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 that the hospital’s trauma center in Escondido, California, was expecting at least one patient and that one to four additional patients might 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 had 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.
Rep. Jimmy Gomez said on Twitter: “Another tragedy in a place of worship … Another instance in America where people went to pray and find peace, only to be met with violence and bloodshed ... My heart goes out to the victims of the Chabad of Poway shooting today.”
Rep. Mike Levin said in a tweet that he was closely monitoring the situation. “We must do more to address the hate behind this attack and end the epidemic of gun violence in this country,” he wrote.
The Chabad of Poway was established in 1986. It approaches the Torah in a “modern, relevant context,” according to its website.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.