Breaking: Shooting Near/Around Santa Monica College Campus

@john:

if only more people were allowed to openly carry RPGs and such this the perp might have been taken out right away even if he did have body armor

Because California’s strict gun laws were so successful in preventing him from spraying a bus with an AR-15, randomly shooting at people walking down the street, and carrying his weapons onto a college campus, right? How’d that work out for the 4 dead?

@Nan G: Yes, that’s the same story. I think it’s made national news.

Helicopters, police, and media have been here all night.

@Nan G:

If this is the same incident….STILL no name for the perp.

@plainjane31: Yes, looks to be of Lebanese descent, but this is not a case of jihadi terrorism.

LATimes:

The first signs of trouble came about 11:50 a.m., when gunshots rang out at Kansas and Yorkshire avenues, a quiet neighborhood nestled along the Santa Monica Freeway.

Jerry Cunningham-Rathner had watched her son walk out the front door of her home a few minutes earlier and rushed outside, fearing he had been shot.

Instead, looking across the street, she saw a house engulfed in flames. A man standing in front of the house was dressed all in black, with an ammunition belt around his waist and a large rifle in his hands.

“He looked like a SWAT officer,” she recalled later.

Firefighters would later find the bodies of two men inside the house. Police sources, who requested anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, said the men were Samir Zawahri, 55, the owner of the house, and one of his adult sons. A second son is suspected of being the shooter, the sources said.

Cunningham-Rathner looked on in horror as two cars approached. The man pointed his weapon at the first, a Mazda hatchback, and yelled at the driver to stop. Cunningham-Rathner said he motioned for the woman driving the second car to keep moving. When she hesitated, the man opened fire on her silver Infiniti, wounding the driver slightly.

Laura Sisk, 41, the driver in the first car, froze, she later said. She knew President Obama was in town for an event a few miles away and thought momentarily the man might be a Secret Service agent. She quickly realized that wasn’t the case.

“You’re going to drive me to Santa Monica College and let me out,” she recalled the gunman saying.

She begged him to take the car instead. “No. You’re driving,” he responded.

Before sitting next to Sisk, he fired several shots aimlessly around the neighborhood with what authorities later said was an “AR-15 style” semiautomatic rifle, according to witnesses.

Other than telling her where to turn, the man said little during the mile drive down Pico Boulevard toward the college campus, Sisk said. He was calm, she said.

Sisk said she was crying and shaking as she drove. The gunman reassured her. “He told me to calm down,” she said. “He said he’d let me go if I didn’t do anything stupid.”

Near Cloverfield and Pico boulevards, the gunman fired at the outside of a public bus from front to back, shattering the windows. Passengers threw themselves to the floor for cover, said Marta Fagerstroem, a student from Sweden, who was on the bus and studying for an exam.

A woman sitting in the back row was grazed in the head by a bullet, witnesses said.

“It happened so fast,” said Fagerstroem, her voice quavering. “You don’t expect this.”

After shooting at the bus, Sisk recalled the gunman shouting at her to “‘Go! Go! Go!’ So I drove, drove, drove.”

They continued toward the campus. At a school parking lot at 20th and Pearl streets, the shooter opened fire on two people in a Ford Explorer, police said. The driver died at the scene, and the passenger was badly wounded. Shortly after, Sisk said, the man ordered her to let him out. After he exited, she sped down the block and then got out of her car and ran.

@Nan G:

When will we learn who the killer and/or his victims were?

There’s supposed to be a statement at 10am this morning.

It’s confirmed something that my neighbor told me when I ran into him yesterday at the scene of Pearl/20th St: He told me one of the people shot was a homeless woman he often saw and helped give cans to, rummaging in the back alley garbage and recycling bins.

Being of Lebanese descent, and having moved here, his family could just as well be Christian for all we know at this point (and would religious Muslims name their sons “John” and “Chris”?).

Marcela Franco has expired, bringing John Zawahri murders up to 5. Also:

Before entering the library, he shot an unidentified woman in her 50’s just outside the entrance. She died about three hours after being transferred to UCLA Ronald Reagan-Medical Center. It doesn’t sound like the woman was a student: Santa Monica police spokesman Sgt. Richard Lewis said the woman was collecting a bag of recyclables at the time.

Apparently shot her in the head.

When I first went outside to check out what was going on at Pearl and 2oth, my neighbor saw me and approached me. He knew right then that this woman who was killed was a homeless woman who often collects cans and bottles from the garbage and recycling bins out in our back alley.

More on Zawahri

@Wordsmith:

I believe the police still haven’t officially released the name; and that’s because the family member not deceased in all of this, the mother, is on an overseas trip for one more week.

Apparently the name is known because the mother is now back in country:

Authorities did not immediately name the shooter or the two men found dead in the house because next of kin was out of the country and hadn’t been notified.

Lewis said his name was released Sunday after his mother cut her trip short and came back to the country.

Debbie Schlussel:

Over the weekend, when the name of the Santa Monica murderer of five was released, I received plenty of e-mails from readers and friends asking me about John Zawahri. He murdered five people, including his brother Chris and his father, Samir “Sam” Zawahri, and injured several others. Yes, they were Arabs. No, they were not Muslim. They were Christians, and his parents, Samir Zawahri and Randa Abdou, were immigrants from Lebanon.

She doesn’t cite where she’s gotten her info on his family’s religion.

And then she launches into this tirade since it can’t be pinned down that he is a Muslim extremist rather than just a mentally disturbed mass murderer:

What struck me is that this is the second such rampage by the kid of an Arab immigrant family in California, this year. In March, I wrote about Muslim Ali Syed of Orange County, who went on a jihadist rampage, shooting and murdering three innocent people not related to him and wounding several others. Like Zawahri, he also was a 20-something ex-student who was excused as “mentally disturbed.” Um, yeah, “mentally disturbed while Arab,” or as I call it, “the halal twinkie defense.”

Whether they are Christian or Muslim, this is the culture of the Arab Middle East. They are violent and don’t settle things peacefully and civilly. It’s “in the blood.” As I’ve frequently noted on this site, Egyptian Copts (also Christians) are extremely violent and bloody and led Muslims in pogroms against Jews in Egypt. The Copts and the Greek and Syrian Orthodox were helping HAMAS and Hezbollah. That’s their “brethren.”

And when we bring more and more of these Arab immigrants to this country, we cannot be surprised when more and more innocents are murdered by them. They bring their backward culture, backward mores, and backward way of dealing with problems to this country. And since we make no effort whatsoever to force them to civilize and absorb into American society (instead, we bend over backward because we’re “not supposed to judge”), we will have more and more of this.

~~~

That’s how it goes in Lebanon, and that’s how it goes when they come here. To ignore that or make excuses or dismiss this as bigotry is to be an idiot wearing a hat and mask of sand.

I wouldn’t go so far as to claim this is another example of cultural and values clash (not enough is known about the family background and history); but in the past, I have mentioned about how certain practices blamed on Islam can actually be blamed on cultural traditions that predate the religion.

The father Samir sounds like he was not a great husband.

I believe John and Chris were born in Los Angeles.