The San Diego Islamic Center is typically a bustling crossroads, with kids in school, the faithful coming to pray and others simply taking part in cultural activity.

But these days, the site is busy for another, much darker reason. The community is mourning. An ever-growing pile of bouquets of lilies, daisies and sunflowers and notes sits at the base of a large palm tree outside the mosque gates.

The entrance to the center remains cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. No children are filing in to attend school. Now the parents approach slowly — with tears in their eyes — to pick up their children’s belongings and share their grief.

The center — its minaret visible for miles — draws congregants from across the globe. Many who worship at the mosque have immigrated to America from Gaza and other places besieged by violence. The expansive white building with its blue tiled roof has been the backdrop for daily connections to God, countless Eid celebrations and events that welcomed interfaith communities.

For them, the mosque represented the best America has to offer: peace, a sense of community and love.

That sense of security was shattered Monday, when three people — a security guard, a longtime mosque employee and the husband of a teacher — were slain as they tried to prevent two teenage shooters from killing others, including dozens of children hiding in classrooms.

Many congregants are still in a state of denial that the center — a place where they felt so safe — so quickly became the scene of violence and tragedy. There’s also a simmering anger over anti-Muslim hate that has been embraced — and perpetuated — by some of the highest-ranking elected officials in the country.

“We are aware of what’s happening around the world, around the nation, the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment, the rise of anti-every type of minority sentiment, but we never expected such things to happen,” Imam Taha Hassane told The Times.

Tamer Bar, 39, prays at the mosque at least two times a day. His family back in Gaza faces violence on a daily basis, and he said the mosque offers respite from news of the painful destruction of his homeland.

“When we pray at the mosque we leave everything behind and we go to face God,” he said. “It’s a place of peace.”

Omar Abusham, 23, has been going to the Islamic Center of San Diego since he was 3. His childhood memories, in many ways, revolve around the mosque.

“Our mosque is not just only a place for prayer. We have activities, we have youth groups, we have a school. It was much more than just a mosque or a religious site. If you wanted to spend some time with your friends, you would come to the mosque. So to see this happen it’s devastating,” he said.

He attended Arabic school on Saturdays at the center. His family and friends gathered there for Eid al-Fitr. Now he works across the street from the mosque as the programs and outreach coordinator at the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

He goes to the mosque twice a day to pray. But his favorite times there were the events that brought the community together regardless of faith — a gathering for Palestine or an event for Sudan.

Going back will be painful, he said, but he knows the community will endure.

“I think this is a story we’ll tell our kids, and it’s something that we can’t ignore,” he said.

Tensions were also high at a news conference with San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria on Monday. A woman heckled the mayor just as he was about to speak and accused city leadership of ignoring concerns of Muslim and Palestinian communities. “Our Muslim brothers and sisters have been talking to you, for how long?” she shouted. “You have to f— listen to them.”

Raqib Hameed Naik, the executive director of the Washington-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a nonprofit that tracks online extremism, said anti-Muslim sentiment has reached a fever pitch in roughly the last year and has been pushed by more than 80 Republican elected officials online who have “used their platforms to promote dangerous narratives” and helped bolster coordinated campaigns by right-wing social media influencers propagating conspiracy theories.

“There’s this broader climate of hate targeting Muslims,” Naik said. “This shooting in San Diego is a clear manifestation of that.”

An online smear campaign last month engulfed another Southern California mosque.

In a post on X, a social media influencer who frequently spreads anti-Muslim conspiracy theories claimed that plans by the Islamic Society of Orange County to expand would create a “parallel” society and “Sharia enclave” where U.S. laws do not apply, in service of the “Islamization” of Orange County.

Mosque leaders said the brazen online screed had led to a surge of hateful rhetoric and threats of violence against the facility and its congregants. In response, the Garden Grove Police Department increased patrols in the area.

“We are seeing a pattern,” said Deana Helmy, the chair of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California, of the incident last month and of the community’s fear in the aftermath of the San Diego shooting.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations received 8,683 civil rights complaints in 2025, the highest number of complaints in a single year since it began tracking such data in 1996. Of those complaints, 198 were considered hate crimes, according to its most recent report.

The Islamic Center of San Diego and its congregants have been the target of threats and hate in the past. The center increased its security and began arming its security after the mosque attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Abdullah, the armed security guard who was killed, had encouraged women to learn self-defense, particularly those who wore hijabs, who were more vulnerable to violence because they are visibly Muslim, said Ismahan Abdullahi, a local Muslim leader and activist who is currently the executive director at the Faith Power Alliance.

He offered training for volunteers at other nearby mosques that might not have the funds to hire guards.

Abdullah took his job so seriously, Abdullahi said, that he would stand in the hot sun constantly peering around and at times skipping meals. He would never sit, so as to always be at the ready, she said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him sit in all these years,” she said.

Vandals have targeted the mosque. People have thrown eggs and hurled curses and epithets as they drove past the center. It happens more during election time, Hassane said, “when some politicians want to score cheap political points.”

The mosque and those who attend have come to expect such rhetoric, but it hasn’t deterred those who worship there.

“This mosque for my community members is a second home,” Hassane said, pausing to hold back tears.

“This is a place where my community members, when they want to worship, when they want to meditate, when they want to celebrate, when they want to learn, when they want to enjoy their time, they come here,” he said.

Misbah Rashad, 30, an epidemiologist who attends the mosque daily, said it has been jarring to see a place so core to her and to her community on the news.

“Seeing footage, I think, ‘I walk down this sidewalk, I know that front door.’ These are all images familiar to me. That’s what makes it real,” Rashad said. “I am just hoping there are ways, inshallah, to prevent something like this from ever happening again.”

Suzan Hamideh is trying to come to terms with what unfolded at the mosque she’s been visiting for three decades. Years ago, her children attended Saturday school at the mosque, buying snacks from Mansour Kaziha, who ran the market inside the center. Kaziha was also killed in the shooting.

Right now, she said, she’s angry — at the loss of life, the fact that children will live with this trauma for the rest of their lives and the rampant misunderstanding of the Muslim religion that she suspects led to the violence.

“It’s just so sad that every time an Islamic organization or Islamic house of worship or Islamic school is targeted, we get the news that the shooters are mentally ill,” she said, adding that when other groups are targeted authorities call it terrorism.

“I am so sorry, but we are so done with these excuses,” she said.

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