The video begins like many others that erupt into mass violence: a young man in a car, holding a gun.
Recorded in the style of a first-person shooter game, the video appears to show the perspective of one of the gunmen who killed three people Monday at the Islamic Center of San Diego as he storms the mosque, opens fire and steps over a fallen body. At the video’s end, the camera records the gunman raising a pistol to his chin, then slumping forward in a torrent of blood.
The video, which a federal law enforcement official briefed on the investigation confirmed was legitimate, offers a brutal glimpse into the latest deadly assault on an American house of worship. It remains unclear where the video was originally shared, or how many might have watched it in real time.
But in extremist corners of the internet, the footage has already been heralded as a clarion cry connecting the mass shooting at San Diego’s largest mosque to a long history of violence designed to be consumed and eternalized online.
The shooting, conducted by two teenagers who police said met on the internet, extends a pattern of bloodshed inspired by the web, where in recent years video-recorded slayings have been live-streamed onto Facebook and Twitch, reposted onto YouTube and X, and cut into memes across Reddit and 4chan.
The videos so frequently cite one another that they’ve raised fears from extremism experts that they could motivate copycats. The speed of their virality has also made it challenging to fully take them offline.
A manifesto that investigators believe was written by the two gunmen, whom police identified as Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, says the men were inspired by Brenton Tarrant, the Australian gunman in 2019 who killed 51 people around two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and streamed the massacre live on Facebook.
The Christchurch shooting was also a formative moment for Amin Abdullah, who had been so disturbed by the 2019 massacre that he had decided to become a security guard, a chaplain at the mosque told The Washington Post. Abdullah, 51, was standing watch at the Islamic Center of San Diego when he exchanged gunfire with the shooters and was killed in the attack, police said.
The parallels between the first-person videos in San Diego and Christchurch are impossible to ignore and show the danger of extremist content proliferating online, said Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the extremism-tracking group Open Measures. The San Diego video, he said, resembled a clear attempt to replicate one of the world’s deadliest mass shootings.
Extremists record acts like this “in hopes of inspiring somebody to reproduce what they’ve done,” Holt said. “They look at the insane global impact that the Christchurch shooting had and aspire to something like that. … In their world, they describe Tarrant as: He’s the one with the high score.”
The San Diego shooting video appears to have been recorded on a viewer’s phone and shows the interfaces of the messaging service Discord, though the clip could have been downloaded and shared from one platform to the next.
In the recording, users on an interface resembling Discord can be seen reacting to the scene, with a user, named “Otto,” saying they’re in “SOME MOSUQE” and “ONE OF THEM GOT SHOT IN THE ARM.” Another user responds, “Bro tell her call the cops.”
A Discord spokesperson said the company found no evidence that the stream had originated on the platform and that it would support authorities during the investigation. The company said the footage appeared to be a secondary recording that was shared on Discord after the shooting occurred.
The San Diego footage, with its “view like a video game, is intentional to hook young, digitally native audiences steeped in that aesthetic,” said Adrian Shtuni, a security consultant and associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, a think tank. “But it’s not just ideology: it’s also about ego, status and fame. They’re chasing a morbid form of immortality through viral, hard-to-remove digital footage … [and] the more it spreads through reposts and mirrors, the harder it becomes to contain.”
In far-right extremism circles online, the Christchurch video is widely shared and discussed, with some posters sharing clips and memes portraying the shooter as a saint. Tarrant, 35, is serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.
Graham Macklin, an assistant professor at the University of Oslo’s Center for Research on Extremism, wrote in 2019 that the Christchurch stream, which was recorded with a GoPro camera, had become a milestone in the “gamification of mass murder” and that the gunman “grasped intuitively that digital technology could and would amplify his murderous message.”
Though fewer than 200 people watched the Christchurch shooting live on Facebook, a group of users on the anonymous message board 8chan, where Tarrant first announced his attack, saved and reuploaded the video across the web, ensuring it would be viewed millions of times.
The horror of the shooting led to an international agreement, known as the Christchurch Call, signed by countries and tech platforms that outlined steps to help prevent the broadcasting and sharing of violent extremist content.
But the explosion of online video platforms and private video messaging, and the challenge of moderating the vast amount of footage uploaded or live-streamed every second, has nevertheless allowed killers to broadcast their shootings online, creating videos that viewers can save, cut into clips and share in perpetuity.
In 2022, a White supremacist named Payton Gendron who also said he was inspired by Tarrant, streamed himself killing 10 Black people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo — beginning the video, as Tarrant did, from his car and continuing to record through his rampage.
Lawyers for the victims’ families are suing Discord, Meta, YouTube and other tech companies they said were responsible for helping radicalize the shooter and broadcast the attack. Gendron was sentenced in 2023 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In the aftermath of the San Diego attack, some users on online platforms celebrated the shooting, with one X user writing, “Brenton Tarrant is back,” according to research from SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks online extremism. In a thread on the anonymous message board 4chan, one user wrote, “There are more of us coming. We are done.”
San Diego police investigators said Tuesday that the suspects had met online, learned they both lived in San Diego and “exchanged radicalized ideology” before planning the attack. The teens shot and killed Abdullah before running into the building, entering a few empty rooms and exiting into a parking lot, where they killed a mosque caretaker, Mansour Kaziha, 78, and the husband of a mosque teacher, Nadir Awad, 57.
The teens then drove into a neighborhood, where they shot at but did not injure a gardener, and then stopped their car, where one of the gunmen shot the other and then turned the pistol on himself.
Investigators found writings in the vehicle the suspects used “outlining religious and racial beliefs of how the world they envisioned should look,” according to Mark Remily, the FBI special agent in charge in San Diego. He said the manifesto espoused hate toward “a wide aspect of races and religions,” adding, “These subjects did not discriminate on who they hated.”
Cain was enrolled in an online school, iHigh Virtual Academy, and was on track to graduate this year, according to James Canning, a spokesman for the San Diego Unified School District. Cain had been enrolled in online classes in the district since the eighth grade, Canning said.
Vazquez attended an elementary school in the San Diego district but left in 2018 after the fifth grade, Canning said. Vazquez and Cain did not attend the same schools.
On Wednesday, plainclothes police officers canvassed house to house on the street near the mosque where the shooters ended their lives. A resident there, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, pointed to splatters of blood on the street that were still visible from where he said the gunmen had been dragged from a white BMW.
The man’s home security cameras picked up the sound of gunshots that he assumed were from the mosque, followed by more gunshots off camera and finally the car screeching to a halt in front of his house, he said.
“You can hear them arguing, a lot of f-words,” he said. Three gunshots rang out, and then silence, he said. He has turned the video over to police.
Guns and tactical gear seen in the San Diego video bear insignia prominent in neo-Nazi circles, including a symbol known as a “Sonnenrad” embraced by the Nazis before World War II and adopted by White supremacists in the decades since, Shtuni said. A pistol seen in the video is scrawled with a swastika and the phrase, “Race War Now.”
The symbols, Shtuni said, suggested the gunmen were motivated by an interest in “accelerationism,” the extremist ideology that says racist violence will help speed up the collapse of the social order and establish a pro-White ethnostate. Tarrant, Shtuni added, plays an “almost mythical role” in the far-right ecosystem and is “regarded as the tactical pioneer of modern live-streamed, manifesto-driven accelerationist terror.”
The scrawling of ideological messaging on gear and weaponry has become a hallmark of high-profile shootings. Police investigators said Tyler Robinson, the suspect in the September killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, etched phrases and drawings into rifle shell casings that referenced online jokes and a popular video game, “Helldivers 2.” The references, he said in an online chat cited in court documents, were one “big meme.”
J.M. Berger, a terrorism expert and the author of “Extremism,” said the messages are a way for shooters not just to lionize themselves but drive others to seek out what that drove them to violence in the first place.
“They want people running down rabbit holes and getting exposed to these networks, so they put a lot of material in there to lead people to seek out more information,” Berger said. “They have the belief that society has to get worse before it gets better … and that random acts of violence will advance that cause.”
Annie Gowen, Jeremy Roebuck and Daniel Wu contributed to this report.
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