A San Bernardino elementary school shooting in a classroom Monday left a female teacher, an 8-year-old student, and the gunman dead in what police say was a murder-suicide. Now, more details are coming out about the shooter and his relationship to the adult victim.
According to The San Bernardino Sun, Cedric Anderson, 53, went to the main office at North Park Elementary School just before 10:30 a.m. Monday and told school officials he had to drop something off to his wife, 53-year-old Karen Elaine Smith.
Smith was in the classroom at the time with 15 special-needs students ranging from first graders to fourth. The couple had been separated for several weeks even though they were just recently married, the newspaper reported.
“Without saying anything, armed with a large caliber revolver, [he] opened fire on his wife,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan told The Sun. “She was killed in the exchange. After that exchange, the suspect turned the gun on himself and killed himself.”
KTLA-TV reported that two students sustained gunshot wounds in the murder-suicide and were transported to Loma Linda University Medical Center’s trauma center. One of the students, 8-year-old Jonathan Martinez, died shortly after arriving at the hospital.
The other student, a 9-year-old boy, was listed in stable condition, Burguan told KTLA-TV. The chief said that Anderson had a criminal history that included domestic violence, weapons, and possible drug charges, though it’s not clear if he was ever convicted.
“That’s not uncommon for a spouse to be able to gain access to a campus to meet with their spouse,” the police chief told the Los Angeles Times.
Smith’s mother, Irma Sykes, told the Times that the couple was married in January after being friends for about four years. The two lived in Smith’s home in Riverside, California, before Smith “decided to pull away.”
“She thought she had a wonderful husband, but she found out he was not wonderful at all. He had other motives. She left him and that’s where the trouble began. She broke up with him and he came out with a different personality. She decided she needed to leave him. She was going to divorce him,” she continued.
“She was a very fine person,” Sykes said of her daughter. “She was a Christian. She loved the Lord and served him, and she was a dedicated teacher.”
Anderson was a pastor, Najee Ali, a community activist in Los Angeles and executive director of Project Islamic Hope, told the Times.
“He was a deeply religious man. I met him at a few events. I know he preached on the radio a little,” he said. “There was never any signs of this kind of violence . . . on his Facebook he even criticized a man for attacking a woman.”
