A co-worker of one of the two people who killed 14 victims and injured nearly two dozen others in San Bernardino, said it sounded like a bomb went off when gunfire erupted earlier this week at their holiday party.
Patrick Baccari said he was inside the men’s restroom at the Inland Regional Center late Wednesday morning when Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik began spraying the room with bullets.
Baccari was drying his hands when a bullet ripped through the restroom’s doors.
“It seemed like an explosion,” he told KTLA in an interview Friday. “It seemed like a bomb going off.”
Baccari, who saw the impact marks, told everyone in the restroom to get down because they were being attacked.
“’Get down,’ ‘secure yourself in place,’” he recalled telling them. They then barricaded the door until help arrived.
He described his wounds as “impact” injuries. A doctor told him he had some fragments inside of him, but that they were not life-threatening.
Baccari shared a cubicle with the 28-year-old county employee who, along with his wife, committed an act that was being investigated as terrorism.
Farook and Malik, who had been married for about two years, died during a gunbattle with law enforcement several hours after the shooting rampage, according to police.
His co-worker had seemed quiet and sheltered, mostly keeping to himself and rarely speaking about his wife and their new baby, according to Baccari.
At one point, he introduced Farook to another co-worker, Juan Espinoza, who shared his interest in fixing cars. Espinoza, a father of two, was gunned down in the attack, along with the 13 other victims, all of whom Baccari knew.
“It’s really sick,” he said. “When you work in a work environment with so many people, you can’t know everyone as well as you’d like to.”
Baccari stated he did not witness any conflict between Farook and anyone else at the party that day.
“I don’t think it was that day that upset him. To do what he did took preparation,” he said.
“It’s just horrific. I believe it’s a terrorist attack.”