Officials said the assailant had been taken into custody and identified him as John Earnest, a white 19-year-old man armed with an AR-15-style weapon.
The shooting, at Chabad of Poway, about 25 miles north of San Diego, came exactly six months after one of the worst attacks against the U.S. Jewish community left 11 dead in a Pittsburgh synagogue.
Local officials called the California shooting a hate crime. The gunman shouted that Jews were ruining the world as he stormed the synagogue, according to a government official familiar with the investigation.
The synagogue did not have a guard at the time, the official said, and there were about 40 to 60 people there at the time of the shooting.
An older woman died in the shooting, and a young woman and two adult men were in stable condition at a hospital. A spokesman at Palomar Medical Center confirmed that the rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein, was among those being treated.
Sheriff Bill Gore of San Diego County said that the gunman’s weapon may have malfunctioned, cutting the attack short.
San Diego police chief David Nisleit said that after the shooting, the gunman called the California Highway Patrol to report his location on Interstate 15 in Rancho Bernardo.
A police officer who was responding to the synagogue attack exited the freeway and saw the gunman in his car. The man pulled over, jumped out of his vehicle and put his hands up, Nisleit said, and the officer saw a rifle on the car’s front passenger seat.
Police are investigating a possible connection between the gunman and a manifesto that was posted before the shooting on the online message board 8chan.
The document echoes the manifesto that was posted to 8chan by the gunman in last month’s mosque slaying in Christchurch, New Zealand. The document’s author, who identified himself as John Earnest, claimed to have been inspired by the Christchurch massacre and motivated by the same white nationalist cause.
The author also claimed responsibility for a fire at a mosque in Escondido, California, last month. Police are looking into whether there is a connection between the two episodes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.