San Diego – The mother of one of the attackers made repeated phone calls two hours before Monday’s deadly attack on the San Diego Islamic Center, as understaffed police struggled with authorities to assess the severity of the threat and find the gunman.
The mother of 17-year-old Cain Lee Clark first called police at 9:42 a.m., nearly two hours before the first reports of an active shooter at the center. According to sources with access to the call logs, the police did not reach his home to talk to him until 11:10 am.
Meanwhile, the mother had called at least twice more with concern, sources said. More than an hour after the initial call, those calls were enough for police to escalate the incident.
It’s not clear what the mother told police during the first call, but police officials have said it came down to “runaway juvenile” and was classified as “Priority 2,” one of the two law enforcement sources said.
Several law enforcement officials said that the wait time between the mother’s first call and when an officer was dispatched was comparable to a similarly classified call.
According to data recently released by the city in a public records request, the average response time for the department for Priority 2 was more than two hours as recently as March. The San Diego Police Department has been struggling with staffing shortages, which emerged as an issue amid budget talks earlier this month.
Flowers were displayed at the security office of the Islamic Center of San Diego, a day after three people, including security guard Amin Abdullah, were killed in a shooting at a San Diego mosque on Tuesday.
(Cristian Carrion/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)
The mother provided more information about her son in subsequent calls, prompting police to take the case to Priority 1 call, sources said.
Sources said that at 10:54 a.m. a terrorism liaison officer was brought into the case, leading to a race to find Clark. When the call was upgraded, a patrol car with two officers was dispatched to the mother’s home. Sources said they arrived at 11:10 am.
By that time, officials at Clark’s school had been alerted and were scanning data from license plate readers for any signs of a stolen car, one of the law enforcement sources said. Police got two hits for license plates – both before the shooting, one of which was at the Fashion Valley Mall, about six miles from Clark’s home. Sources said the car was no longer there when an officer arrived.
According to a recording of San Diego police dispatch audio reviewed by The Times, dispatchers asked officers in the area to be on the lookout for a “potential terrorist threat” at about 11:05 p.m. Dispatchers reported that a 17-year-old boy named Cain Clark left his parents’ house at 6:30 a.m. with another teen.
According to dispatch records, he took a shotgun and additional guns from his parents’ gunhouse. “He wrote a note on the computer saying, ‘I’ve gone too far and this is going to happen anyway,'” the dispatcher said. The recording states the teen drove off in a white BMW X1 and bared his location on his phone.
Clark was described as wearing a camo baseball cap, camo jacket, black pants and black shoes. The second suspect was reported to be wearing an army green baseball cap, camo jacket and army green camo cargo pants.
Parents of Kavod Charter School students wait to be reunited after the shooting at the Islamic Center in San Diego neighborhood on Monday.
(Casey Alfred/The San Diego Union-Tribune via Getty Images)
Police officers were questioning Clark’s mother when the first reports of shots fired at the Islamic Center came in at 11:42 a.m.
18-year-olds Clark and Caleb Liam Vazquez came to the mosque with a plan to commit mass murder. They were briefly chased away by a security guard, who along with two other victims in the parking lot, informed the center and police about the attack and saved their lives. The attackers were later found dead with self-inflicted wounds.
San Diego police declined to add details to the timeline and said investigators were still sorting it out.
“With such an intense investigation, we want to make sure the information shared remains reliable. We are working on our next update, which you can expect in the coming days. Thank you for your patience and understanding,” the department said in a statement to The Times. “As you can imagine, there are a lot of details we are still working out.”
It is unclear whether staffing issues played any role in the response to the case. But the issue of police staffing and response times has been a point of debate in the city.
Jared Wilson, president of the San Diego Police Officers Association, said in an email statement to The Times that his organization has been raising concerns about staffing shortages, overtime and reductions in response times.
Wilson declined to discuss specific details about staffing or Monday’s attack. He referred questions to a San Diego Police Department spokesperson about the incident and staffing.
“Our patrol staffing levels are at historically low levels, causing response times to reach an all-time high,” Wilson said. “It is not unusual for staffing levels to be 50% or worse, under long-established minimum levels. In addition to the detrimental effects of higher response times to the community, our officers are being placed in dangerous situations with reduced backup and are becoming exhausted.”
Wilson said the department currently has 200 vacant positions, plus an additional 100 officers who are in training, or in the academy, and unavailable for service.
A San Diego police officer stands as part of a larger security presence at a vigil for victims and families of the shooting at the Islamic Center in San Diego, California, May 19, 2026, a day after the attack.
(Zoe Meyers/AFP via Getty Images)
Police department officials have acknowledged that it is often below recommended staffing levels due to personnel shortages that have affected larger agencies across the country. Both sources said the department’s Northern Division – where the mass shooting occurred – had seven officers assigned to work in that area at the time, which was below the department’s minimum staffing standard level of 14 officers in that division. Once the incident was elevated to Priority 1, other officers also became involved.
In the 2027 draft budget released by the city this month, the police department’s top two priorities were recruiting and retaining staff and improving response times.
But the city has been facing budget shortfalls for years, which has led to cuts in police department spending. San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said the fiscal year 2027 budget focuses on cutting management positions such as sergeants and lieutenants in an effort to “keep police on the ground.” An interview with CBS 8 San Diego this month.
Wahl said the department’s budget is short by “a couple hundred” officers. But, he said, the department is “a thousand police officers short of the number needed to handle the call volume that we have.”
Over the past few days, police officials have said their understanding of the threat posed by the teenagers has evolved based on information from the mother, who did not respond to requests for comment.
Wahl noted during several press briefings that law enforcement’s understanding of the threat that was unfolding had increased “as the mother began to piece together what she had found,” but officials did not publicly discuss whether she made multiple calls to police or how long it took for officers to respond to the home.
