San Bernardino shooting suspects were thrown an office baby shower

(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

published 4 December 2015

Months before Syed Farook and his wife allegedly fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition on Farook's co-workers in San Bernardino, California, they threw him a baby shower.

Farook had set up a baby registry at Target for his newborn daughter, asking for the standards, like "a car seat, diapers, and safety swabs," The New York Times reports. At the shower, his co-workers at the San Bernardino Country Department of Health asked when they would be meeting his wife, Tashfeen Malik. They never expected they would meet her Wednesday, when she allegedly helped Farook kill 14 people and injure 21 more after opening fire during an all-staff meeting in a conference room at Inland Regional Center.

From the outside, Farook and Malik's coupling seemed rather ordinary. They met online on a Muslim dating site. Malik, 27, was from Pakistan and had just gotten a conditional green card. Farook, 28, was born in Illinois and raised in Southern California, and he had a degree in environmental engineering from California State University. He was a regular mosque-goer, won performance awards at work, and was generally seen as "peaceful and quiet." "He got along with everybody," one of Farook's coworkers, Chris Nwadike, told The Washington Post.