The Poway Station of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said on Twitter that the shooting happened around 11:30 a.m. local time at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California, about 25 miles north of San Diego. It said that there were injuries but that no additional details were immediately available.
Derryl Acosta, a spokesman at Palomar Medical Center, said the hospital’s trauma center in Escondido, California, was expecting at least one patient and that one to four additional patients might also be on the way.
Walter Vandivort, who lives in the neighborhood of the synagogue, said he heard gunshots while he was indoors. He said he was unsure how many he heard.
He described the neighborhood as a “peaceful, middle-class” area that had never seen this kind of violence in the decades he has lived there.
“I see the Orthodox Jews walking to their synagogue and we’ve never had a problem,” he said.
In October 2018, a man shouting anti-Semitic slurs opened fire inside a Pittsburgh synagogue, killing at least 11 congregants and wounding four police officers.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.