An engineering student who went off on a stabbing spree Wednesday, wounding four people on the campus of U.C.-Merced before being shot and killed by police, has been identified as Faisal Mohammad.
Mohammad was a freshman student residing in Santa Clara, California. After withholding the attacker’s name for more than 24 hours, the college and the local sheriff moved quickly Thursday to frame the attack as not related to terrorism.
Sheriff Vern Warnke insisted the FBI looked into Mohammad’s background and family and found nothing to indicate terrorist ties. When asked about an ISIS tweet that praised Mohammad’s actions, Warnke said ISIS was most likely just taking advantage of the attacker’s “ethnic name” to instill terror, ABC News reported.
Police have released almost no information about what appears to be a case of a Muslim attacker who tried to kill two students, a student counselor and a construction worker Wednesday morning.
The authorities also moved quickly to scrub Mohammad’s social media sites before they released his name.
The attack occurred around 8 a.m. on the bustling college campus in the San Joaquin Valley about 120 miles south of Sacramento.
Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke confirmed the identity of the 18-year-old computer-science and engineering major who went on a stabbing rampage with a large hunting knife.
Police said they couldn’t decipher a motive but Robert Spencer, an Islam expert and author of the JihadWatch blog, said it was pretty clear to him.
“The Islamic State (ISIS) has been calling for jihad attacks by individual Muslims against individual infidels in the U.S.,” Spencer told WND. “Their claim to be the caliphate has been compelling enough for 30,000 young Muslims from around the world to travel to Iraq and Syria to join them, and for many others in Western countries to heed their calls for violence. Faisal Mohammad fits the profile of a young Muslim who would find that caliphate claim attractive and be willing to act upon ISIS’ marching orders.”
Mohammad was shot and killed by campus police as he ran from the two-story classroom building where police said his stabbing spree began.
“He had a smile on his face, he was having fun,” a construction worker who helped stop the attack told CBS 47.
‘They are laughing at us’
Attorney, columnist and talk radio host Debbie Schlussel said Americans should expect more of these attacks by Muslims because the U.S. government has no plan to eliminate or even reduce Islamic immigration.
“As I’ve warned again and again over the decades, we will see more and more of these because we did nothing to demand the stop of Islamic immigration and instead sped it up as a reward for the 9/11 mass murder of 3,000 Americans by Muslims,” Schlussel wrote. “They are laughing at us, while we ignore this and do zero to change the momentum against us.
“At this point (and well before it), you should all be thinking of how to protect yourself against these Muslim attacks on Americans, which happen now with some regularity.”
Pamela Geller, who survived an attack on a Muhammad cartoon drawing event earlier this year, said the motive should be obvious for anyone willing to cut through the political correctness of the day.
Mohammad was armed with a hunting knife 8-10 inches long when he entered a second-floor classroom as class was starting Wednesday and struggled with a male student, stabbing him.
“The knife jihad comes to America — like the knife attacks on Jews in Israel, and on hundreds of Chinese commuters by Chinese Muslims (Uighurs), secular bloggers and writers in Bangladesh, yesterday’s knife attack on tourists in Morocco,” Geller wrote at her blog, PamelaGeller.com.
“It is a new wave of terror. It is worldwide. And it is all motivated by the same thing, the single motive that the West ignores: Islamic jihad,” she added. “Smiling while stabbing.”
The U.S. has seen yet another incident of ‘individual jihad’ said Clare Lopez, vice president for research and analysis for the Center for Security Policy.
“A doctrinal obligation for all Muslims, the duty to attack infidels wherever they are becomes mandatory whenever ‘infidels’ ‘occupy’ so-called ‘Muslim lands’ anywhere in the world,” she told WND. “Both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State repeatedly have urged faithful Muslims to use whatever weapons are at hand — knives, vehicles, or items from the kitchen — to attack non-Muslims.”
Lopez also saw a possible connection with the barrage of knife attacks on Israelis in Jerusalem recently.
“Perhaps in imitation of Muslim Arabs who’ve been attacking Israelis in recent weeks, the young Mohammed was one of those who heard and obeyed the call to kill,” she said.
“As the authorities quickly removed the young Muslim’s social media pages from the Internet to obscure from public view what motivated him, it will fall to investigative reporters to seek out the influences from family, friends, imams, or his local mosque that impelled him to attempt murder,” Lopez continued.
Mohammad ‘kept to himself’
Right after the attack the dorm where Mohammad lived was evacuated and searched by the local bomb squad, reports the school newspaper, the Prodigy. One student who knew Mohammad’s room mate said the suspect was “rarely ever in the room.”
Speaking to ABC Fresno, that room mate, identified as Andrew Velasquez, said Mohammad “didn’t talk much and kept to himself.” He added, “Every time I would try and say something he would just ignore it.”
The wounded included two students along with a female student advisor and a construction worker who was part of a remodeling detail. It was this construction worker, 31-year-old Byron Price, who is being described as taking heroic action to stop further carnage. He was working in a nearby room and heard a commotion, then intervened.
Price told CBS 47, “It was a really big knife and he was swinging it down so I figured if I was on the ground and my feet were at him, he could get my legs and not my body.”
If it had not been for Price, “the first victim could have been a lot worse off, or even dead,” Warnke said. “The cops on campus, oh my gosh, praise them because they stopped a threat, but this first guy, he stopped a death.”
Price drew the suspect’s attention and was slashed around the waist during the confrontation. Price’s co-workers drove him to Mercy Medical Center where he was treated and later released.
Detectives believe Mohammad then left the building and stabbed another male student outside.
Warnke said the suspect ran out of the room after attacking the construction worker and ran down two flights of stairs to the outside.
He then found the student adviser sitting on a bench and stabbed her twice, officials said.
The suspect fled the building. He was shot and killed by pursuing campus police on a nearby foot bridge.
All the victims were conscious when paramedics reached them, Assistant Vice Chancellor Patti Waid said.
Lensy Maravilla, 19, a first-year student, said she was in a biology class on the second floor of the same building, when a female student ran in.
Maravilla said the student “was crying hysterically and came in and said that she had seen somebody get stabbed, or slashed, in the throat and she ran.”
The main road to enter the campus remained closed to outside traffic Wednesday night and classes were canceled until Friday at the university. Police were allowing students who live on campus to come and go, but anxious parents waited in their vehicles at the end of the dark roadway about a half mile from the campus entrance.
Two university police officers chased Mohammad to a bridge on the campus, where he was shot and killed. The identities of those officers have not been released. One of the officers was placed on an automatic three-day leave from the department, a standard protocol in officer-involved shootings.
One student remained hospitalized Thursday but was expected to recover and the other student was released after being treated, according to a statement from university spokeswoman Lorena Anderson.
The student adviser, a member of the U.C. Merced staff, suffered a collapsed lung and was recovering Thursday after successful surgery, she said.
The FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security are involved in the investigation.
Classes at the campus northeast of Merced were canceled Thursday. Chancellor Dorothy Leland said activities on the campus would resume Friday.
