SDPD’s new timeline shows the suspect’s plate wasn’t hot-listed until about 36 minutes before the attack
[SAN DIEGO Fri May 22, 6:00 p.m.] — News Analysis
Four days after the mass shooting that killed three people at the Islamic Center of San Diego, police put out a preliminary timeline on Friday. It fills in a lot, and it complicates some of the questions raised here earlier about the city’s license plate cameras.
For most of the morning, this didn’t look like an emergency. The 17-year-old’s mother called 911 at 9:42 to report him missing. She said he’d left on his own with a man he met online, that a gun might be gone from the house, and that nobody had forced him out the door. There was nothing in that first call about violence, so it went in as a runaway juvenile — a Priority 2. SDPD says it gets around 1,891 of those a year.
The second call is where it turned. At 10:41 the mother phoned back: more guns missing, what looked like a suicide note, hate-filled writing on her son’s computer. Ten minutes later the call was bumped to Priority 1. It wasn’t until sometime after 11:06 that the Threat Management Unit asked to have the car’s plate hot-listed in the reader system. The plate finally came up at 11:31 over in Mission Valley, and units rolled that way. Eleven minutes after that, the shooting started.
So the earlier question doesn’t go away — it just changes shape. Nobody was hunting a hot-listed car for two hours, because the plate wasn’t on the list until roughly 36 minutes before the attack. And the one hit it produced came with eleven minutes on the clock, on a car that was moving. A plate reader can tell you where a vehicle just was. It can’t put an officer in front of a shooter who’s already minutes down the road.
The department also got ahead of the other obvious question, which is staffing. SDPD admitted it’s short-handed — it’s been saying so for a while — and that whether that mattered here will be part of the review. For now its line is that the response came down to “the information officers and dispatchers had at the time.” That’s honest enough, and it also quietly moves the story toward budgets and headcount. Worth keeping an eye on.
