Huddled beneath a desk, a bookshelf shoved against a locked office door, Regina Kuruppu held tightly to her co-workers’ hands and began to pray aloud, unable to drown out the terrifying cries coming from one story below. “Heavenly Father,” she said as her colleagues tried to offer words of comfort. “Watch over my family. Watch over us.”
When the fire alarm had sounded minutes earlier, Kuruppu was sitting at her desk on the second floor of Building 3 at the Inland Regional Center. A 19-year veteran of the organization that helps those with developmental disabilities such as autism and cerebral palsy, Kuruppu was wrapping up her pre-vacation emails, sending notes of thanks to the center’s supporters. By week’s end she would be off for the month and home doing what she loved: baking for the holidays and stringing Christmas lights outside her home.
The alarm, she thought, was just a drill – until she got downstairs and saw two bodies in a pool of blood by the door of the auditorium, the victims’ eyes open and unblinking.
She didn’t stop to wonder what evil had come to the center that morning or why. Those questions would come later, for her and for a nation left grappling not only with another mass shooting, but another potential act of terrorism at home.
Barricaded back upstairs, Kuruppu could only pray for protection – even as she prepared to die. She thought of her son. She texted her sister. They exchanged their “I love yous.” A woman of strong faith, Kuruppu tried to hold fast to hope. But she kept seeing the unseeing eyes downstairs.