Shock turned to anger in the quiet suburb of Thousand Oaks on Friday after a man shot 12 dead in a bar, including at least one victim who had survived a previous attack.
The former US marine Ian Long entered a country and western bar in Thousand Oaks on Wednesday night and killed 12 people, including a sheriff’s deputy. More than two dozen were wounded.
Some of the country music fans who were dancing but found themselves caught up in the attack had previously been shot at during the attack in Las Vegas just over a year ago, and survived both. But one heartbroken mother spoke out angrily over her son’s death – he had survived the Las Vegas shooting only to die in the tragedy in Thousand Oaks.
“I don’t want prayers. I don’t want thoughts,” said Susan Orfanos, whose 27-year-old son, Telemachus Orfanos, a navy veteran, died on Wednesday night at the Borderline Bar and Grill.
“I want those bastards in Congress … They need to pass gun control so no one else has a child that doesn’t come home,” she said, raising her voice to speak through gritted teeth and tears outside her home in the California suburb 40 miles north-west of Los Angeles.
Ben Campbell’s story is typical of those who live through a mass shooting. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said, explaining to reporters at the scene of Wednesday’s massacre how he pushed his friends out a broken window before climbing out himself and running for his life.
Campbell, 19, said he was a regular at Borderline Bar & Grill. Like several other survivors, and a few of the dead, he also shares a distressingly typical connection to a mass killing that happened two years earlier.
“My brother was in Vegas,” he said. And it was his brother who rescued him on Wednesday, responding to a text and arriving just at the same time.
“It’s something you’re not supposed to go through, ever,” he said. But it keeps happening, again and again; a young woman next to him, another survivor of the Borderline shootout, lived through the Vegas shooting too.
Before leaving, Campbell hugged a couple with their own connection to repeat mass murder.
Sandy Phillips’s daughter was Jessi Phillips, one of a dozen people murdered in the 2012 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.
Phillips told reporters she was there to offer moral support, exchanging her contact information with survivors at the scene – part of a growing network of Americans with direct ties to spree killings.
Flowers and candles lie next to police tape at the scene of the deadliest crime in the history of Thousand Oaks. The sun shines, and there are far fewer news cameras, but the air has a hint of smoke – some residents have already been evacuated due to a vast approaching wildfire.
While the scene was blocked off to the public, a young woman with a pronounced limp could be seen walking away from the crime scene. She was a survivor of Wednesday night’s massacre at Borderline Bar & Grill, having injured her leg while running for her life.
“A few of them have come over there to look at the memorial, and just observe what happened,” said Miguel Gonzalez, a deputy with the Ventura county sheriff’s office. “And most of them have their cars still parked here.”
At least, Gonzalez said, the “bodies of all the victims, as well as the suspect, have been recovered”. The names of the dead will be officially released once the Ventura county medical examiner has finished conducting the autopsies.
Volunteer police with the city of Thousand Oaks manned the entrance to the scene, where agents from the FBI and ATF continued their work alongside local police and the California highway patrol. They won’t be done “anytime soon”, Gonzalez said. The adjacent 101 freeway, from which drivers could see into the bar’s dance floor, remained closed.
At nearby California Lutheran University, classes were closed for the second day, the campus a ghost town. The few students left on campus, home 24 hours to attend a vigil for the dozen people killed, worried they would have to be evacuated because of fire next.
As investigators worked to figure out why Long killed 12 and injured more than two dozen, Donald Trump on Friday did not address the issue of gun control and instead mentioned mental illness. He described the gunman as “a very sick puppy” who had “a lot of problems” as he spoke to reporters outside the White House.
Investigators have not commented on a motive for the attack or whether mental illness played a role.
But neighbors reported hearing frequent loud fights between Long and his mother, one of them in April so extreme they called police, and authorities at the time worried that Long, a 28-year-old Afghanistan war veteran, might have had post-traumatic stress disorder. They did not seek to have him treated at a mental health institution, however.
A law enforcement official said the gunman went on social media during the attack and posted about his mental state and whether people would believe he was sane. The official, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, would not give additional details on what was posted on the gunman’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
On Wednesday night, Long, dressed all in black with his hood pulled up, opened fire with a handgun at the Borderline during college night, then apparently killed himself as scores of police officers closed in.
The victims included sheriff’s sergeant Ron Helus, a 29-year veteran nearing retirement, who responded to reports of shots fired and was gunned down as he entered the bar. He and other first responders “ran toward danger”, the Ventura county sheriff, Geoff Dean, said at a vigil on Thursday evening. He called Helus a hero.
Dani Merrill, who escaped from the Borderline bar when the shooting began, had also attended the 2017 Las Vegas country music festival where a gunman in a high-rise hotel opened fire and killed 58 people. She was appalled that such bloodshed had come to her community.
At the White House, Trump touted his efforts to fund work on PTSD among veterans. He declined to engage on questions of whether America needed stricter gun control laws.
Julie Hanson, who lives nextdoor to the ranch-style home Long shared with his mother, described him as “odd” and “disrespectful” well before he left home a decade ago, got married and enlisted in the marines. She could often hear him yelling and cursing, but several months ago unusually loud banging and shouting prompted her husband to call authorities.
“I was concerned because I knew he had been in the military,” Tom Hanson said. About 18 months ago, Don and Effie MacLeod heard “an awful argument” and what he believes was a gunshot from the Longs’ property. Don MacLeod said he did not call police but avoided speaking with Long.
“I told my wife: ‘Just be polite to him. If he talks, just acknowledge him, don’t go into conversation with him’,” Don MacLeod said.
Thousand Oaks is a city of about 130,000 people about 40 miles from Los Angeles. It is frequently listed as one of the safest cities in America.
“Hope has sustained communities very much like Thousand Oaks, through the exact same triages of mass shootings,” said Andy Fox, the city’s outgoing mayor. “Tonight Thousand Oaks takes its place with those cities, who in order to move forward will rely on hope.”
The Democratic California governor-elect, Gavin Newsom, in his first public appearance since winning office on Tuesday, lamented the violence that has returned to California.
“It’s a gun culture,” he said. “You can’t go to a bar or nightclub? You can’t go to church or synagogue? It’s insane is the only way to describe it. The normalization, that’s the only way I can describe it. It’s become normalized.”The bar on Wednesday had been packed with students from many colleges in the area, including the nearby California Lutheran University.
Nick Steinwender, the student body president at Cal Lutheran, learned his friends were at the scene of when they texted him, just after it was over. “I’m still speechless,” he said.
Just hours after the tragedy, as the bar was still sealed off as a crime scene the sheriff described as “covered in blood”, Steinwender was on campus, where classes were canceled.
He said: “I think the campus is coming together really as a community right now.”
On the grass nearby, several students sat and cried, holding each other; at least one of their classmates has been confirmed killed.
“People have issues with each other all the time,” Steinwender said, “but especially at times like this, we’re just human.”