A 17-year-old North Carolina high school student was indicted on Monday on three counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy for allegedly aiding and abetting a mass shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, according to Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill. The suspect, identified in local reports as Sarah Lindsay Santiago, is accused of livestreaming the May 18 attack, distributing the shooters’ manifesto, and failing to report the planned violence to law enforcement.
Indictment and Charges in North Carolina
According to Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, a multi-agency investigation revealed that the 17-year-old girl worked directly with the two teenage gunmen to record and disseminate a livestream of the attack. Investigators stated that she also provided the attackers with the hate-filled patches they wore during the assault and published their manifesto afterward. Law enforcement arrested the teenager a week prior to the grand jury indictment because authorities “didn’t know what she was capable of,” O’Neill said during a Monday news conference.
Although the teenager was not physically present in California, prosecutors maintain she shares criminal liability under North Carolina law for aiding and abetting the crime. Due to the terrorism-related nature of the offenses, she will be tried as an adult, according to Forsyth County prosecutors.
The May 18 Attack and Prevented Targets
The shooting occurred on May 18 when two teenage gunmen, Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, opened fire in camouflage clothing at the Islamic Center of San Diego located in the Clairemont neighborhood. Three men were killed in the attack: longtime security guard Amin Abdullah, mosque caretaker Mansour Kaziha, and neighbor Nadir Awad.
Authorities stated that the death toll would likely have been higher had security and community members not slowed the shooters down. Abdullah, a father of eight, managed to shoot and injure one of the attackers before being killed, which investigators believe prevented the gunmen from entering an adjacent Islamic school where 140 students were sheltering in place. According to District Attorney O’Neill, the shooters planned subsequent attacks at the Kehilat Ariel Messianic Synagogue—located 1.5 miles away—and a local high school targeting Black students. The additional attacks were averted when Vazquez and Clark took their own lives in a car nearby.
Online Radicalization and Investigation
Federal and local law enforcement agencies stated that the North Carolina teenager and the two gunmen communicated through the encrypted messaging platform Signal, where they were radicalized within online extremist networks. FBI Special Agent in Charge Reid Davis of the Charlotte Field Office noted that the suspect had multiple opportunities to report the impending violence. “When someone has credible knowledge that a crime is going to be planned or going to be committed, particularly an act of violence, the law requires you to come forward,” Davis said, adding that “the failure to do so must have consequences.”
The joint investigation involved more than 100 interviews, the execution of over 30 search warrants, and the review of more than 4 million messages by the FBI joint terrorism task forces of Charlotte and San Diego, alongside the San Diego Police Department and the Winston-Salem Police Department.
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