A 17-year-old North Carolina girl has been indicted on three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy for recording and disseminating a livestream of the Islamic Center of San Diego shooting — a prosecution that equates holding a camera with pulling the trigger, and that threatens to criminalize anyone who documents a crime instead of just reporting it to the state.
Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O'Neill announced the indictment Monday. The girl, who was arrested just before the school year began, didn't fire a single shot. According to O'Neill, she "was the person who was recording the livestream" and "published their manifesto." Under North Carolina law, aiding-and-abetting charges carry the same penalties as if the defendant committed the attack herself.
The shooters, Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18, stormed the Clairemont mosque on May 18, killing security guard Amin Abdullah, 51, who returned fire and initiated a lockdown protecting 140 children nearby, along with Nadir Awad, 57, and Mansour Kaziha, 78. The pair then drove off and killed themselves. O'Neill revealed Monday their plan was even broader: after the mosque, they intended to hit a local Jewish temple and then a predominantly African American high school. The teens wore GoPro helmets to broadcast the attack, and O'Neill said three people were watching the livestream in real time, including one viewer in the Eastern time zone.
O'Neill framed the recording and dissemination as inseparable from the plot: "Number one was to kill as many people possible on that day. And secondly, they wanted this — their carnage and destruction — recorded, livestreamed, and disseminated out." He said the teen faced only three or four years if prosecuted federally, which is why officials brought the case to his office under state law. He also said she was arrested before the grand jury indicted because, with school starting, "we didn't know what she was capable of."
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that O'Neill cited North Carolina's aiding-and-abetting statute plainly: "A person may be guilty of a crime although he or she personally does not do any of the acts necessary to constitute the crime." CAIR welcomed the indictment as "an important step toward ensuring that anyone who allegedly" participates faces accountability.
But here is the open question: where does conspiracy end and documentation begin? The DA says the livestream was part of the terrorists' purpose — and that may well be true. The shooters absolutely wanted their violence broadcast. But if recording a crime and publishing a manifesto are legally indistinguishable from committing murder, then every citizen with a phone at the scene of an attack is one prosecutorial decision away from a life sentence. The same logic that makes this girl a murderer could tomorrow make a journalist who publishes a terrorist's writings — or a bystander who films police misconduct — an accomplice to whatever they capture. The state has always wanted to control the narrative. This is how it gets the power to do it.
