The young couple had left their 6-month old baby with the grandparents in their apartment in Redlands, a prosperous community east of the Los Angeles area.
They arrived aboard a rented SUV at the Inland Regional Center a few miles away from their residence. With assault-type rifles and wearing black vests, they entered the room where a celebration was going on, and sprayed bullets and suddenly, there were screams, cries of pain, moaning. It was an eternity and when it was over, 14 people lay dead and 17 injured. There was smell of gunpowder in the air in the room that was earlier filled with joy and laughter.
The man, 28, was in the room earlier and had joined in the celebration--he worked as an environmental specialist at the center-- but he left for unknown reason. Was he repelled by the merrymaking of his colleagues? What was going on in his mind as he went out the door?
Why did Syed leave? What was going on in his mind? When he came back minutes later, he was with his wife and in tandem with Tashfeen, 27, went on a shooting rampage.
What went on in the minds of the husband and wife as they pulled the triggers of their weapons of mass destruction? What were they thinking as they saw the people fell one after the other, spilling their precious blood all over the floor?
Were they mad and insane? Were their minds diseased? What triggered them to do the act that lasted probably for a few minutes? A few deadly moments that leave one in pain, sad, angry, dumbfounded.
Was the killing ideologically motivated? Psychologically driven? Was there a workplace issue? A religious dispute that had to be resolved by violence and fear?
What went on in their separate minds as they lay dying in the SUV, their young bodies riddled with bullets fired by the lawmen who engaged the wife in a firefight as he drove away in the car chase that ended in tragedy for them?
What went wrong with the young, educated, good-looking Asian couple? They were living the American dream in a wealthy neighborhood.
No Filipino casualty was reported in the carnage. The victims included an Iranian who fled his country because of religious persecution, a female Vietnamese and other nationalities that had become US citizens and embraced the American way of life. *Facts culled from California newspaper reports, radio and television broadcasts/
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