Musings of a Restless Mind

OK, this is bizarre, and it helps if you’re familiar with San Diego where I live. Yesterday I went to the Red Cross donation center in Kearney Mesa to donate platelets and plasma.¹ I do that because I can do it every 2 weeks, and it helps cancer patients whose platelets are depleted by chemotherapy. Also it takes nearly 3 hours altogether (2 hours on the machine, the rest in prep and recovery). Since I’m retired, I can afford the time. Normally I do this every two weeks on Thursdays, but last Thursday my hemoglobin count was too low to donate, so I made a new appointment for noon yesterday. So far, so good. I leave my home in Pacific Beach around a half-hour before my appointment because it takes between 20-30 minutes to drive straight up Balboa Ave. through the heart of Clairemont and Kearny Mesa, only about 8 miles but lots of traffic lights.

My donation went fine, and after drinking some apple juice and downing a couple of provided snacks, I headed back home around 3pm. Traffic seemed strange as I approached the 805 freeway intersection. Everybody was abandoning the middle lane (of 3) and turning either left into a shopping center or right onto the freeway. I didn’t understand until I saw several cop cars with flashing lights and yellow police tape stretched across all 6 lanes of the road. As I took the freeway entrance to go around the traffic stop, I wondered what could cause the police to block off the whole of a main thruway. I figured I’d never know because local news frequently ignores such stories where local neighborhoods are impacted.

It wasn’t until later that night that I heard reports of a shooting at a mosque in San Diego. No details were forthcoming though—until today. Apparently a couple of teenagers had shot up the big Islamic Center complex on the South side of Balboa Avenue just next to the freeway, killing 3 people and, then later, themselves. I just tried to follow what’s coming out about the incident, and the proclaimed timeline seems, uh, interesting.

• 09:42 A concerned mother calls the police telling them that her teenage son has left a suicide note and disappeared with her car and a couple of guns she owns.
• 10:00 Police initiate an urgent search for the vehicle and the teens.
• 11:44 Shots fired at the mosque.
• 11:47 Police receive reports of the shooting at the mosque
• 11:50 Officers arrive at the mosque, but apparently the shooters have driven a few blocks away and shot themselves already.

Now preliminary reports on incidents like this are almost always wrong, or, at best, incomplete, but it seems odd that the teenagers took more than two hours to drive to a mosque that was only a couple of miles away. Police also claim they had reports of the perpetrators’ car at the Fashion Valley Mall a few miles further down the road. So maybe the killers decided to take in a movie before going off to shoot up the mosque? Maybe more will come out about what they did before the shooting or maybe not.

What struck me though was the timeline. Remember I said I left my home a little after 11:30 to get to my scheduled blood donation. My route takes me right past the big Islamic Center, and, based on the announced timeline, I must have been driving by just as the shooting was happening. Maybe I was paying too much attention to the traffic? Maybe I was playing the radio too loudly? Maybe I passed through a dimensional portal that was only a few blocks long?

1 If you’re unfamiliar with the procedure, instead of taking a pint of whole blood, they pump the blood out of one arm, push it through an apherisis machine which extracts the platelets, and sometimes plasma, and return the platelet-free blood to your other arm.