The shooters were on a Signal video call with a user identified only as "Noelle" before and during the attack, according to screen recordings reviewed by CBS News. The recordings show Noelle had been on the call with the gunmen for roughly 20 minutes before they began shooting.
During that time, Noelle appears to have used a second phone to join a Discord video call with another user, identified as "Otto," positioning the camera so Otto could watch the Signal call in real time. Otto then began recording on his own device, according to footage reviewed by CBS News.
As the attack unfolded, Otto alerted another person on Discord to the live video. "DUDE LOOK," Otto wrote. The person asked where the gunmen were. "IN SOME MOSUQE [sic]," Otto replied.
"Tell her call the cops," the person wrote, in an apparent reference to Noelle. "Bro, tell her call the cops," they wrote again a minute later. "It doesn't even matter if they aren't in LA just tell her to call them and they can hopefully find out where he is."
International Viewers Watched From Overseas
By the time Otto responded five minutes later, the attack was over. One of the teen gunmen, Cain Clark, 17, had shot and killed the other, 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez, before turning the gun on himself. That sequence was also captured in the video.
CBS News could not independently verify the location of the users who watched the video, though details visible in the recordings suggest some of them may have been located far from California. In Otto's screen recording, VodafoneAL, an Albanian mobile carrier, appeared on the device, and the phone's time zone matched local time in Albania, suggesting Otto may have watched from overseas.
A time zone visible on Noelle's device was set to three hours ahead of San Diego, suggesting the user may have been in the Eastern time zone. Noelle appeared to be in some kind of online relationship with one of the shooters, according to Barrett Gay, a digital research analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
A recording of the attack later circulated online, including on so-called "gore websites" that have previously served as gathering places for admirers of mass shooters. Both shooters had been active in fringe communities on mainstream social media platforms, said Matthew Ivanovich, a senior research manager at the organization.
Authorities said they believe the two teens who carried out the attack met online and discovered they were both residents of the San Diego area before meeting in person, as Insider Wire previously reported.
The investigation continues into how the attack was organized and whether the viewers who watched the livestream could face charges for failing to report the crime in progress.
