10 Years After The San Bernardino Mass Shooting That Shook The Nation: 5 Things To Know

SAN BERNARDINO, CA — For anyone connected to San Bernardino, Dec. 2, 2015 stands as an unforgettably tragic day, when a mass shooting killed 14 people and injured 22 others as they celebrated at a holiday workplace party.

Tuesday marked the 10th anniversary of the horrific day, which, for a while, bore the title of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.

"It's hard to believe it's been ten years," Mark Sandefur told ABC7. "It doesn't make for good feelings this time of year."

Sandefur's son Daniel Kaufman was one of the people who died in the attack.

For Mandy Pifer, her fiancé’s death “changed the whole trajectory of my life. Everything now is before or after ‘the event.’”

Her fiance, Shannon Johnson, was killed while shielding a 27-year-old co-worker from the gunfire with his own body.

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In the minutes after the first shots rang out at 10:59 a.m. inside a conference room at the Inland Regional Center on South Waterman Avenue, early reports of an active shooter triggered a massive emergency response across San Bernardino.

Shaun Sandoval, an officer with the San Bernardino Police Department, was among the first to arrive.

“I remember the victims reaching out, I remember people asking for help and crying,” Sandoval told the Times. “Unfortunately, even after all this time, those sounds are not forgotten.”

A decade later, victims, families and members of law enforcement present that day, are still trying to make sense of an otherwise ordinary morning that ended in unspeakable carnage.

Here are five things to know about the Dec. 2, 2015 attack:

1. The shooters were husband and wife

The attack was carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook, a San Bernardino County health inspector, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik.

Farook, who attended the party, is said to have left early and may have been "angry or something of that nature," San Bernardino Police Department Chief Jarrod Burguan told Patch at the time.

When Farook returned to the party, he and his wife "came prepared." The pair were seen clad in protective gear, wielding assault rifles.

The couple then opened fire on Farook's own co-workers, striking dozens, before escaping through a side door to a dark SUV.

2. A massive manhunt unfolded across the Inland Empire

As detectives worked to understand what had unfolded on that day, they quickly identified one of the suspects as a county health inspector who had abruptly left the gathering earlier that morning.

The discovery set off a rapidly unfolding manhunt across the Inland Empire.

With the suspects still armed and fleeing in a black SUV, officers pursued them through city streets, leading to an intense shootout in a residential neighborhood.

By late afternoon, both suspects were dead, roughly four hours after the attack.

Investigators began revealing that the couple had carried out the attack after months of preparation.

3. FBI vs Apple showdown: Investigators broke into the gunman’s iPhone

After the attack, the FBI seized Farook’s locked iPhone but could not access its data. When Apple refused to build special software to bypass encryption — citing privacy and security concerns — the dispute escalated into a national debate over surveillance and the limits of government power.

The standoff ended when investigators found a third-party vendor who helped them unlock the device without Apple’s assistance, the BBC reported at the time.

"The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers," Apple CEO Tim Cook had said in a statement to customers. "[T]his order ... has implications far beyond the legal case at hand."

Apple argued that the request violated its First Amendment rights and argued that it would set a dangerous precedent.

Still, the company said it would "continue to help law enforcement with their investigations, as we have done all along, and we will continue to increase the security of our products as the threats and attacks on our data."

4. The attack was later classified as terrorism

Just two days after the shooting, the FBI determined the couple had been radicalized and had pledged allegiance to ISIS in online postings, prompting federal authorities to classify the attack as an act of domestic terrorism.

“This is now a federal terrorism investigation, led by the FBI,” then FBI Director James Comey said in a statement on Dec. 4, 2015. “The reason for that,” Comey said, “is that the investigation so far has developed indications of radicalization by the killers and of the potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations.”

In the aftermath, investigators revealed that Farook and Malik had spent at least two years discussing jihad and martyrdom in private online messages.

They were believed to have drawn inspiration from the Islamic State’s aggressive online propaganda, which at the time included videos of a Jordanian pilot being burned alive, the beheadings of two American journalists, and graphic images of children injured in U.S. airstrikes — all aimed at urging sympathizers to carry out revenge attacks, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“That really got the FBI’s attention and galvanized them to start looking at the propaganda ISIS was putting out” Robert Pape, a professor who studies terrorism and other security threats at the University of Chicago, told the Times.

5. Trump used the shooting to call for a “Muslim ban”

Just one day after the rampage, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump stunned even some within his own party when he proposed “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

The statement drew widespread condemnation but also became a defining moment in his 2016 campaign.

“I disagreed with it completely,” said Renee Wetzel, who was 32 years old when her husband, Mike, was killed in the attack, told the Times.

Wetzel told the newspaper that she was shocked to learn that entire populations could be banned from traveling to the U.S. when the act was committed by two people who didn't come from any of the countries on the ban list. Farook himself was born and raised in the U.S.

But Trump did not relent.

"We are now at war," he said on Good Morning America.

A week after taking the oath of office in January 2017, Trump imposed that ban.