San Bernardino County Sun
SAN BERNARDINO — San Bernardino County probation officers Nathan Scarano and John Holmes were in their office the morning of Dec. 2 when the first dispatches of an active shooter came over the police radio.
The two dashed from their office, each got into his own department-issued vehicle and rushed to Inland Regional Center.
En route, Scarano contacted Holmes over the police radio.
“John, when we get out, stay on my shoulder,” he told Holmes.
The two were among the first to arrive on scene and were horrified at what they saw.
In the parking lot behind the building were a throng of victims, in shock and some bloodied from gunshot wounds. Some were taking cover behind trees, parked vehicles and even an electrical transformer box. A fire alarm buzzed.
“Immediately, people were screaming for help, yelling, ‘Get your first aid kit!’ The terror that was apparent in their eyes was like nothing I had ever seen,” said Scarano, a supervising probation officer and department veteran of 19 years. “No matter how much you train, nothing can prepare you for this.”
Holmes, Scarano’s partner that day, said, “Everyone was in kind of a haze” at the horror they encountered that day.
“This terrible thing happened a few months back, but I feel it was just 10 minutes ago. I’ve got butterflies right now,” Scarano said during a recent interview outside the Inland Regional Center, where he returned for the first time since the incident.
Scarano and Holmes were among 21 county probation officers who received medals of valor last week during a private Probation Department ceremony at Cal State San Bernardino. In addition, more than 100 probation officers and roughly 30 non-sworn Probation Department personnel received awards for their service that December day.
On the morning of Dec. 2, Syed Rizwan Farook, an environmental health specialist for the county, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, entered a conference room at Inland Regional Center and killed 14 people and wounded 22 others in a mass shooting the FBI declared the deadliest terrorist strike on U.S. soil since 9/11.
Most all the victims were Farook’s colleagues in the county’s environmental health services division, who were attending a training seminar that day in a rented conference room.
Farook, 28, and Malik, 29, of Redlands were killed in a shootout with police hours after the attack. The FBI determined the two were radicalized Muslims who had been planning a mass casualty attack.
Like the Washington D.C.-based law enforcement think tank The Police Foundation, which is preparing an after-action report on the Dec. 2 mass shooting, the San Bernardino County Probation Department is preparing one of their own, department spokeswoman Kimberly Epps said.
The report will detail what probation officers went through that day and how they worked with other first responders to gain control of a high-stress situation.
At the scene of the shooting, Scarano grabbed as many first aid kits from department vehicles as he could get his hands on, yelling for his colleagues to do the same. But he quickly realized the victims’ injuries were too severe.
“I realized my first aid kit was not going to work,” Scarano said. “There was blood everywhere.”
Probation officers Nathan Clark and Isabel Jaramillo had just arrived on scene.
“We knew exactly where to go because we had training in that same exact room a couple of months prior,” Jaramillo said.
As Jaramillo went to retrieve a first aid kit from her vehicle, she said she encountered one of the victims laying on the ground near the building entrance, bleeding profusely, unresponsive and drenched in water from the fire sprinklers that had been activated during the attack.
“I remember saying out loud, ‘Oh my God!’” Jaramillo said. “It was pure chaos.”
The officers began loading victims into their vehicles. Holmes dropped the tailgate on his pickup and began loading victims in the back, then loaded more into the cab of the truck, including Trudy Raymundo, director of the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, which was hosting the training seminar that morning.
“Eventually we ran out of room,” Holmes said. In all, Holmes loaded a dozen victims into his vehicle, four seriously wounded and eight without injuries but badly shaken up.
In an excerpt from the pending after-action report, Holmes recounts Raymundo being in shock but “dutifully trying to focus on her employees and assuage their fears.”
Raymundo declined an interview request.
As Scarano and other officers were rounding up victims and loading them into vehicles, one of the witnesses ran to them, pointed to a man hiding behind a tree near the entrance to the Inland Empire Lighthouse for the Blind across the street, and said the man could identify the shooter.
Scarano instructed two San Bernardino police officers to go talk to the man, who was the first person to identify Farook as the gunman.
Scarano loaded four female victims, all who appeared uninjured, into his Chevy Malibu, then yelled for Clark to assist.
“He said, ‘Nate, take my car and get them out of here!’ And so I did,” said Clark, a county probation officer of eight years. “As I was leaving I was thinking, ‘where am I going to take them?’”
He spotted a San Bernardino police officer, who instructed Clark to take his passengers to the San Bernardino Police Department to be interviewed.
While en route, Clark said his front seat passenger soon realized she was sitting in blood.
“When we got close, the passenger in the front seat reached down and felt her thigh and said, ‘I think I’ve been grazed,’” Clark said. He dropped the three other witnesses off at the Police Department, then took the injured woman to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton.
Clark and Jaramillo were also among the 21 probation officers who received medals of valor last week for their conduct on Dec. 2.
Meanwhile, at the Inland Regional Center, Holmes drove his dozen passengers to the Inland Empire Lighthouse for the Blind parking lot across the street. A triage area had not yet been set up yet, and medical personnel had yet to arrive.
Holmes sought safer ground, away from the center, because it was still uncertain if the shooters were still in the building.
That’s when one of Holmes’ passengers asked him if he had a gun. When Holmes said he did, the woman was relieved, Holmes said.
Then, another woman spotted a man walking through the neighboring Sepulveda Building Materials lot and started screaming hysterically, Holmes said.
“She just started screaming and saying, ‘There’s a guy over there!’” Holmes recalled. “She thought it might be one of the shooters.”
Holmes and the woman’s colleagues consoled and calmed her.
At the center, Scarano and Jaramillo proceeded toward the conference room where the shooting occurred. Scarano recalls the distinct smell of carbon wafting in the air from the gunfire, fire sprinkler water raining down on them and the victims, Christmas decorations strewn about, shot up tiles hanging from the ceiling and overturned tables and chairs.
Then they saw the carnage.
“It was pure evil,” Sacarano said.
Scarano came upon a woman who had been shot, laying on her back near the conference room entrance, nearly catatonic from shock and softly muttering, “I am going to die today. Don’t let me die.”
“I said, ‘You’re not going to die,’” Scarano said. “I turned to Izzy and said, ‘Go get your car. We’re getting her out of here.’”
The woman survived.
By that time, enough police officers, sheriff’s deputies, paramedics and other first responders had arrived to secure and evacuate the buildings and get the wounded to a triage area set up on Waterman Avenue.
Most the victims and first responders are still adjusting to the trauma and tragedy endured that day. Many of the environmental health services employees who survived remain on leave and are undergoing counseling.
The scars are permanent. Healing, or any semblance of healing, will likely be long and painful.
“You ask yourself how anybody could do this to innocent people,” Scarano said. “We’re still processing this.”
Jaramillo said that while the active shooter training she underwent benefitted her the day of the attack, she never thought she would actually find herself in such a scenario.
“It was horrible, but we did something very good that day — we saved lives,” Jaramillo said. “A lot more people could have died that day.”
Scarano has kept in touch with some of the victims he helped that fateful day, and he met four of them for lunch recently at a San Bernardino Thai restaurant.
“It was very nice just to sit back and get to know each other in a friendly environment. It was emotionally healing as well,” Scarano said.
After lunch, the four survivors posed with Scarano for a picture outside the restaurant. Scarano keeps a framed copy of that photograph in his office as a reminder of the special bond he shares with the victims, like soldiers who survive a war.
“We all shared in this experience. It sits with us and it probably always will,” he said. “I have the utmost respect for them. What they went through was unimaginable. They are the true heroes in this.”
Copyright 2016 the San Bernardino County Sun