A 19 year old gunman opened fire with an assault rifle at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, Calif., this morning, leaving one dead and three injured.
Poway Mayor Steve Vaus and San Diego County Sheriff William D. Gore confirmed this afternoon four people were taken by first responders to Palomar Medical Center with gunshot injuries at around noon.
One of the victims, an adult female, “succumbed to their wounds,” Vaus said.
Three others remain in the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries — one female child and two adult males.
All three were in stable condition.
“I can only tell you that we have a fatality,” Vaus told MSNBC, “and I can also tell you that it was a hate crime, and that will not stand.”
Among the injured was Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, whose hand was wounded.
John Earnest, the 19-year-old man arrested, published a manifesto on a far-right message board prior to the attack.
“My name is John Earnest and I am a man of European ancestry. The blood that runs in my veins is the same that ran through the English, Nordic, and Irish men of old. I am a descendant of one of the original colonists of Roanoke—John Earnest” the manifesto begins.
“I don’t care concerning the debt-based foreign money that Jews prefer to fake is cash. I don’t take care of the bread and circus that Jewry has used to aim to pacify my individuals. I willingly sacrifice my future—the way forward for having a satisfying job, a loving spouse, and wonderful youngsters. I sacrifice this for the sake of my individuals. OUR individuals. I might die a thousand occasions over to stop the doomed destiny that the Jews have deliberate for my race.”
Earnest claims he set a fire at an Escondido mosque within the weeks after the Christchurch capturing. In his manifesto, Earnest wrote, “I scorched a mosque in Escondido with gasoline per week after Brenton Tarrant’s sacrifice and so they by no means discovered shit on me (I didn’t notice sandn*ggers have been sleeping inside although—they awoke and put out the hearth just about instantly after I drove away which was unlucky. Additionally they didn’t report the message I spray-painted on the car parking zone. I wrote ‘For Brenton Tarrant -t. /pol/’).
Earnest makes use of a number of anti-Semitic tropes and themes in his manifesto, together with references to the supposed Jewish management of the media and monetary establishments.
He additionally references “cultural Marxism,” a favorite theme of the alt-right.
He denied being a supporter of Donald Trump, and blamed conservatives for being “too weak.”
The mass shooting at the Chabad of Poway Synagogue came on the last day of Passover and exactly six months after the Tree of Life shooting that left 11 people dead.
The reports of a mass shooting at the Chabad of Poway Synagogue is just the latest in a string of lockdowns, bomb threats, active shootings and mass shootings that have plagued the United States of America in recent year.
Minoo Anvari, a member of the congregation, told CNN that “[Goldstein] did not leave his congregation until he was finished speaking to them — calming their fears and pledging resilience.”
Anvari, whose husband was inside when the gunfire began, said, “Everybody was crying and screaming.”
The Chabad hosts a weekly Kiddush luncheon followed the Shabbat morning services. On Saturday, the synagogue was also holding a Passover celebration, according to 10News, which was scheduled to end at 7 p.m. with a final holiday meal.
President Trump expressed his “deepest sympathies” for the victims of the shooting, which he said “looks like a hate crime,” prior to departing for a political rally in Wisconsin.