The tragedy of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack includes what might have been.
For Ryan Reyes of Rialto, it’s wedding talk that will forever be just that.
Ten years ago, on the morning of Dec. 2, Reyes and Daniel Kaufman, his partner of three years, talked about tying the knot, then worrying later about the ceremony and reception.
Hours later, Kaufman, 42, died in the 13th-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history when a married couple killed 14 and wounded 22 before dying in a firefight with police.
As the attack’s 10th anniversary approaches, Reyes, now 42, thinks about Kaufman every day.
Valerie Kallis-Weber, who almost died in a conference room-turned-killing zone, has trouble walking up stairs and feels uncomfortable in crowds.
San Bernardino’s former mayor, Carey Davis, yearns for tolerance. He tried to unite a city in mourning, as did a graphic designer whose online logo went viral.
These are their stories.
‘Our usual farewell,’ then silence
To the outgoing Kaufman, the checkout aisle was no barrier to conversation.
“It would be a regular occurrence, if we were somewhere like at a grocery store, where I would have to pull him away and be like, ‘OK, Daniel, the cashier actually has a job to do,’” Reyes said. “Because that’s just who Daniel was.”
Kaufman would dress up to play characters at The Original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Irwindale. He became a 1920s-era film director at a black-and-white themed 16th birthday party for Reyes’ cousin.
As usual, Reyes dropped Kaufman off at work — he was a trainer at a coffee shop inside the Inland Regional Center — on Dec. 2.
He remembers their last conversation. “‘Hey, I won’t be able to pick you up because I’ll be in the High Desert,’ and then our usual farewell — the hug, the kiss, ‘I love you. I’ll talk to you later, text you later,’ ” Reyes said.
“And that was that.”
He was about to leave for a doctor’s appointment in Victorville when his sister called.
“She was like, ‘Doesn’t Daniel work at the IRC in San Bernardino?’”
“‘Yeah, he does. Why?’ And she (said) ‘Well, there’s something going on. You should probably turn on the news.’ ”
He did. “That’s when I started texting Daniel … to see if he was OK.”
Kaufman didn’t answer.
“I was optimistic or at least holding out hope that I would hear from him or see him, especially since I was kind of getting mixed signals about where he was at the time,” Reyes recalled.
At one point, Reyes heard that Kaufman was injured but carried out on a stretcher.
“If he had been outside, then he wouldn’t have had his wallet on him and so if he’s unconscious or unresponsive for whatever reason, they might not even know who he is.”
He learned the truth the next morning.
“My initial reaction — this actually wasn’t my first rodeo as far as losing a partner … the other one was because of health — I just looked at my mom and I was like, ‘How am I supposed to do this again?’”
“Everything was finally coming back together and I finally rebuilt my world. I was finally feeling better about everything … And then to just have that all ripped away.”
“I was just completely devastated. I still am.”
Chaos, panic and a long recovery
Kallis-Weber joined her San Bernardino County environmental health colleagues in an Inland Regional Center conference room for a holiday-themed meeting.
Shortly before 11 a.m., 28-year-old Syed Farook and 29-year-old Tashfeen Malik burst inside, wearing black tactical gear and armed with handguns and AR-15 semiautomatic rifles. Farook, a county health inspector, had abruptly left the room about 20 minutes earlier.
Kallis-Weber, who didn’t know Farook, was shot in the back and left shoulder. She recalls a “massive amount of bullets” and drifting in and out of consciousness before crawling to the doors.
She woke up in Loma Linda University Medical Center’s emergency room.
“I remember just chaos and panic,” she said. “I think they were trying to figure out who I was and I was trying to have them call my son, and they were ripping my suit off with scissors.”
Surgeons wanted to amputate her left arm.
“My son said no matter what happens, even if it’s hanging there, do not cut it off,” said Kallis-Weber, adding that doctors used a vein from inside her left thigh to do a bypass in her shoulder.
Convinced the shooters would scale the building and hunt her down, Kallis-Weber tried escaping her hospital bed. The staff put her in restraints and moved her bed next to the nurses’ station.
After 93 days, Kallis-Weber, who was 58 at the time of the shooting, went home in March. She still couldn’t walk, and estimates she’s had more than 60 surgeries.
Scalpels couldn’t fix everything, including her traumatized psyche.
One night, Kallis-Weber thought she saw a man outside with a machine gun. It turned out he was changing his truck’s wiper blades.
She always wanted to be facing doors, not having her back to them. “I had to be looking at the door and I also looked for strategies on how to escape.”
Even a trip to the Ontario Mills mall troubled her.
“To get from one exit to the other, it’s like a whole corridor,” Kallis-Weber said. “That was very unsettling for me and I wasn’t able to go there.”
Today, Kallis-Weber can barely use her left hand, and one leg is longer than the other.
“If you look at me, you probably wouldn’t see a lot of dysfunctionality. My hand does look like a stroke patient’s hand. It’s kind of curled in.”
There’s been progress. Physical therapy restored functionality to her left arm. She can walk, drive and ride a bike.
“What I cannot do is I cannot walk up steps like a normal person,” she said. “I have to take a step at a time, like a baby, one step and then your foot comes up, and then one step and your foot comes up.”
In 2020, Kallis-Weber, now 68, moved back to her native Ohio. Despite the trauma, she’s not angry about the attack.
“‘Poor me’ is nothing I’ve ever felt,” she said. “‘Why me?’ is something I never asked myself.”
“Life happens, and these are the cards that I was dealt, and for whatever reason, I have to make the best of the situation, and that’s been my mindset my whole life.”
An unexpected call
A staffer tapped Davis, San Bernardino’s mayor, on the shoulder during a transportation board meeting. He had a phone call.
Davis got up to take it.
“There was some preliminary information of so many that had been shot and there were maybe 10 or so that were dead at that time,” he said.
“It took a moment for it to have an impact on me because it was just something that I was not expecting.”
He drove to San Bernardino City Hall. From there began a long day of communication, coordination and striking the right tone.
“There was a lot of uncertainty about the safety of the community. But our goal was to try to help the city stay calm and to not go out and create more traffic” at the shooting scene, Davis said.
The mayor’s first media interview started at 3 a.m. Dec. 3.
“We had indicated that one of the things we weren’t going to talk about was gun control,” he said. “It was not a time to turn it into a political nightmare.”
The question came anyway.
“I think I was not really prepared for it,” Davis said. “I think I said something like ‘People kill people’ or something of that effect.”
Later on Dec. 3, Davis spoke for about five minutes with then-President Barack Obama, who Davis said offered “anything that he could do to help us during this tragic time.”
Despite the attack, it was business as usual for city government. The day after the attack, Davis went from interviewee to interviewer in previously scheduled meetings with city manager candidates.
That evening, a prayer vigil took place at San Bernardino’s San Manuel Stadium.
“We wanted to make sure we used (the vigil) as an opportunity to quell any potential retribution as a result of the mass shooting,” Davis said.
“We had the Catholic church, we had my church — the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — we had the Jewish community … the Islamic community was there … We gave each of them an opportunity to speak.”
After losing re-election in 2018, Davis moved to Mesa, Arizona, to be closer to family. He also took part in an academic study of mass shootings.
Farook and Malik held radical Islamic beliefs. About 15 minutes after the attack, Malik went on Facebook and pledged the couple’s allegiance to the Islamic State group’s leader. The FBI would later investigate the attack as an act of terrorism.
Looking back, Davis said the ordeal gave him “a sense of a need to make sure that we do try to conduct ourselves with more civility and that as a community and culture, I’m not sure that we always are trying to be less contentious.”
“I think that there’s a need to be respectful of others’ differences and to try to recognize that the traditions that I may hold, someone else may not hold those same traditions.”
‘We’re still standing. We’re still proud’
Graphic designer Juan Garcia-Ruiz was working from his San Bernardino home that day.
One of his three younger brothers, employed at a Wells Fargo branch not far from attack site, messaged him.
“‘Something’s going on. We’re on lockdown,’” Garcia-Ruiz, then 25, recalled his brother saying. “That’s when my ears went up and I’m like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
He turned on the TV.
“I was shaking. I was scared,” Garcia-Ruiz said. “My brothers, even though they were nowhere near at the time … one was going to Colton High School, one was in middle school … I’m just checking in on them. I’m like, ‘Are you guys good?’”
His thoughts shifted.
“How can I use my role and my voice to kind of help send my condolences to these families and this community and let them know I feel this pain that you guys are feeling?” he wondered.
He remembered the “Boston Strong” motto after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and thought of San Bernardino County’s arrowhead logo. He designed a logo featuring an all-black arrowhead with “SB Strong” in the center.
“I added no colors for the logo because we were in mourning,” he said. “It was an event that kind of sucked everything out of you and it just left you feeling black and white almost.”
“I wanted something to be bold and strong where it was a logo that was of mourning. But I still wanted to (say), ‘Hey, we’re still standing. We’re still proud.’ ”
He shared the logo on the “I Love San Bernardino” Facebook page.
“Before you know it, I’m getting likes. I’m getting comments on the posting. People are re-sharing. I eventually turned off my comments because there’s so many that were kind of just pouring in.”
He never expected the logo to go viral, but it spread on social media and appeared on bumper stickers and T-shirts. To this day, Garcia-Ruiz, now 36, hasn’t made a dime from it.
“I’m a firm believer that if you do something with good intentions, you’ll just have a positive reaction,” he said. “I did it out of the kindness of my heart.”
The path toward healing
After Kaufman’s death, Reyes talked to the media. A lot.
The interviews, he said, were “a distraction from actually having to sit and think about it … I didn’t have to think about what actually happened and what was actually going on inside of me because I’m too busy.”
He didn’t want Kaufman’s name used to justify hate — especially against Muslims.
“I was like, ‘Oh, no. We’re not doing this,’” Reyes said. “I’m going to be as vocal as I possibly can and I will rip his name right out of their mouths and do the exact opposite because that is who Daniel was.”
For the first few months, Reyes avoided processing his loss.
Once media interest waned, “and it was quiet, it was a very, very long process,” he said. “I still deal with it on a semi-regular basis, especially around his birthday, around the anniversary. That’s when it gets particularly rough … They’ve gotten better over the years.”
“This year has been a bit rough, even just from the start of the year, just because I already knew it was the milestone. Even if you don’t actively think about something like that, your body remembers.”
“So when you’re starting to be like ‘Why am I being so short with people and why am I being so cranky?’ You’re like ‘Oh yeah. That’s why.’ ”
Grief led Reyes, previously a chef, to pursue a career in massage therapy, which forces him to focus on his client and not his trauma.
“It helped with the PTSD because it was like, ‘No, even if I have that invasive thought, I really can’t deal with you right now because I have got to focus on this,’ ” he said.
“Even though we’re not healers … We are the wounded healers because a lot of us have these traumatic backgrounds. We don’t like to see people in pain. We want to ease whatever it is that they’re going through.”
Reyes still can’t bring himself to visit the IRC or San Bernardino County’s Dec. 2 memorial.
“Anytime I have business in San Bernardino, I will go out of my way to not even drive past” the IRC, he said.
Pain that never goes away
While not condoning their actions, Reyes said he understands how the shooters became radicalized.
“I know what it’s like to be the outcast and I know what it’s like to want to find that sense of community and that sense of welcoming,” he said. “That’s what they ended up finding, even though I think it was the wrong path.”
He thinks San Bernardino County could have done more to prevent the attack.
“What makes me the angriest is the IRC is not a county building,” Reyes said. “The county was renting that space. And Daniel was the only person (killed) that did not work for the county. So if anybody was not a target, it was Daniel.”
“That is where I still hold a lot of anger and resentment. And to this day, even seeing something like a county building or a county vehicle, that kind of triggers a little something.”
He has advice for those grieving a loved one.
“Find anything, any little thing that brings you comfort, no matter what that is, and do that,” Reyes said. “Focus on that.”
“Obviously, it’s going to hurt. Some days are going to hurt more than others. That pain is never going to go away. I have thought about Daniel every single day for the last 10 years … Know that the hurting aspect of it does eventually fade away, so it’s not as intense. It’s not all the time.”