It’s been a little over three months since two teenage cowards stormed the Islamic Center of San Diego. And just when you think this story couldn’t get any more fucked up, along comes another headline to prove you wrong.
Cain Clark and Caleb Vazquez killed three men that day, including security guard Amin Abdullah, who managed to trigger a lockdown and drive the shooters back outside before he died protecting roughly one hundred and forty kids who were just steps away in the attached school. Nadir Awad and Mansour Kaziha were also murdered while the attack unfolded. Both gunmen were later found dead in a vehicle nearby, having taken the coward’s way out rather than face what they had done.
Everything that came out afterward painted a picture of two kids who had built their entire identities out of other people’s massacres. Investigators say Clark and Vazquez met through a gore forum connected to the so-called True Crime Community, a subculture that treats mass shooters like trading-card collectibles and turns manifestos into fan fiction.
Their own writings cited the Christchurch shooter as inspiration and were loaded with neo-Nazi ideology, “great replacement” nonsense, and hatred aimed at just about every group imaginable. We later learned they had also planned follow-up attacks on a Jewish temple and a predominantly Black high school, which tells you this was never just about one mosque. This was a kid-tested, TCC-approved kill list with San Diego as merely the opening act.
Now a third suspect has entered the story, and she was never anywhere near San Diego when the shooting happened. 17-year-old Sarah Lindsey Santiago, a student in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County school system in North Carolina, has been indicted on three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy.
According to Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, Santiago agreed in advance to record the shooters’ livestream, distribute it afterward, and publish their manifesto once the killing was done. She also allegedly bought a Sonnenrad patch, a neo-Nazi symbol, and mailed it to Vazquez so he could wear it during the attack. Investigators say she communicated with the pair over Signal beforehand and was one of only three people who watched the livestream as it happened.
If that does not sound like standard school shooter fandom behavior to you, then you have not been paying attention to what I have described in this space for years now. The TCC is not just people passively consuming gore content anymore. Some of them are apparently active participants who help plan the production.
Santiago allegedly did not stumble onto this attack after the fact. She reportedly signed up ahead of time to be the camera operator and the distribution network for somebody else’s massacre, which makes her the first case I have covered where an alleged TCC member’s job was literally to make sure the footage got out.
Santiago absolutely deserves to be prosecuted for something. If she knew in advance that Clark and Vazquez intended to walk into a mosque and start killing people, and she said nothing to anyone who could have stopped it, that is a real and serious crime on its own. Failure to report planned violence when you have credible knowledge of it should carry consequences, and FBI Special Agent Reid Davis was not wrong when he said staying silent in that situation can itself be criminal. But murder? Three counts of first-degree murder for a girl who was three thousand miles away in North Carolina and never touched a weapon?
North Carolina law technically allows this under G.S. 14-5.2, which abolished the old distinction between an accessory before the fact and a principal back in 1981. Once that distinction disappeared, anyone who helps plan a felony beforehand gets treated exactly the same as the person who pulled the trigger.
I get the legal mechanics. What I do not get is the strategy behind stretching those mechanics this far for a teenager whose alleged role was recording and uploading, not shooting anybody.
O’Neill has framed this prosecution as a message, essentially telling the next round of would-be TCC contributors that helping produce a massacre carries the same weight as committing one. I understand the impulse. I even sympathize with wanting to close the loophole where somebody can help engineer a mass shooting from a safe distance and walk away with a slap on the wrist.
Deterrence just does not work the way O’Neill seems to think it does here, because you cannot threaten prison time to people who never expected to see the inside of a cell in the first place. Clark and Vazquez planned to die that day. Every kid marinating in this same nihilist ideology online right now is operating under the same assumption, which means dangling a murder charge in front of the next Santiago accomplishes roughly nothing as a deterrent.
You cannot scare someone out of a plan that already assumes their own death as the ending.
What this looks a lot more like is a prosecutor trying to generate headlines out of a genuinely disturbing case rather than someone building the most legally sound charge available. Three counts of first-degree murder against a girl who allegedly filmed and uploaded a livestream is the kind of charge that gets cable news attention and grand jury indictments filed with dramatic timing right before the school year starts.
A conspiracy charge tied to material support, or something built around failure to report combined with providing material assistance, would probably have been just as prosecutable and a lot less likely to collapse under appeal. Instead, we get murder charges that may end up getting knocked down or thrown out entirely, which would be its own kind of message, just not the one O’Neill intended to send.
Meanwhile, buried underneath all of this legal theater, nobody in any of these reports has bothered to ask the one question that actually might prevent the next attack. Two teenagers assembled an arsenal, including weapons that were reportedly Clark’s own, and used them to storm a mosque full of children. That detail keeps getting treated like scenery instead of the actual headline.
Prosecutors are perfectly happy building elaborate murder cases against a girl who never left her home state, yet nobody seems interested in asking how Clark ended up with enough firepower to stage an attack after his accomplice’s own family had already pulled every string they could to disarm their son. If Forsyth County wants to talk about deterrence, maybe start with the part of this story that involves actual bullets instead of the part involving a livestream.
(Sources)
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