Miss Imani had just finished benchmark testing and was sending her last student back to the classroom when she heard it: the sharp crack of gunfire that echoed off the high ceilings of the Islamic Center of San Diego's [ICSD] mosque . She knew immediately what the sound was. She ran, locked the door, and dropped under a desk in the dark.
Minutes later, fists pounded on the door. "Police, open up." She hesitated. Anyone could say that.
When she finally emerged, headed toward the evacuation zone, she saw Amin Abdullah, the mosque's security guard, lying on the floor in front of the exit. She screamed while her coworker's knees buckled. Imani grabbed her before she fainted.
"It was so graphic," she said. "Every single kid that walked into the school that day — every single staff, everybody spoke to Brother Amin that day."
At the Seventh-day Adventist Church down the street, where staff and students had evacuated, Imani stood at the door and counted faces as each child walked in. When the rosters finally closed and every student was accounted for, the staff collapsed in relief.
Then a child approached her. "Miss Imani, why are you crying?" Around them, students pre-kindergarten through third grade were hugging one another, telling each other to thank God they survived.
Three members of the ICSD community died that day. On Monday, 28 May, just before noon, the San Diego Police Department received reports of an active shooter at the Islamic Center of San Diego. The attack landed on the last full week of classes at the centre's pre-K through third-grade elementary school, where teachers were finalising grades and printing graduation certificates while students, some as young as three, counted down the days to summer. Police had received their first warning nearly two hours earlier, when the mother of one of the suspects called to report that her son was missing, suicidal, and had left home that morning with an online acquaintance, taking firearms and a car with him. The gunmen, identified as 17-year-old Cain Lee Clark and 18-year-old Caleb Liam Vazquez, live-streamed the attack and left behind a manifesto referencing the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings , citing racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic ideology. Authorities believe the pair met online, discovered they both lived in the San Diego area, met in person, and exchanged radicalised ideology before carrying out the attack. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime. Three men were killed: Amin Abdullah, the mosque's security guard; Mansour Kaziha, a long-time staff member; and Nader Awad, a neighbour whose wife taught at the school, who rushed toward the building when the shooting began. The men who gave their lives for ICSD When Khalid Alexander converted to Islam in 1995, the first Muslim household to welcome him was that of Mansour "AbulEzz" Kaziha.
"The first place I ever had hummus was their house," said Khalid, founder of Pillars of the Community San Diego, an organisation working to counter the criminalisation of Black and brown neighbourhoods through community organising and policy advocacy. "They invited me in, fed me, let me know I was part of their family. That had a huge impact on me." AbulEzz was the mosque's quiet anchor, a long-time staff member who wore many hats and was known by all regulars. "Many people may have gone to the [mosque] once or twice and not seen his place there," Khalid said. "But anybody who's been here a while has known how integral he was."
Sarah Yousef, a former student, knew him through the small rituals of childhood. He ran a shop inside the mosque, and after school, the kids would run to find him.
"He was the kindest and sweetest soul," she said. "If our parents hadn't given us money, he would say, 'Don't worry, just take it, you can pay me back later.'"
In the days after the shooting, a friend broke down in tears when she remembered she had yet to settle up.
Nader Awad lived directly across the street from the mosque. His wife taught at the school, and he attended daily prayers at the centre. When the shooting started, he ran toward the building. Surveillance footage reportedly shows him and AbulEzz drawing the suspects toward the car park and away from the classrooms before both men were killed.
"When he heard the shooting, he rushed to do something, to protect," the mosque's Imam, Taha Hassane, said in a press conference.
The first victim, Amin Abdullah, is credited with implementing the lockdown measures that protected the 140 children attending the school that day, and his actions undoubtedly caused the suspects to flee the scene. Amin stood at the entrance every morning and greeted everyone who came through. Khalid had prayed beside him at Fajr and Isha for years and counted him among his oldest friends in the faith, as someone who was never visibly angry, whose presence was defined by constancy and warmth, and who wove an invitation to be closer to God into everyday conversation.
For the staff and children he protected that day, the credit belongs not to the police response but to the three men who ran toward the threat. 'We feared this could happen' The Islamic Center of San Diego sits directly off the freeway, its dome and minaret visible to every driver passing through Clairemont.
Most mosques in the city are tucked into side streets or commercial strips. ICSD's high visibility, paired with national spikes in Islamophobia, was not lost on the teachers. "We've had this conversation many times," Miss Imani said. "Our mosque is very easy to spot. We are not undercover, we are not hiding who we are."
The visibility was a point of community pride, yet a source of quiet concern. She described a feeling that had been building over the past several years, tied to the political atmosphere and what she saw as an increase in emboldened hostility.
"It's been building since Trump came into office," she said. "With the mental health crisis and barely any gun laws, this is the product of that."
For Sarah, who attended the Islamic school from kindergarten through eighth grade, the fear had roots in childhood. "I remember almost having little panic attacks as a child just going through the drills," she said. "I'd be scared to go to the bathroom during class, because my biggest worry was that I'd be stuck in a bathroom if a shooter came in." After October 2023 and the wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that followed, she said, that fear grew in a way that felt different from before. "As a visibly Muslim woman in America, especially after what just happened, that fear has grown exponentially."
Khalid Alexander had watched the same accumulation from a different vantage point. A few weeks before the shooting, he saw something shift in Amin Abdullah at morning prayer. ICE agents had killed two people in Minneapolis during a deportation operation, and Amin, who Khalid said was almost never visibly angry, appeared furious in a way he had not seen before. "He recognised the direct connection between the rhetoric coming from the White House, the rhetoric coming from ICE, and how that endangered the lives of the people he protected every day," Khalid said.
"He knew what his job was. He knew the dangers. And he embraced all of that willingly." A climate built for this Dr Hatem Bazian , a leading Islamophobia scholar and UC Berkeley lecturer, described the current period as a shift in degree rather than kind. Anti-Muslim hostility , he argued, had long operated as an external force, visible in foreign policy and military intervention. What had changed was its domestic direction.
"Islamophobia has turned decisively deadly in the Western landscape," he said, situating the San Diego attack within a broader pattern of intensifying hostility toward Muslim communities inside Western countries.
Dr Hatem pointed to a coordinated increase in what he described as Israeli government Hasbara spending as a structural driver of the broader climate. Figures reported put the current year's budget at $730 million, a fivefold increase over the $150 million allocated in the previous cycle. A separate report on leaked Israeli polling research shed light on the strategic logic behind the increase, finding that messaging framing Palestinians through the lens of "jihadism and anti-Sharia" sentiment shifted Western public opinion toward Israel by as much as 20 percentage points.
Dr Hatem argued the two were directly connected to the rise in Islamophobic rhetoric and hate crimes on a global scale. A report published in April 2026 by the Centre for the Study of Organised Hate found that what began as a single gubernatorial social media post in February 2025 had, within 13 months, grown into a formal congressional infrastructure comprising dozens of lawmakers, multiple pieces of legislation, and a dedicated caucus.
Monthly posting volume by elected officials increased by 1,450 percent over the study period, with 63 posts using language that described Muslims as "demons," "cancer," or a "death cult." A small core of five lawmakers is responsible for nearly three-quarters of all content. "You can't dehumanise Muslims in Palestine and not dehumanise Muslims and Arabs in the United States," Khalid said. "You can't bomb schools in Iran and not be okay with similar actions happening to school girls in the United States." The making of an attacker The manifesto believed by federal investigators to be connected to the shooting opens with a line that captures the ideology behind it with unsettling precision.
"Let me preface this by saying I don't hate Muslims, at least not really," it reads, in a passage attributed to Vazquez. "What I do hate is the religion of Islam itself, and what I hate more than that is seeing them here, invading my country." The document, which law enforcement states references usernames matching social media accounts that posted consistent ideology in the months before the attack, elaborates on the Great Replacement theory , which frames the presence of non-white immigrants as a deliberate effort to displace white Western populations. It expresses admiration for previous mass shooters by name, and returns repeatedly to islamophobic and nihilistic ideas. Anti-Islamic writing was found inside the suspects' vehicle, and hate speech was written directly onto the firearms used in the attack, alongside numerical codes referencing Nazism and messages about past shootings.
Among the figures the document expresses admiration for is the gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 , and who also livestreamed his attack. The online ecosystems that produce this kind of ideology have been documented extensively in the years since the Christchurch attack.
Researchers at organisations including the Global Network on Extremism and Technology have tracked the way mass shooters are glorified in specific corners of the internet, their attacks framed as acts of heroism within a broader racial and civilisational struggle, their manifestos circulated and studied by others.
The pattern follows a consistent logic: an isolated young man, heavy consumption of accelerationist content, and a target selected for symbolic visibility. The warnings that went unanswered The warning signs in this case arrived before the shooting did. In January 2025, police obtained a temporary gun violence restraining order against Caleb Vazquez's father after a welfare check flagged Caleb for behaviour officers described as idolising Nazis and mass shooters.
The family voluntarily removed 26 firearms from the home and placed them in licensed storage. A San Diego Superior Court judge dismissed the order roughly two weeks later, without explanation in the court record. The guns could legally return to the house. Then, on the morning of the shooting, the mother of Cain Clark called police to report her son missing, suicidal, and last seen leaving the house with an online acquaintance, taking her firearms and car .
Over the course of multiple calls across nearly two hours, she relayed that additional weapons were missing, that she had found a suicide note, and that she had discovered hate-filled writings on her son's computer.
Police elevated the threat level and began searching for the vehicle. They were still searching when the first shots were fired at ICSD.
In the days following the shooting, the community's grief carried within it a layer of frustration directed at law enforcement, concerning both what had happened before the attack and what had happened during it.
"We're fully aware that our martyrs are the ones who saved us, not the police," Imani said. She described the failure to shield small children from seeing Amin’s dead body at the exit as something she struggled to understand, given that students as young as three years old were among those evacuated.
Khalid was more direct. "They failed in every sense of the word," he said. "They did absolutely nothing at best, and at worst they did things that contributed to what happened at ICSD."
He was referring not only to the handling of the evacuation but to the two hours between the mother's first call and the shooting, during which he argued that notifying the mosque or placing the area on alert could have changed the outcome. The San Diego Police Department declined to comment to The New Arab on community concerns about the mishandling of the response.
In a public statement, the department acknowledged that staffing levels would be examined as part of an ongoing review, noting : "We understand why people would ask whether staffing levels played a role in this week's tragedy."
Miss Imani asked what had carried her through the days since, described the staff gathering at the homes of the bereaved, holding each other's hands, crying without embarrassment, because everyone in the room understood what no one outside it fully could.
"Every single child walking through that door felt like a miracle," she said of the church where they waited to count heads.
"We were in complete disbelief. It really is a miracle that all of us made it out." Hannah Raslan is a journalist and visual storyteller based in the Middle East. Her work focuses on political and social issues, migration, and identity