A neighbor of San Bernardino, California, attackers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik named Enrique Marquez is expected to be arrested, multiple outlets report; the charges are related in part to “allegations that Marquez had bought two rifles that Farook and Farook’s wife used in the December 2 mass shooting,” CNN says.
Marquez’s home was raided on Dec. 5. From the Washington Post:
Two days before his Riverside home was raided, Marquez had posted a strange, garbled message on Facebook: “I’m. Very sorry sguys. It was a pleasure.” When he didn’t show up for work the next day as a doorman at a pirate-themed neighborhood bar, his co-workers began to worry.
The co-workers feared that he may have become suicidal. In fact, he had checked himself into a mental-health facility sometime in the immediate aftermath of the Dec. 2 shooting rampage.
Marquez reportedly has told investigators that he and Farook planned a terror attack in 2012 but never went through with it. A profile of Marquez in the New York Times from Dec. 11 depicted him as something of a big talker whose deeds may not have matched the claims he often made at the bar where he worked:
“He would say stuff like: ‘There’s so much going on. There’s so many sleeper cells, so many people just waiting. When it happens, it’s going to be big. Watch,’ ” said Nick Rodriguez, a frequent patron who had known Mr. Marquez on and off for the past two years. “We took it as a joke. When you look at the kid and talk to him, no one would take him seriously about that.”
Marquez may have converted to Islam and was known to occasionally pray at local mosques. “He looked very goofy,” the manager of one mosque told the Times. “He looked like a regular kid.”
