NC teen charged for role in San Diego mosque shooting

A 17-year-old North Carolina girl who recorded a livestream of a shooting that killed three people at a San Diego mosque and disseminated the attackers’ white-supremacist writings has been charged with murder by aiding and abetting, a district attorney said Monday.

Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill said at a news conference in Winston-Salem that the girl was arrested last week. On Monday, just before Sarah Santiago was due to begin the school year, a grand jury indicted her on three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy.

Santiago planned and coordinated before the mosque attack with the two shooters, prosecutors said.

Santiago also bought and sent one of the men a Sonnenrad patch, a symbol used by the Nazis, which the shooter then wore during the attacks.

After the mosque, prosecutors said that the shooters planned to kill worshippers at a Jewish temple then Black students at a public high school.

Under North Carolina law, the aiding-and-abetting charges carry the same penalties as if the girl had committed the attack herself, O’Neill said.

“The individual here, locally, was the person who was recording the livestream,” O’Neill said. “She disseminated that information and she published their manifesto.”

Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18, stormed the Islamic Center on May 18 before being driven back outside by a security guard who exchanged gunfire with them as he initiated a lockdown, helping to protect 140 children who were just steps away.

The pair killed the guard, Amin Abdullah, and two other men before taking their own lives in a vehicle nearby. They left behind rambling writings full of vitriol against a wide range of people, and citing the shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, as one of their models for the violence.