Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune

Seven people were wounded and one killed during an attack on a birthday pool party in the La Jolla Crossroads luxury San Diego apartment complex on Sunday.

The attacker, identified as 49 year old Peter Selis, was sitting in a poolside chair while the party was going on. The birthday celebrant approached him and offered to share food and drink with Selis, who declined, and continued to sit quietly in his chair. “Six or seven minutes later it’s just pow, pow, pow, pow — out of nowhere…. There was no indication that he was there to do evil,” partygoer Drew Phillips told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Witnesses reported that when he opened fire, Selis “never left his poolside chair,” and remained in the chair while reloading as well.

Two young girls, ages 3 and 8, were with a grandmother and a nanny when the shooting started. Their grandfather, Shahrayar Jeff, said they escaped unscathed.

He said the older child described seeing Selis, in a baseball cap and glasses, “relaxing and shooting people.”

Two UC San Diego students who were in a nearby hot tub were too scared to bolt, but then slowly made their way to a wall. One of the students, 20-year-old Kaela Wong, said she heard Selis threaten women trying to help a victim.

“You can either leave or you can stay here and die,” Wong said she heard Selis say.

A police helicopter arrived on the scene at 6:07pm, reporting that Selis “was still in the pool area holding a large-caliber handgun and appeared to be reloading.” (How the helicopter police knew the caliber of handgun is rather unclear.) The air crew directed police on the ground into the area, who shot and killed Selis after he reportedly pointed his gun at them, according to Police Chief Shelley Zimmerman.

Selis’s motive is unknown. The Union-Tribune reports that he was a mechanic at a local Ford dealership, and facing “crushing debt,” filed for bankruptcy in 2015. Based on nearly-identical wording in the news stories from both FoxNews and the Union-Tribune, it appears that the police are drawing attention to the fact that Selis was white, and his victims were either Black or Hispanic. It might be a coincidence, it might not.

California has some of the nation’s strictest gun control laws. It has earned an “A” rating from the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a gun control lobbying group founded by wealthy trial attorneys such as Elizabeth Cabraser, and which has received backing from Gabby Gifford’s Americans for Responsible Solutions…which is, in turn, funded by plutocrat Mike Bloomberg.

This lobbying group had a hand in writing the bevy of gun control laws enacted by California in 2016 that infringed on Californians’ right to keep and bear arms…none of which did a thing to stop this incident. Instead, the laws were focused on aesthetic characteristics of certain kinds of rifles and background checks for ammunition purchases, not doing anything to help people attending a pool party in San Diego protect themselves against an attack while waiting for police to show up.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

36 COMMENTS

  1. Anything on the stabbing at University of Texas today? I’ve heard unconfirmed reports that “eyewitnesses have reported seeing a student pull out a concealed handgun on the suspect, and made him back down.”

  3. I thought the gun laws in San Diego would prevent this exact occurrence. Oh wait, criminals and crazies don’t obey laws. What was I thinking.

  4. That was less than a mile from my place of work. I love what you guys at TTAG do everyday. Nothing but respect from a man behind enemy lines.

  5. If we only had ONE more law, this could have been prevented; you mean murder is already illegal?

  6. Nothing to do with California’s gun control laws. Everything to do with the fact that California is a nutcase sanctuary, starting from the Governor on down.

  7. Well, a bit over the top. None of the laws passed last session that you mention, the AR ban or the ammo law, had anything to do with this incident, the first because he didn’t use an AR and registration, in any event, hasn’t begun, and the second because that law hasn’t gone into effect either. He was on private property, so the CCW laws were inapplicable too; any one of these people could have lawfully had a CCW (unless the condominium rules banned firearms).

    This is just another suicide by cop, another loser going out with a bang. A kind of crime that no law can prevent.

  9. I have the feeling that when they said a “large caliber handgun” they probably meant a 6″ revolver, most likely in .357 Magnum, but that’s just an impression and there’s no way I or the helicopter pilot would know that. It would explain why he was reloading after shooting 8 people, though.

  10. Perhaps as more of these shootings happen in California some day the wrong victim will be killed and things will start to change for the better.

    But for now don’t worry. You got legal pot to get high with now in Cali. You got crystal meth to improve your sexual experience. You can have sex in public on government approved days in the state. You can legally put anything “up” inside you now. But you cannot put raw milk down your throat. The police will arrest you.

    You can have wonderful displays of homosexual sex in public. But you can”t have a poster size picture of a gun in a store front window in California.

  11. The way I’ve seen this story spun by the main stream media is that the shooter was stopped “as he was reloading”, giving more “credibility” to magazine restrictions. From eye witness accounts, this is false, but of course this doesn’t matter.

  12. Unrelated thought…. I wonder if they will trace the serial number of the gun back to the original purchaser? They want to do it for every other gun so why not this one?

  13. The gun was a SiG P220 .45 according to the radio. This is a single stack California legal gun which is why he had to reload.
    Why did no one rush him while reloading?

    • Why didn’t anyone in Charleston, SC rush their assassin while he reloaded a couple of times? They sat there and waited to be executed.

  14. So, when is the NRA and POG going to abolish the political term “mass shooter” and “active shooter”?

    The goal of those terms is to villify the act of shooting, which has no good or evil alignment, it is neutral.

    I miss the days of more accurate reports of “serial killer” and “murderer” that have emphasis on the person’s crime rather than focusing the tool.

    Serial killer with a knife puts the blame of the act on the person. “Mass stabbing” sounds like a disembodied knife was floating around stabbing people.

    I’m just tired of the BS political wordplay that caters to a lowest common denominator audience.

    • I invest no ego in word selection, so if you have a better phrase to use that cuts through the nonsense efficiently and understandably, let me know.

  15. Just to be clear, he was not a criminal. He was a nut job that snapped because his girlfriend broke up with him. In fact, he went through the normal NICS background checks and had the CA gun safety card.
    So, the same concept applies, Gun Control will not stop nut jobs only force multipliers.
    Unfortunately, our Sheriff Gore is corrupt and will not hand out permits, hence the whole Peruta case hopefully headed to the supreme court.

  16. We all know that gun control is NOT about crime, criminals, nut jobs. Gun control has always been about CONTROL of the serfs and political elites giving each other pats on the back, with the look at me, I did something grin.

Comments are closed.