Security guard’s ‘heroic’ actions saved others in San Diego mosque attack, officials say 5%
By Hannah Fry49% Karen Garcia60%
5/19/2026, 2:35:55 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Availability Heuristic, and Appeal to Authority, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 22.8% saturation with 137 hits. Analysis detected 1,187 faulty-reasoning hits from 601 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 19.1% and a BS Rank of 5% (20,977 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 95.80% of the article peer group.
SAN DIEGO — The Islamic Center of San Diego is mourning three people killed in Monday’s attack, including a security guard praised by police for his actions.
San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said the security guard who was inside the mosque was “able to minimize the situation to the front area of the mosque” and saved lives.
“His actions were heroic,” he said.
On Tuesday, he was identified as Amin Abdullah.
The mosque honored him in a Facebook post, calling him “a courageous man who put himself on the line of the safety of others, who even in his last moments did not stop protecting our community.”
Wahl credited Abdullah and others at the center with distracting the attackers and giving people at the center the chance to seek shelter.
Abdullah called out on his walkie talkie for the school to be locked down.
He shot one of the attackers, but he was wearing protective armor.
On Tuesday, the entrance of the Islamic Center of San Diego was blocked with police tape, and a man stood outside the black iron gate, cradling his head in his hands while he wept.
Abdullah was his friend.
“He was a good man,” the man screamed toward the entrance but at no one in particular.
He declined to provide his name.
Others echoed those feelings.
“He wanted to defend the innocent so he decided to become a security guard,” a family friend, Shaykh Uthman Ibn Farooq, told the Associated Press.
The Islamic Center of San Diego is one of the largest mosques in San Diego and attracts worshippers from across the region.
Inside are classrooms, an office, praying halls, a multipurpose room, a library, a kitchen and a grocery store where kids frequently buy snacks after school.
The man who ran the grocery store, Mansoor Kaziha, and Nadir Awad, the husband of one of the school’s teachers were also killed, according to mosque members.
Suzan Hamideh was trying to come to terms with what unfolded at the mosque she’d been visiting for decades.
Right now, she said, she’s angry — at the loss of life, by the fact that the children will live with this trauma for the rest of their lives and by what she called the rampant misunderstanding of the Muslim religion that she suspects led to the violence.
“Why should this be happening to begin with?
And then in schools and places of worship.
There is so much hatred,” she said.
“It needs to change, and it starts with educating people about Islam.
It’s a religion of love and peace.”
Hamideh said she’d heard from those inside that, as soon as the shooters entered the house of worship, the security guard radioed to the rest of the staff that there was an active shooter.
This gave teachers a chance to lock their classrooms, which house students in kindergarten through third grade, she said.
Odai Shanah, 9, was sitting inside his third-grade class at the Islamic Center of San Diego when the shooting started.
He wasn’t sure what the sound was at first.
He assumed it was a tree branch snapping in the wind and hitting the ground.
He hid in the classroom closet with the rest of his class until the SWAT team arrived, kicking down the door and instructing the students to file out with their hands up.
The students walked out past the bodies of those killed, his family said.
“We saw a bunch of bad stuff,” Odai said.
“I felt scared.
My legs were shaking.”
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