14 dead, more than a dozen wounded in California shooting

(AP) — As many as three gunmen believed to be wearing military-style gear opened fire Wednesday at a Southern California social services center "as if they were on a mission," killing at least 14 people and seriously wounding more than a dozen others, authorities said.

Police shed no light on a motive for Thursday's massacre, which came just five days after a gunman opened fire at Planned Parenthood in Colorado, killing three.

In what authorities described as a carefully planned assault, the gunmen invaded the Inland Regional Center, which serves people with developmental disabilities, and began shooting around 11 a.m. They opened fire in a conference area that the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health had rented out for a banquet, said Marybeth Feild, president and CEO of the center.

FBI agents and other law enforcement authorities converged on the center and searched room to room for the attackers, but they had apparently escaped.

Petit, choking back tears as the read the text for reporters at the shooting scene, said his daughter works at the center, where social workers find jobs, housing and transportation and provide other services to people with disabilities such as autism, cerebral palsy and epilepsy.

President Barack Obama was briefed on the attack by his homeland security adviser.

"The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world, and there's some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don't happen as frequently," Obama said.

The shooting sounded like "an organized plot," and preliminary information seems to indicate that "this is personal, and there seems to suggest some element of revenge and retaliation," said Erroll G. Southers, director of Homegrown Violent Extremism Studies at the University of Southern California and a former FBI agent.