San Bernardino desert town stunned by mass shooting
Date
12/3/2015 3:05:10 AM
Los Angeles:San Bernardino is prey to regular gang violence but the California desert town has never seen carnage of the scale that left 14 dead on what had been just another Wednesday morning.
Paul George a youth center leader was around the block when the shooting erupted inside a packed conference room at the Inland Regional Center for the disabled.
"I was at the gas station and I heard gun shots. Over a dozen. The police started to pull out from everywhere locking down the perimeter."
The 28-year-old who has spent most of his life in San Bernardino was not frightened at first.
"I'm used to hearing gun shots" said George. "There's gang violence everywhere here day and night."
But this soon turned out to be violence on a different level entirely.
Wednesday's attack was the country's worst mass shooting since 2012 when 20 pupils and six adults were killed at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut by 20-year-old Adam Lanza.
It was certainly the deadliest such incident in this town -- on the desert's edge an hour east of Los Angeles -- which made headlines in 2012 for declaring itself bankrupt in the wake of the Great Recession.
"I've been with the county police for 26 years I've never seen anything like that" police spokeswoman Cindy Bachman told AFP a few hundred meters from the crime scene.
Television footage of the entrance to the Inland Center showed wounded people laid out on the sidewalk their clothes slit open on the spot to allow medics to tend to their injuries.
Some of the wounded visibly shocked were carried away on stretchers while others were transported by hand -- sometimes loaded into the back of a pick-up truck while waiting for an ambulance.
Several people lost their shoes in the panic.
AFP