MILLINOCKET, Maine — One of 21 people wounded in a mass shooting Wednesday at a California social service agency has Millinocket relatives and visited the Magic City while growing up, family members said Thursday.
Amanda Gaspard was shot three times during a Christmas party at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, according to resident Jean McLean, who is Gaspard’s aunt. News reports describe Gaspard as a 31-year-old environmental health specialist for San Bernardino County.
“We found out on Facebook this morning. Her mother posted something,” McLean said Thursday. “She came out of surgery and is going to be fine, so it was a big relief.”
Gaspard’s grandfather, David McLean, grew up on State Street in Millinocket, said Jean McLean, who owns Memories of Maine Gallery on Penobscot Avenue.
Gaspard was raised by her parents, Kenneth and Diane McLean Gaspard, in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, before moving to California, McLean said.
Besides wounds to her arm and leg, family members were told Gaspard also took as many as 20 shrapnel wounds to her head and body in the attack, according to Julee McLean, Jean McLean’s daughter.
Julee and Jean McLean said Gaspard was not a very close relative but that the family was shocked nevertheless.
“Everybody’s shaken up,” Julee McLean said.
Fourteen people were killed in the attack. The husband-and-wife shooting tandem were killed in a gunfight with police immediately afterward. Authorities Thursday had yet to determine why Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, who together had a 6-month-old daughter, opened fire at the party.
San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan and David Bowdich, an assistant regional FBI director, said investigators have not ruled out terrorism as a motive. Like Gaspard, Farook also was an environmental health specialist for San Bernardino County, news reports indicate. He and his wife left the party before the shooting.
Gaspard will likely get excellent care at the San Bernardino hospital where she continues to recover, Jean McLean said. Gaspard’s grandfather, mother and aunt worked there for several years and are probably still remembered by the hospital’s staff.
A crowd-sourced website, shootingtracker.com, which keeps a running tally of U.S. gun violence, claims that the San Bernardino massacre is among more than 350 shootings in the United States this year in which four or more people were wounded or killed. The rampage is the deadliest U.S. gun incident since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, in which 27 people, including the gunman, were killed.
The mass attacks have spurred calls for increased gun control in the United States, a view McLean shares to a degree.
“I don’t want to see guns taken away, let’s put it that way. I just think people need to be screened before they can buy a gun,” she said.
Information from Reuters is included in this report.