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, was the most recent in a series of high-profile acts of violence at houses of worship, including the mass shooting at a mosque in New Zealand last month and the church bombing in Sri Lanka last week. It 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 with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about it.
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. Derryl Acosta, a spokesman at Palomar Medical Center, confirmed that the rabbi, Yisroel Goldstein, was among those being treated. Goldstein had tried to speak with the gunman before he was shot in the hand, the government official said.
At a news conference Saturday, Sheriff Bill Gore of San Diego County said the gunman’s weapon may have malfunctioned, cutting the attack short.
The 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 were investigating a possible connection between the gunman and a manifesto that was posted before the shooting on the online message board 8chan.
The document, an anti-Semitic screed filled with racist slurs and white nationalist conspiracy theories, 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 were looking into whether the two episodes were connected.
The document also referred to a live video stream and linked to a Facebook page, an indication that the author may have tried to stream the shooting in real-time.
Nancy Levanoni, 80, who has been going to the synagogue for 17 years, said, “Apparently, God was looking after us because we got there a little later than normal.”
Services started at 10 a.m., and Levanoni and her husband, Menachem Levanoni, 81, the former president of the synagogue, got there closer to 11:15 a.m.
“As we were getting out of the car, we heard gunshots,” she said. “I thought maybe someone was stepping on those little plastic bubbles.”
They headed toward the synagogue, where Nancy Levanoni saw the rabbi bleeding from a finger where he appeared to have been shot. One of her closest friends was on the floor, she said.
Levanoni learned that her friend had been shot and was seriously injured. The pair had been friends for 17 years and the victim was very active in the synagogue, she said.
“She can’t do enough for people around her,” Levanoni said. “If you are sick, she brings you food. She’s a wonderful, wonderful person.”
On Saturday, for the last day of Passover, there was a special service known as Yizkor to remember deceased family members.
Walter Vandivort, who lives in the neighborhood of the Poway synagogue, said he had heard gunshots while he was indoors. He said he was unsure how many he had 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.
The community, which describes itself as “the city in the country,” is both rural and urban, a place where sports stars have made their homes but where horse trailers are parked in front of many houses.
Neighbors gathered on the sidewalks near the synagogue as officers closed major roads.
“I thought I heard shots, but I thought maybe it was a car,” a resident, Jake Padilla, said. “Then I heard it again and I heard people screaming. I started to run outside, and my wife yelled at me to call the cops instead. This kind of thing is getting too common. There’s too much hate in the country right now.”
President Donald Trump offered his sympathies from Washington, saying, “obviously — looks right now based on my last conversations — looks like a hate crime.”
“Hard to believe, hard to believe,” he continued. “With respect to the synagogue in California near San Diego. We’re doing some very heavy research. We’ll see what happens, what comes up. At this moment it looks like a hate crime. But my deepest sympathies to all of those affected. And we’ll get to the bottom of it.”
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.
As helicopters flew overhead, Judith Zimmer, a member of Chabad of Poway, stood outside nearby Poway High School, which was being used as a meeting place for synagogue-goers, and tried to call her daughters in San Diego to tell them that she was fine and had not been at the service at the time of the shooting.
“I was going to go with a friend, but she hurt her foot and I decided to stay home,” Zimmer said with tears in her eyes. “We’re a close-knit group here and Poway is a wonderful place to live, but hate happens all over San Diego. I’m sad and disappointed, but I’m not afraid.”
As people walked into the high school, they held hands, and one man was holding a teenage girl tightly, his arm wrapped around her. Most of them looked down as they went inside.
As palm trees swayed in the soft breeze under a bright blue sky, traffic was being diverted by police and drivers looked out of their windows trying to see past the yellow tape that was blocking the main thoroughfare.
“I heard what happened and had to come over and see if I could help,” said Avi Edberg, who lives in Poway but attends Temple Adat Shalom, another Poway synagogue. “My friend is still being interviewed by the police. I’m going to wait for her. I know she’s not at the hospital, so that’s a good thing, right? This is so horrible. Just horrible.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.