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What We Know About The San Bernardino Shooters

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

More details are emerging about Syed Farook. It's now confirmed that his brother served in the U.S. Navy from 2003 to 2007. We go now to Kate Mather. She's a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, and she's in Redlands, Calif., outside the shooter's townhouse. Redlands is about a 15-minute drive from where the shooting took place. And thanks for joining us, Kate.

KATE MATHER: Thank you for having me.

MCEVERS: Investigators have been at this townhouse that the shooters rented all day. What are you seeing?

MATHER: Well, you're right. They have been there since yesterday, actually. They're clearly still focused on this. We've been out here since before dawn this morning. FBI agents are still walking in and out of the residence as we speak, and it's unclear how long they could be there with an investigation this delicate, where they're trying to get any scrap of evidence they can.

MCEVERS: And your newspaper has located several court documents about Syed Farook's parents. What information did they find there?

MATHER: One - yeah, my colleagues pulled the court records about the divorce of his parents. And one of the - according to one of the filings, his mother, in her allegations, painted the picture of a troubled home, that there might have been some physical abuse. There might've been some other issues that might have indicated a tumultuous background.

Now, of course, what that means, whether those were just allegations, what impact that might have had is something that, you know, reporters are certainly still trying to figure out. Authorities are digging into these people's backgrounds as well. So what it all means, we still don't know yet, but there's certainly some indicators there that it was a troubled home life for him.

MCEVERS: So far, it appears that neither Farook nor his wife, Rafsheen Malik (ph), had criminal records. Is that right?

MATHER: I believe so, that that was one of the things that they've said at the press conference this morning was that there's no, you know - there was nothing necessarily to put either of these people on the radar of police here. The chief said that neither of them had a criminal record that he was aware of.

MCEVERS: And the FBI is looking into the couple's travel. What're they looking at specifically?

MATHER: Right. So they're looking into - you know, like I said, there's many elements of the background of both of these people that investigators are going to look at both now and in the coming days as they develop new information. One of the things they have released so far is that Syed Farook returned to the U.S. in July 2014 after doing some international travel. They're still not quite exactly sure where he went but that when he came back to the states at that time, he brought back his future wife with him.

She was here on a K-1 visa under a Pakistani passport, according to the FBI. But they're still trying to figure out if there's any link between that travel and what happened in San Bernardino yesterday. Again, they're pulling together this information, but they've got to analyze it and figure out what, if any, impact it had on what happened here yesterday.

MCEVERS: Kate Mather is a report with the Los Angeles Times. She was speaking to us from Redlands, Calif. Thank you so much.

MATHER: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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