Add The California Post on Google A San Diego teen is pleading with the internet to clear his name after he was mistakenly linked to the city’s teenage mosque shooters.
Jakub Vazquez said in an emotional Instagram post that he is not 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez, who killed three people alongside Cain Clark at a city mosque.
He says there is a photo circulating of him online with people identifying him as Caleb.
Online sleuths appear to have linked Jakub to Clark because they were wrestling teammates two years ago at Madison High School. Clark was a standout wrestler at the school.
”He was nothing more than just a teammate. After my season ended, I had no contact with him. I have no association with him. I am not involved in this manner in what they were planning in any way, shape or form,” he said.
He said the misinformation has made him “scared” because of its rapid spread.
“I personally want to clear my name because I am nowhere near involved in any of this,” he said, giving his condolences to those involved and asking viewers to share the video.
“I personally want to state that there has been false information claiming that this person in the photo is Caleb Vazquez, however, the person shown in numerous photos, this exact one, in numerous posts is my photo.”
“I am being falsely recognized as Caleb Vazquez however, I have no idea who he is. People say we graduated the same year. I have no knowledge to who he is, what school he even attended,” he added.
Clark killed Vazquez before turning the gun on himself after carrying out the attack, in which three were killed before the teenagers turned their weapons on each other. One of the two had run away from home in camo and with some of their parents’ weapons. The two were seen wearing body armor, and carrying long guns and other firearms.
The victims have been identified as Mansour Kaziha, Nader Awad, and security guard Amin Abdullah. Awad’s wife was a teacher at the mosque, and Abdullah has been praised as a hero for his actions in preventing further casualties.
Anti-Islamic writings were found in the suspects’ vehicle, and “hate speech” was written on the firearms used in the shooting, sources told The Post.
A manifesto revealed the pair were bigoted Nazi sympathizers who disliked a variety of different groups of people.
The 75-page document is laden with the same Nazi iconography that Clark was seen wearing during a horrifying livestream video of the attack, including the Black Sun, which is associated with Nazi SS head Heinrich Himmler, and Atomwaffen, which is tied to a violent neo-Nazi group.
The opinions within are a nonsensical collection of anti-Trump, anti-liberal, antisemitic, homophobic, and misogynistic bile — tied together only by the authors’ fury that they were not given more in life.
The shooters also idolized Australian Brenton Tarrant, who committed two mosque shootings in 2019 in New Zealand that left 51 dead.
Clark referred to Tarrant as ”Saint Tarrant” and used his blueprint for livestreaming the terror attack, which they hoped would be widely shared and serve to motivate others to carry out similar deadly strikes.