Caleb Vazquez has always been the harder half of this story to write about, mostly because his family actually tried. Long before the Islamic Center of San Diego shooting happened, police conducted a welfare check after concerns that Vazquez was idolizing mass killers, and that check led to a gun violence restraining order along with the removal of more than two dozen firearms from the Vazquez home.
His parents reportedly coordinated with school officials, pursued treatment options, and even had a parent staying home from work just to keep an eye on him. None of that stopped Cain Clark, who allegedly shot Vazquez in the getaway vehicle before turning the gun on himself, meaning the kid whose own family did everything they could to disarm him still ended up murdered by his accomplice using someone else’s guns entirely.
Whenever a tragedy like this happens, the lawsuits eventually start flying, and a lot of them end up feeling more like a search for deep pockets. Video game companies get sued after school shootings on a semi-regular basis, as if Call of Duty, DOOM, or Grand Theft Auto somehow programmed a teenager to become a murderer instead of just being one more piece of media he consumed along with everything else. Those lawsuits rarely go anywhere because there is no real causal link between playing a video game and deciding to shoot up a school, and courts have generally recognized that.
Now the Vazquez family has filed its own wrongful death lawsuit, this time against the mental health organization that had been supervising Caleb before the shooting. According to the filing, the FBI warned Vazquez’s parents just four days before the attack that their son was active on the dark web and communicating with people discussing school shootings, and his mother passed that warning along to the people treating him.
The lawsuit alleges inadequate supervision, and on the surface, I understand the instinct. Somebody warned them, and three days later three people were dead. But as I’ve written before, this family already did about as much as any parent reasonably could. They got the restraining order. They pulled the guns. They stayed involved. This was voluntary supervision for an eighteen-year-old adult who was legally allowed to walk out the door whenever he wanted, and by every account, that’s exactly what he did on the morning of the shooting, with his parents searching for him and trying to file a missing persons report while the attack was already happening a few miles away.
If the Vazquez family is looking for somebody to sue, I’d point them toward the Clarks instead. It’s the Clarks whose guns were actually used in the shooting. Cain Clark is the one who allegedly executed his own accomplice once the killing was finished, using a weapon that came out of his own home rather than one the Vazquez family had already surrendered to police months earlier.
Let’s not forget just how rare a two-person school shooting actually is. Despite how normalized school shootings have become in this country, attacks carried out by two shooters working together remain genuinely uncommon.
This is only the fourth instance of a two-shooter school attack in American history. Jonesboro and Columbine are the two most infamous two-person school shootings in this country. Then there was the 2019 attack at STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado. Out of the staggering number of school shootings this country has endured, that puts multi-shooter attacks somewhere in the low single digits as a percentage of the total. Out of all of these attacks, there was the one ringleader and his lackey. And in this instance, Vazquez was obviously not the leader.
As I’ve said, school shootings are always a perfect storm of failure stacked on failure, and this case fits that pattern perfectly while also complicating it. One family did essentially everything right and still lost their son to violence he may or may not have fully understood was coming.
I’m honestly not convinced Caleb Vazquez knew that being murdered by his own accomplice was part of the plan that day, and if he didn’t, that makes his death even more senseless than it already looked.
The other family, meanwhile, left a house full of firearms accessible to a radicalized teenager who used them to kill three people and then his own partner in crime.
Blaming a voluntary mental health program for not physically restraining a legal adult misses where the actual failure sits in this story.
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