- We're starting to get calls that there was
a mass shooting at the Inland Regional
Center in San Bernardino.
- The witnesses and the accounts that were
coming in were that there were men
dressed in black with AR-15s.
- Now we have two suspects, both dressed in black.
- Thought it might be a domestic terrorism.
- Go, go, go.
- They're hiding in restrooms, and they're hiding in closets.
- "I'm in a tiny room with a bunch of people.
We're freaking out."
Please pray for us."
- The shooters are on the loose.
- The suspects have fled
potentially in a dark-colored SUV.
- We don't have an eye on the shooters.
[dramatic music]
- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it.
- Freeze! - FBI.
- FBI! - Action!
- But they don't know the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down?
We save that for each other
when we're talking agent-to-agent.
♪
This is "FBI True."
[tense music]
♪
- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked gangs, crimes against children,
as well as human and drug trafficking.
Kottis was the supervisor of the FBI'S
threat response squad
overseeing the Bureau's response to terrorism
threats in New York City.
♪
- Steve, as the special agent in charge of terrorism
when San Bernardino mass shooting happened,
why don't you take me from where you were,
how you knew it, and what you were doing?
- That day was like any other day.
That morning as I was parking my car
in the parking lot at our office,
I got a call from one of my ASACs.
She says, "Hey, we're starting to get calls that there was
a mass shooting at the Inland Regional
Center in San Bernardino.
♪
- My ASAC thought it might be
a domestic terrorism situation,
because the witnesses and the accounts that were
coming in were that there were men
dressed in black with AR-15s.
- Stephen Woolery joined the Bureau in 1999.
He worked violent crime before becoming ASAC
for the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York.
He was special agent in charge of the counterterrorism
division in Los Angeles.
- I then got on the phone with my boss,
and I said, "Hey, activating our critical incident response,
"bomb squad, SWAT, the Joint Terrorism Task Force
so we can get there as quickly as we can."
And he said, "Yep, I'm on my way as well."
- Mike, where were you when you first heard of this incident,
and what's going on?
- So I'm at FBI headquarters, where I spend my day.
- Mike Kortan served as chief of the FBI's
international relations unit in the criminal
investigative division before leading
the National Press Office.
He retired as assistant director
of the FBI's Office of Public Affairs in Washington in 2018.
- And I was in between meetings.
And somebody came out of the press office and said,
"Have you seen this thing on TV?"
- Police are investigating a report of shots fired
in San Bernardino, California.
At least 20 victims as a result of this shooting.
- The phones start ringing.
It's kind of the old-fashioned way.
[phone rings]
Nobody's emailing or texting; they're calling.
They're calling into my office.
These are the networks, the cables, major newspapers.
Everybody's starting to ask questions.
- As Kortan works the phones in Washington, D.C.,
Woolery is en route to the Inland Regional Center
in San Bernardino.
But there's a problem.
[horns honking]
- The level of frustration in the LA traffic
at that moment in time, I don't have words for.
It's West LA in all of its glory.
I activated my Code 3 equipment.
- Did you put the disco strobes on and everything?
- I turned on everything.
It was almost as if everyone had
Code 3 equipment, because no one got out of the way.
- So as you're spending all this quality time
on the highway in bumper-to-bumper traffic,
what are you hearing from the office,
from your assets on the ground?
- A lot of what's happening right now,
to sum it up, it's just chaos.
All I want to do is get there.
I want to see it, I want to hear it, I want to feel it.
- Two hours after the gunfire begins,
Woolery finally makes it to the unified command center
in San Bernardino, where he starts to learn
more about the attack.
- The business of the Inland Regional Center
is to provide clinical psychological counseling,
health care-type services.
It was a Christmas party for the San Bernardino County
Health Inspection Division.
Christmas party started around 9:00 or so.
We started getting the calls of an active shooter
at that conference room.
- Initial reports were there were three shooters.
And then as we started actually talking to the witnesses,
there were two shooters.
One individual entered the north door
and fired assault rifle rounds indiscriminately at the folks
inside the conference room, and then a second shooter
came in through the south entrance.
They fired what amounts to over 100 rounds
of AR-15 .223-caliber bullets
into the conference room.
- They're shooting, and everyone's running.
They're running in the back.
They're hiding in restrooms, and they're hiding in closets.
- "I'm in a tiny room with a bunch of people.
"We're freaking out.
Please pray for us."
- She's so scared.
She kept saying, "I'm so scared right now."
- "Shooting at my work.
"People shot.
In the office waiting for cops."
[sobs]
- The Inland Regional Center--
it's a campus, so there's three main buildings.
And this campus was very busy.
There's a lot of offices there.
- And at this point, is anybody talking about, who is it?
- Yep.
- What are they saying?
- We start to get some indication of who
one of the shooters could be.
- One of the witnesses inside the conference room
told us that the mannerism and the stature of the shooter
reminded him of the colleague, Syed Rizwan Farook.
He was a health inspector.
He worked with these folks for five years.
It was also noted that Syed Farook
was at the Christmas party.
- Wow. Unbelievable.
- And other witnesses reported that the second shooter
could have been a woman.
The second shooter was of smaller stature.
Her clothing was baggier.
She was just of a smaller build.
And we later learned Farook was married to a woman
named Tashfeen Malik.
- As investigators try to figure out
who the shooters are, they have a more
pressing question to answer--
where are they?
- The main thing that we're hearing
is that the shooters are on the loose.
- Sir, we're being advised that one
suspect fled in a black SUV westbound from the location.
- We don't have an eye on the shooters.
We don't know where they are.
[sirens wailing]
- How did that feel?
- Pretty vulnerable.
Because typically when these types of mass shootings
play out, there's some martyrdom involved,
or there's a confrontation or a shootout.
It was troublesome for me.
It was troublesome for the community.
There were 14 lost souls that were killed,
then there were 22 whose bodies will never be the same.
They were wounded.
- Mike, what's happening at headquarters?
- We're working closely with counterterrorism.
We're on standby.
Is there anything we can put out that will
help advance this thing?
Are we at a point or are we not at a point
where publicizing the description of the vehicle
across the media, would that be helpful?
It's a delicate balance in terms
of what the FBI releases.
One, it's got to be accurate.
Two, it's got to be, you know, helpful to the investigation.
You don't want to do anything that could cause,
you know, the bad guys, as you said,
behave in a particular way they might not otherwise do.
- The suspects have fled potentially
in a dark-colored SUV.
We do not have any identification
on who those suspects are.
We do not know what the motive is for the shooting
at this point.
- News of the fleeing SUV sets off a flurry of calls to 911.
- 911 calls were coming in fast and furious.
But there was one caller in particular.
- This caller was so clear and determined
to share this information that he didn't have to write
down the Utah license plate.
He remembered it from his memory.
- Wow.
- And he was able to share that with us.
- Once you get the license plate, what happens?
- So an analyst takes that information
and runs it in NCIC, and the plate and the vehicle
come back to Enterprise Rental out of Utah.
And the name on the rental was Syed Rizwan Farook.
With that information, along with some of the witness
accounts and a good address,
they go to his home in Redlands.
- Two plainclothes narcotics officers get the call
and are the first ones on the scene.
- They went to the house.
And as they arrived there, they saw
the SUV with that Utah license plate leave the residence.
The narcotics detectives wave down a marked unit,
and it's that marked unit that then gets
behind the suspect vehicle.
And they were hoping to do a much more coordinated stop.
But before they could get all the marked units in place,
she's got an AR-15 rifle,
and she's just spraying marked units.
- Before they could activate their code red equipment,
"shots fired" goes out over the radio.
[sirens wailing]
Rizwan then parks the vehicle.
- Oh, [bleep].
[gunshots]
Oh my gosh!
- Tashfeen is just indiscriminately
firing the AR-15.
- Guys, they're just-- shot out my house right now,
there's cops all over the [bleep] yard.
Holy [bleep].
- Rizwan then gets out of the car
and starts firing his AR-15.
[gunshots]
- You're in the unified command post while this is going on?
- I'm hearing all this from the radio.
Then I'm on a conference call with the FBI deputy director
and all the FBI deputy director executives,
and I'm describing to them that this is a rolling gunfight.
- Copy, one suspect so far, male in black clothing.
He's still firing rounds.
- All this is playing out in the news.
By this time, there's a lot of reporters
out there, a lot of cameras.
- Got multiple officers here.
We got officers running here back eastbound
chasing now on foot.
Look at all those units here.
This is where a suspect is at.
- Marked units are responding.
There were a lot of officers that engaged in the shootout.
[gunshots, sirens]
After four minutes, after 400 rounds of gunfire,
Tashfeen is determined to be deceased
as she sat in the back of the SUV.
And then Rizwan had actually exited the SUV,
and he at first used an AR-15 as his choice of weapon.
He became incapacitated.
He then swung the AR-15 away,
and he went for his 9-millimeter.
That's when he was struck several times
and succumbed to his wounds.
[sirens wailing]
- Farook opened fire.
He was hit 26 times, his wife 15 times.
- With the shooters taken out by law enforcement,
officers on the scene search the SUV
and make a chilling discovery.
- Inside the vehicle where Tashfeen was located,
there was a remote control device.
[ominous music]
We learned from the FBI SWAT team
there was a bag that was on the table
in the conference room, the scene of the shooting.
And inside that bag, we located three pipe bombs.
♪
These three pipe bombs were connected by Christmas
tree lights, wiring.
They asked for our bomb squad to come in and render
the bag and its contents safe.
- And what are you thinking, Steve?
You're like--
- Our thought was that the reason why Rizwan and Tashfeen
were driving around San Bernardino area
was that their intent was to use
that remote control device to detonate
the pipe bombs remotely.
The theory is that a secondary attack is always
meant for first responders.
- Try to relax, everyone. Try to relax.
I'll take a bullet before you do, that's for damn sure.
Just be cool, OK?
- The folks that are coming in to triage
and to get folks out of there to save lives.
The idea is that that secondary attack is
to thwart the saving of lives.
[tense music]
- You're getting this information.
When is the building declared clear and safe
and you're going to get your first look inside?
- We went inside.
- The fire alarm was going off.
The smell of gunpowder--
it was just chaos.
30 years of being in this type of work,
I expected to see carnage.
I expected to see bodies thrown across the room just in,
you know, sort of horrific--
- Like a human pileup.
- Yeah.
Instead what I saw was-- and it was
mostly because of the water sprinklers
had rinsed away the blood.
[water spraying, alarm beeping]
Those deceased individuals, those victims that were dead--
it was as if they were sleeping.
There was no blood.
There was no signs of horror or terror.
They just looked like they were sleeping.
- Investigators searched the Farooks' apartment
looking for clues about motives
and possible accomplices.
- As you can see behind me, there is police tape.
It is evacuated.
That's because the FBI is processing
the crime scene, which is an apartment
where the suspects lived.
Throughout the day, police will be here at the scene
processing the inside of that apartment.
- At the completion of the FBI-led search
of the suspects' residence, which took about 12 hours,
we turn the ownership back to the landlord.
And as it turns out, the landlord
sort of offered tours, if you will,
to all the news organizations.
- It's your first look inside the home of the suspected
San Bernardino terrorists.
The patio doors were smashed when the FBI raided the home
on the night of the massacre.
- It got to be-- it was quite a circus.
And some, shall we say, news organizations
were very invasive in their press coverage
looking at, you know, personal mementos,
photos of the children, documents
without really knowing what they were
and exposing that to the world.
- Reporters pushed through the front door
to the two-bedroom apartment revealing their domestic
details live on TV.
- Social Security cards.
- A Quran sitting on a table.
- Bank statements showing a balance of almost $64,000.
- A burrito half-eaten.
- And to depict those kind of images
was really hurtful to many.
- As you guys are unfolding this investigation,
you find out that Farook and his wife, they have a baby.
What kind of evil mindset is willing to let
a baby become an orphan?
- These same colleagues gave him a baby shower.
- So I just want to understand this again.
This individual is attending a Christmas party
with people who care enough about them
to give them a baby shower?
- Yes.
- Syed Farook's colleagues had no idea
he was hiding a dark secret.
- Syed, though, he had demonstrated
anti-U.S. grievances,
these Islamist extremist ideology for years.
And in fact, he looked for a wife
that was as devout or more devout
than he was in his extremist ideology
that could partner with him to carry out what happened.
He traveled to Saudi Arabia.
He was introduced to Tashfeen online.
Once he married her, he brought her back
and brought her into his family.
She was so devout that she was fully covered.
And it was a week before the shooting
is when they had dinner, and she was no longer covered.
They were really meeting her for the first time.
- Wow.
- Sources tell CBS 2 the suspects
were married for two years.
Here's what we know about Farook.
He's 28 years old.
He was born in the United States,
and he worked as an environmental health
specialist with the San Bernardino
County Health Department.
He was employed with them for five years
and most recently working as a swimming pool inspector.
- The folks that worked with him knew
that he was a devout Muslim.
And we later learned that he just abhorred Christmas
parties and thought that, you know,
only infidels attend Christmas parties.
- Hmm.
- Investigators believe the couple was inspired by ISIS
to carry out the attack.
They found online statements that Malik had written a year
before the shooting, when Farook had
been required to go to a similar holiday
event with his coworkers.
- Was upset about him having to participate
in an event of that nature, and that Muslims
should not participate in what are predominantly
Christian events.
[applause]
- That's unbelievable, the loss.
- Yeah.
- Wow.
- All I could do in the shower that night was cry.
That's all I could do.
It just impacted me in a way that it
really-- you start to understand
post-traumatic stress disorder.
The San Bernardino newspaper, the front page,
they had all the pictures of the 14 individuals
that were killed on December 2nd.
I just sort of look at that, like,
14 souls were taken from us.
I laminated that front page so that I could see it every day,
and it would help me and remind me--
I'll never forget.
- How did this change that community?
- There's always this feeling when
something like this happens in a-- you know,
a small community.
There's this sense that nothing like that would happen here.
How could this happen in San Bernardino, California?
The reality is that no community, no city,
no place is immune from this type of violence.
- It was a devastating event.
The way it was projected across this country
and around the world, it brought attention
to mass shootings, it brought attention to the challenges,
I think, of keeping this country safe.
So I think it was something that--
it will always stay with us in a very, very important way.
It's why we do what we do.
[somber piano music]
♪