San Bernardino school officials have revealed that due to his job as a San Bernardino County health inspector, terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook inspected eleven school sites in the county for months before he massacred 14 people and wounded 21 others last week.
Less than 24 hours before the massacre, San Bernardino City Unified School District officials discovered that Farook visited one site only two months before the shootings.
Linda Bardere, a spokeswoman for the district, told Southern California Public Radio that after the shooting occurred, district officials asked the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians for permission to use their bomb-sniffing dogs to inspect the kitchen and pool areas at Arroyo Valley High School, where Farook had inspected the areas within the last two months.
Once the area was cleared, officials examined records for other school cafeteria inspections, discovering Farook had visited ten other campuses. Bardere stated, “Because this was such an unexpected attack at the Inland Regional Center, we didn’t want to take any chances, we just wanted to make sure that our school sites were safe and they indeed are.”
San Bernardino school officials locked down all school buildings after the massacre; Dominguez Elementary School was kept locked down the longest because the shooting between police and the terrorists was close, according to Bardere.
The schools in the district were locked down last Wednesday afternoon as the shooting and its aftermath occurred; they were back in session Thursday, according to the Press Enterprise. Lockdown procedures require all gates and entrances to be secured and to remain secured; no visitors are allowed to enter, according to the San Bernardino Sun, which reported that as the massacre unfolded, the Federal Aviation Administration implemented a temporarily flight restriction over the scene to “provide a safe environment for law enforcement activities.”
