San Bernardino mass shooting

Dec. 2, 2015

Fourteen people were killed and 22 others were injured in a mass shooting at a training event and holiday party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. A married couple whom the FBI referred to as “homegrown violent extremists” carried out the shooting and attempted bombing. Both died in a shootout hours later with police. Nearly all the victims were county employees. Wert said.

The memorial, which has yet to be designed, will be located somewhere on the county government center’s campus, where orange trees and a small park already sit. There, on any clear afternoon, as a nearby fountain softly gurgles water, you can spot the sun dipping down behind the area’s modest downtown, casting everything in gold.

It is nearly three miles from the place where 14 people died.

“Before this happened to us, all mass shootings looked the same, the way they do to most Americans,” Wert said. “And it wasn’t until it happened to us that we realized just how vastly different they are.”

In this county, where leaders regularly prepare for wildfires and earthquakes, navigating the aftermath of mass murder has been far from routine.

“I think, no matter how long you deal with people who have been through something like this,” Wert said, “you never understand what it’s like to be in the place that they were in, to have seen the things that they saw.”

Planning the memorial, Wert said, was “part of an effort for us to communicate with them — to find out what was going on with them — so we could help.”