NBC News cameras were allowed inside the apartment of the husband and wife who shot and killed 14 people at the Inland Regional Center on Wednesday.
What could have been a chilling look into the shocking “normalcy” of the couple’s home quickly devolved into parody-like commentary from correspondent Kerry Sanders. Sanders provided such hard-hitting analysis as “it’s just a typical sort of calendar” and “here’s just some mixed nuts.”
When he first entered the home, Sanders headed upstairs into the baby’s room (the couple left their baby with a relative before the shooting). Sanders noted the computer in the room and walked right over to it and begin touching things.
“As you can see, the hard drive is gone,” Sanders astutely noted.
“This is where it would be plugged in,” he added while touching the cord.
Seemingly unaware that he would not find any clues to assist in the investigation, Sanders walks over to a wall calendar “to see if anything of importance is marked.” Gee, Mr. Sanders, you think you’re going to find a big red “X” on the day of the shooting?
“And it’s just a typical sort of calendar with pictures.” Top notch analysis, Sanders.
Sanders, who has been with NBC since 1996, then said he found something “interesting” — a prayer rug. The shooters were Muslims.
“This prayer rug here may have been — I’m not sure which way — but you would face it toward Mecca,” Sanders said. “It’s possible that that prayer rug has been left in exactly the position that it was.”
At this point Sanders appears to have run out of things in the room to comment on, so MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell assists him by asking, “What kind of computer equipment?”
But Sanders isn’t ready to go to the computer just yet, Andrea! First he spies a bin with shredded paper.
“Here you can see all types of things have been shredded,” Sanders said. “So, the FBI must have decided that whatever was in here was not important.” Good find.
Mitchell again asks Sanders what kind of computer the attackers had, as if the PC versus Mac debate is somehow important to the deaths of 14 people.
“So we have an LG monitor,” Sanders said. Damn! Everyone who owns a PC is now suspicious.
Sanders then starts rifling through the items on the computer desk, picking up “a check from Chase [Bank]” and holding it up for the camera. A check. Which includes the routing number.
Sanders then kneels down to describe a printer and keyboard on the floor. When he gets back up, he again looks at the items on the desk, holding up an empty package of mixed nuts.
“Here’s just some mixed nuts with peanuts,” Sanders said.
Sanders then investigates the baby’s crib, lifting up a pillow to look at the toys inside, as Mitchell tries to bring some legitimacy to the segment by noting how “poignant” the crib is to the story.
Sanders then starts picking up the baby’s toys and describing them. “There’s a teddy bear here. There’s a box here. It looks like it may have been even an unwrapped gift,” Sanders said, before fumbling through the name of the toy. “Dream Eyes. Bright Dream Eyes. Bright Eyes Dreamy.”
He makes sure to touch nearly all of the toys of this innocent child before moving on to the closet, where he finds some books, including a low-level Arabic learning book.
“Now, I’m not sure, but I would suspect that this may actually have been — even though it’s in here amongst the toys — because [the baby was] only six months old, it could either be a gift or maybe it’s something that [Syed Rizwan] Farook himself used, because he was born in the United States, he was raised in the United States, and while he had memorized the Quran, of course, knowing Arabic is important,” Sanders said.
Sanders then began looking through some other books that may have been read to the six-month-old, until Mitchell encouraged him to look for photos of the family.
This would prove to be a problem, however, as Sanders entered a bathroom where a photographer was taking pictures of the family from an album. The cameraman then zooms in on a photo of a woman whom they suspect may have been Farook’s wife.
Mitchell points out that they could not confirm whether the unblurred photos Sanders was holding up were actually of the suspect. They could have been a family friend or a random stranger.
Sanders begins flipping through photos that contain more people who are not the shooters. “This looks like it may have been some sort of birthday party,” Sanders said, holding up a photo of people in front of a cake.
One of the next photos Sanders displays for the camera is of a small child, to which Mitchell said: “Lets make sure we don’t show the children.” But Sanders continues to hold up the photo. He then flips the photo over: “Well we can say here that this is probably not her because it says ‘Sarah’ on the back.”
Good job, Sanders! You just showed the photo of someone else’s kid on cable TV and gave her name! Do you even news?
Sanders apologized but said he was doing this on live TV, and continued to show the camera photos of unidentified – and wholly innocent – children.
As Sanders finally walks out of the bathroom, a member of the news team can be heard saying: “Stop showing pictures.”
Sanders then headed into what he describes as “what may have been the main bedroom.” He immediately walked over to the bed and began picking up and describing driver’s licenses as the camera focuses. He held up the driver’s licence of the shooter’s mother, as well as a social security card. None of the documents were blurred.
Finally, Sanders pointed to two books “that appear to be the Quran” before MSNBC mercifully stops the camera feed and returns to the studio.
We can tell from the footage that MSNBC reused what it thought were the important finds: The shredded paper, the calendar and that bag of mixed nuts.
For those who watched the atrocity unfold live, one couldn’t help but remember Geraldo Rivera’s journey into Al Capone’s vault, wherein the host spent nearly an hour hyping the “mystery” of the vault, only to enter an empty room.
Or for those who were (or are) Weird Al fans, there’s always his parody of a newsman from the movie UHF. In one scene he looks into “Al Capone’s glove compartment” to discover, excitedly: “ROADMAPS.”
MSNBC: People died, and you just presented America with the terrorist version of “MTV Cribs,” while identifying innocent people without blurring their faces.
Update: MSNBC has released a statement apologizing for revealing identifying information about innocent people.
“We regret that we briefly showed images of photographs and identification cards that should not have been aired without review,” the network said.
