Tears, tales with Obama

SAN BERNARDINO, California, Dec 20, (AP): At a table inside the Indian Springs High School library, Mandy Pifer sat alone, the last name of her boyfriend killed in the San Bernardino terrorist attack printed on a label in front of her.

Nearby, relatives of the 13 other people killed sat and waited anxiously. Some clutched memorial service programs with the photos and biographies of their deceased. One held the invitation to President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration his brother-in-law had gleefully obtained.

Pifer wrote out a sign with the words, “I got you.”

When Obama and first lady Michelle Obama entered the room and made their way from one table to the next, spending about 10 minutes with each family Friday evening, the grief, sadness and frustration of the last 17 days were firmly on display.

Some shed tears. Others asked questions. Everyone got a hug.

“It just felt like they were really present in their conversation with me,” Pifer said. “They are sick and tired of doing these things, meeting our families.”

For nearly three hours, the Obamas met with relatives of the nine men and five women killed Dec. 2 when a married couple opened fire on the husband’s colleagues at a work holiday gathering in San Bernardino, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Los Angeles.

The couple, American-born Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 29, of Pakistan, pledged allegiance to a leader of the Islamic State group on Facebook, moments before the shooting, authorities said. Both were later killed in a gunfight with police.

Violence

Consoling the victims of gun violence has become a grim ritual throughout Obama’s presidency.

“My brother will never get his daughter back,” said George Velasco, whose niece, Yvette Velasco, 27, was killed. “But at least we know they are taking it very seriously.”

When Obama approached the Velasco family’s table, he told them he knew nothing he could say would ever truly comfort them, but that he was sincerely sorry for their loss, Velasco said. The victim’s father told Obama how proud he had been of her work as an inspector with the county Department of Environmental Health.

Obama told them he and his wife were parents too and that, “they cannot imagine a loss like ours.”

“I couldn’t believe that he was spending that much time with us,” Velasco said. “It was heartfelt. I could feel it. It was something he really felt and believed.”

The mood in the room was somber, though each family seemed to perk up when Obama arrived at their table. For some, it was the first time they got to meet many of the other families with a relative killed in the attack.

The meetings with Obama largely focused on grief, but a few also touched on gun violence and efforts to ban military-style assault weapons. Farook and Malik were armed with two assault rifles and two pistols, investigators have said. Karen Fagan, whose ex-husband Harry Bowman, 46, was killed, said they also spoke about ending hateful rhetoric and bigotry.

“Our hope is that good can arise from the ashes of this tragedy, but that can only happen if we resist the temptation to give into fear and hate,” Fagan said in a statement after the meeting.

When Obama reached the family of Isaac Amanios, he asked the 60-yearold health inspector’s wife about how long they had been married and about his three children about their lives. He told Amanios’ children that they were his father’s legacy.

Invitation

The family showed Obama the invitation Amanios had received to attend the president’s 2009 inauguration. Amanios had raised money for Obama’s 2008 campaign, even though the immigrant from Eritrea was still not eligible to vote, his brother-in-law, Robel Tekleab, said.

“I know it helped tonight,” Tekleab said. “I can’t speak about the future. But it certainly did a great thing tonight.”

Pifer sat at one of the last tables Obama and his wife visited. While she waited, she wrote out a sign with her boyfriend Shannon’s Johnson’s final words. Johnson’s colleague, Denise Peraza, who survived the attack, said Johnson huddled with her under a table that morning as bullets flew across the room.

He held her close and told her, “I got you.”

Peraza credits Johnson with her survival, and since then the phrase “I got you” has spread across social media. Pifer and Peraza are in the final stages of planning a foundation in Johnson’s memory.

Pifer said the Obamas promised to provide whatever support they could and Michelle Obama even said she would rap or perform at a fundraising concert for the foundation.

“I feel like they’re on my side,” she said. “They’re on our side. And that he’s going to keep working to make this better even after he’s left office. It’s personal for them.”

After finishing the meeting, Obama said speaking with the families was a reminder “of what’s good in this country.”

“As difficult as this time is for them and for the entire community, they’re also representative of the strength and the unity and the love that exists in this community and in this country,” he said.

The attack in San Bernardino, California, that left 14 people dead represented a type of extremist plot law enforcement authorities consider exceedingly difficult to detect: a conspiracy between close family members.

While investigators are still trying to piece together the details of the plot, husband and wife Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik appear to have dropped precious few clues to what they were planning.

“They’re not even below the radar. They’re stealth,” said Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer who is now a security consultant. “Basically you have a woman with zero friends, who had no contact with anyone, and a husband who was the same way. That’s a tough nut to crack.”

A small group of plotters is, by its very nature, harder to detect. The more members a terror cell has, the greater the chances someone will slip up and expose the plan to someone on the outside.

But detecting, infiltrating and thwarting small groups of terrorists is exceptionally tough when the brothers in arms are, in fact, brothers — or father and son, or husband and wife, security experts say.

Conspiracy

Family members don’t need computers or phones to communicate and can conspire around the kitchen table or in bed, beyond the reach of surveillance. Kin may be more reluctant to betray one another. And law enforcement, even if it catches wind of a conspiracy, may be powerless to insert an informant or an undercover agent into such a tight circle.

“If you have a cell that’s all related, they have either blood relations or they’re related through marriage, you’re less likely to find a weakness in that group,” said Ed Davis, who was police commissioner in Boston in 2013 when brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev bombed the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 260.

Davis has seen the same phenomenon in Boston’s underworld, where mobsters and bank robbery rings with deep personal or family ties adhere to a code of silence.

For centuries, blood, marriage and romance have bound criminals, including Old West outlaws Jesse James and his brother Frank, the Depression-era bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde, and the Mafia.

It was a pair of brothers, Said and Cherif Kouachi, who carried out the attacks in Paris in January on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

And multiple sets of brothers figured in the latest Paris attacks, among them Salah and Brahim Abdeslam. Brahim died in a suicide bombing, while Salah, who handled logistics for the attacks, is a fugitive.

The suspected mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, enrolled his brother as a fighter for the Islamic State. After Abaaoud himself was killed in a police raid, his brother threatened revenge.

Several thwarted attacks in the US have involved family members.

Two Illinois cousins pleaded guilty this month to conspiring in a pair of plots that would have had one man storming the Joliet armory and the other jetting off to fight overseas with the Islamic State.

Three brothers originally from Macedonia were among five men convicted of conspiring to kill military personnel at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 2007. A father and two sons from North Carolina pleaded guilty in 2011 to plotting jihadist attacks against the American military.

Most of the jihadist conspiracies uncovered in the US involve someone who thinks he is reaching out to an extremist group such as al-Qaida or the Islamic State but is actually dealing with someone inserted by the FBI, said Brian Michael Jenkins, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corp.

In investigating the Dec. 2 massacre in San Bernardino, the FBI said it discovered that Farook and Malik communicated online about jihad and martyrdom before Malik immigrated to the US But they did it through direct, private messages, not postings on social media, according to the FBI.

Attack

The FBI is still investigating whether they worked directly with any terror organizations. Around the time they launched the attack on Farook’s colleagues from the county health department, they declared allegiance online to the Islamic State.