More than a year before two teens attacked a San Diego mosque, killing three, local police filed a protective order to remove dozens of firearms from one of the shooter’s homes after concerns about his behavior.
Police in Chula Vista, California, wrote in the January 2025 emergency protective order that Caleb Vazquez “was involved in suspicious behavior idolizing Nazis and mass shooters.”
They sought to remove weapons from Vazquez’s home, but his father, Marco Vazquez, would not allow officers to confirm the firearms were being stored properly, the order states. Instead, the father “respectfully” declined the request and voluntarily removed the weapons himself.
On Monday, Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego while dressed in tactical gear bearing insignia prominent in neo-Nazi circles, shooting three men before killing themselves in a car nearby, according to police.
A statement released by the Vazquez family lawyer Thursday night said the teen was radicalized in hateful spaces online. Vazquez was on the autism spectrum, according to the statement, and struggled with accepting and resenting “parts of his own identity.” That led to “his descent into radicalized ideologies and violent beliefs,” the family wrote.
Vazquez’s parents said they had taken steps to address his “mental instability.” He had multiple stints at rehabilitation centers, according to the statement.
“We will forever live with the burden of wondering whether there was more we could have done to help prevent this senseless tragedy,” the family said.
The New York Times first reported on the protective order to remove weapons from Vazquez’s home.
Police are still investigating what drove Vazquez and Carter to target the mosque. But the fact that authorities and the parents were aware of Vazquez’s previous behavior raises questions about whether the attack could have been thwarted.
His father said in a court affidavit last year that he was “well aware of the seriousness of the allegations made against my son” and that he and the child’s mother had “significantly increased” their supervision of Vazquez, including monitoring his online presence.
“We observe all his online activities, who he talks to, what he talks about, and who he is friends with,” Marco Vazquez said.
The teens grew up about 19 miles apart in two similar San Diego-area neighborhoods, and may not have had any reason to meet in real life before encountering each other online and feeding off each others’ “radicalized ideology,” investigators have said.
After the attack, investigators found a 75-page manifesto in the white BMW that the suspects used. The writings outlined the “religious and racial beliefs of how the world they envisioned should look,” Mark Remily, the FBI special agent in charge in San Diego, said in a news conference this week.
He said the manifesto espoused hate toward “a wide aspect of races and religions,” adding, “These subjects did not discriminate on who they hated.”
Police have said firearms were also present at Carter’s home. His mother called police on Monday morning, two hours before the attack, to report that her son, who she believed was suicidal, was missing along with several of her weapons and a vehicle.
After the attack, police searched three homes connected to the gunmen, recovering 30 weapons.
Officials have declined to say whether the parents or other family members are being investigated, citing the ongoing probe.
Though parents have been increasingly scrutinized in the aftermaths of shootings committed by their children, prosecutions remain both new and rare. Between the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 and the shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia 25 years later, children committed at least 195 school shootings, according to a Washington Post database that tracks gun violence on K-12 campuses. Among the cases in which the weapon’s source was identified by police, more than 80 percent were taken from the child’s home or those of relatives or friends. Yet just 11 times were the adult owners of the weapons charged with any crime because they didn’t lock them up.
Two years ago, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents of a school shooter ever to be convicted of homicide. A pair of juries found each of them guilty of involuntary manslaughter for the role their gross negligence played in their 15-year-old son’s killing of four students at Oxford High School in 2021.
That historic case set the stage for another, in Georgia, where Barrow County District Attorney Brad Smith led the prosecution of Colin Gray, who in March became the first parent of a mass shooter ever convicted of murder.
Smith said that while he knows nothing about the San Diego investigation, any prosecutor debating whether to charge a parent in one of these cases should first ask a basic question: If you removed the result — the shooting — and analyzed the parents’ behavior on its own, would you still decide that a crime had been committed?
In Gray’s case, Smith said, the answer was obvious. He had bought his troubled son a rifle as a Christmas gift in 2023 and continued to give him access to firearms despite repeatedly seeing or being warned that the teen could be a danger.
To win the murder convictions, Smith relied on a seldom-used law that requires “negligent cruelty to a child” that leads to their death. In any such case, how the guns were stored, and ultimately obtained by the shooters, will play a critical role in a prosecutor’s decision, he said. It’s much harder to pursue charges against a parent who, for example, locked their gun up in a safe than a parent who left it in a dresser drawer.
If investigators in San Diego do pursue a case, Smith noted, they could benefit from California’s robust safe-storage laws that neither Georgia nor Michigan had at the time of those respective shootings.
Tanya Sierra, a spokesperson for the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, said the investigation into Monday’s attack is ongoing.
Vazquez lived with his parents and his brother in a tile-roofed duplex in a quiet Chula Vista neighborhood dotted with palm trees. He attended High Tech High in Chula Vista, the school said this week.
A former high school wrestler, Clark was enrolled in an online school, iHigh Virtual Academy, and was on track to graduate this year, school officials have said.
Police said the two met online and believe that they shared not only a hatred of minority groups but also — as is common among teenage shooters — an idolatry of another gunman, an Australian man who killed 51 people around two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 and streamed the massacre on Facebook.
On Monday, after Carter’s mother called to report her son missing, police attempted to track him and Vazquez to a nearby mall when they got the call about the shooting at the mosque — and it was being live-streamed.
Randy Dotinga and Daniel Wu contributed to this report.
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