, have now spent a decade passing milestones — birthdays, father-daughter dances, driving tests — without their dad at their side.

But it’s the little, nagging empty spaces that plague her most.

Every night when Mike came home, she would meet him at the door, give him a hug and a kiss, and then hand off the baby, Wetzel said with a chuckle. For years after the shooting, just before six p.m., she could still feel the relief building — “my body would just, like, expect him to come walking in” — only to have it snatched away when the door didn’t open.

A plaque with the names of the 14 people killed in the Dec. 2, 2015, attack at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. The victims are honored along with survivors and first responders in the Curtain of Courage memorial.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

The 27-year-old colleague whom Shannon Johnson saved — who declined to be interviewed — has gone on with her life. She and her husband had their first child not long after the shooting, they now have a second, and they still live in the area near her parents and sisters, according to a friend.

For Johnson’s fiancee, Mandy Pifer, time stood still for a while. She struggled with depression and addiction, she said, adding, “I just became kind of a blob of a person. … I just didn’t care.”

It took most of the decade to pull out of that hole, she said, to start traveling and enjoying life again. But she still lives in the same apartment with the elderly cat she and Shannon adopted before he died.

She remembers him whenever she strokes the cat, especially if she’s wearing short sleeves, exposing the small black letters tattooed on her forearm: “I got you.”