SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. – Today, a man carrying two guns walked inside a southern California fast food restaurant and shot four people who were eating lunch together. He killed two — including an 8-year-old boy — before turning the gun on himself, according to police..
The 56-year-old man arrived at the Del Taco restaurant in San Bernardino on a bike at about 1 p.m., walked over to a table and shot a man, a 29-year-old woman, her 5-year-old son and her 8-year-old son, San Bernardino police Lt. Jarrod Burguan said.
The man eating with the group was declared dead at the restaurant and the 8-year-old was declared dead at a hospital, San Bernardino Fire Department spokesman Steve Tracey said.
The woman, the 5-year-old boy and the gunman were hospitalized in critical condition, Tracey said. The names of the victims and the shooter weren’t released and the relationships of the dead man and the gunman to the victims wasn’t immediately clear.
Police said several other people were in the restaurant, but the gunman clearly walked in seeking the four victims.
Owners of nearby businesses said horrified patrons streamed out of the restaurant after the shots were fired.
“I saw some people yelling and all of a sudden I heard ‘boom, boom, boom, boom’,” Jorge Garcia, who works at a recycling trailer in the same parking lot as the restaurant, told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. “I saw two employees run out of the employee door and then I saw 8 or 10 people run out of the restaurant and across the street.”
It seems the news is crowded with more and more incidents of people apparently just randomly shooting others for no apparent reason. To me this reflects a disturbing trend that unhappy or disgruntled people are more likely to take to violence instead of talking through something or seeking counsel.
Perhaps a criminal background check on the individual would have turned up a sordid past, and perhaps there was nothing to find. Point is, in this day and age, violence is fast becoming the norm and criminal background checks are practically required for any questionable situation.
