LOS ANGELES — A gunman opened fire in a synagogue in Southern California on Saturday, the authorities said, killing one person and injuring three others during a religious service on the last day of Passover, a holiday that celebrates Jewish freedom.
Officials said the assailant had been taken into custody, and identified him as John Earnest, a white 19-year-old man armed with an A.R.-15-style weapon.
The shooting, at Chabad of Poway, about 25 miles north of San Diego, is the most recent in a series of high-profile acts of violence at houses of worship, including the mass shooting at a mosque in New Zealand last month and the church bombing in Sri Lanka last week. It came exactly six months after one of the worst attacks against the American Jewish community left 11 dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Local officials called the California shooting a hate crime. The gunman shouted that Jews were ruining the world as he stormed the synagogue, according to a government official with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about it.
The synagogue did not have a guard at the time, the official said, and there were about 40 to 60 people there at the time of the shooting. An older woman died in the shooting, and a young woman and two adult men were in stable condition at a hospital. Derryl Acosta, a spokesman at Palomar Medical Center, confirmed that the rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein, was among those being treated. Rabbi Goldstein had tried to speak with the gunman before he was shot in the hand, the government official said.
At a news conference on Saturday, Sheriff Bill Gore of San Diego County said that the gunman’s suspect gun may have malfunctioned, cutting the attack short. The San Diego police chief, David Nisleit, said that after the shooting, the gunman called the California Highway Patrol to report his location on Interstate 15 in Rancho Bernardo.
A police officer who was responding to the synagogue attack exited the freeway and saw the gunman in his car. The man pulled over, jumped out of his vehicle and put his hands up, Chief Nisleit said, and the officer saw a rifle on the front passenger seat of the car.
The police are investigating a possible connection between the gunman and a manifesto that was posted before the shooting on the online message board 8chan. The document, an anti-Semitic screed filled with racist slurs and white nationalist conspiracy theories, echoes the manifesto that was posted to 8chan by the gunman in last month’s mosque slaying in Christchurch, New Zealand. The document’s author, who identified himself as John Earnest, claimed to have been inspired by the Christchurch massacre, and motivated by the same white nationalist cause.
The author also claimed responsibility for a fire at a mosque in Escondido, Calif., last month. The police are looking into whether the two episodes were connected. They headed toward the synagogue, where Ms. Levanoni saw the rabbi bleeding from a finger, where he appeared to have been shot. One of her closest friends was on the floor, she said.
Ms. Levanoni learned that her friend had been shot and was seriously injured. The pair had been friends for 17 years and the victim was very active in the synagogue, she said. “She can’t do enough for people around her,” Ms. Levanoni said. “If you are sick, she brings you food. She’s a wonderful, wonderful person”.
On Saturday, for the last day of Passover, there was a special service known as Yizkor, to remember the dead parents of those at the synagogue. Walter Vandivort, who lives in the neighborhood of the Poway synagogue, said he had heard gunshots while he was indoors. He said he was unsure how many he had heard.
He described the neighborhood as a “peaceful, middle-class” area that had never seen this kind of violence in the decades he has lived there. “I see the Orthodox Jews walking to their synagogue and we’ve never had a problem,” he said.
The community, which describes itself as “the city in the country,” is both rural and urban, a place where sports stars have made their homes, but where horse trailers are parked in front of many houses. Neighbors gathered on the sidewalks near the synagogue as police officers taped off and closed major roads.
“I thought I heard shots, but I thought maybe it was a car,” a resident, Jake Padilla, said. “Then I heard it again and I heard people screaming. I started to run outside, and my wife yelled at me to call the cops instead. This kind of thing is getting too common. There’s too much hate in the country right now.”
President Trump offered his sympathies from Washington, saying, “obviously — looks right now based on my last conversations — looks like a hate crime”. “Hard to believe, hard to believe,” he continued. “With respect to the synagogue in California near San Diego. We’re doing some very heavy research. We’ll see what happens, what comes up. At this moment it looks like a hate crime. But my deepest sympathies to all of those affected. And we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
Representative Jimmy Gomez said on Twitter: “Another tragedy in a place of worship … Another instance in America where people went to pray and find peace, only to be met with violence and bloodshed … My heart goes out to the victims of the Chabad of Poway shooting today.”
Representative Mike Levin said in a tweet that he was closely monitoring the situation. “We must do more to address the hate behind this attack and end the epidemic of gun violence in this country,” he wrote.
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