After the fire at the Yorkshire Avenue house, Zawahri carjacked a woman at gunpoint, forcing her to drive through the neighborhood as he fired at passing vehicles. He shot Debra Lynn Fine in another vehicle. He shot and killed Carlos Navarro Franco, 68, and his daughter Marcela Diaz Franco, 26, a Santa Monica College student, as they drove in a Ford Explorer. On Pico Boulevard, he killed Margarita Gomez, 68, who had been collecting aluminum cans. He shot at a Santa Monica city bus and fired at a passing SUV before arriving at the college campus, where he entered the library and continued shooting until officers confronted and killed him.

Samir Zawahri, 55, was John's father — a Lebanese immigrant who had raised his family in Santa Monica. Christopher Zawahri, 24, was his brother. Carlos Navarro Franco had come to Los Angeles from Mexico and worked as a groundskeeper. His daughter Marcela was studying at the community college where she would die. Margarita Gomez supplemented her income collecting recyclables in the neighborhood. Each had their own life, their own history, their own reasons to be on those particular streets that particular morning. The randomness of who was killed and who survived depended entirely on where each person happened to be when a young man with a rifle arrived.

John Zawahri's trajectory toward violence had left traces. In 2006, when he was 16, a classmate had reported that he had made threatening statements and possessed what appeared to be bomb-making materials. He was briefly placed in a mental health hold. The parents had divorced acrimoniously; John and his brother had stayed with their mother. Investigators found that the rifle Zawahri used had been illegally assembled from parts — a method that circumvented the standard background check process, since the individual components were not themselves classified as weapons. The gun he carried held 30-round magazines.

The shooting unfolded on the same morning that President Obama was in the Los Angeles area for a Democratic Party fundraiser. Streets in the vicinity had been partially closed for the presidential visit, which may have altered the movements of some potential victims and responders. The proximity of a major security event to an active shooting created unusual complications for local law enforcement managing both situations simultaneously. The college campus was placed on lockdown. The presidential visit continued on a modified schedule.

Santa Monica College — a commuter campus of 34,000 students, one of the largest community colleges in California — returned to full operation within days. The library where the final confrontation occurred was cleaned and reopened. The city of Santa Monica established a memorial fund and held services for the victims. The debate over how the shooter had obtained the components for his weapon fed into broader national discussions about gun regulations that, as with so many such discussions in the years that followed, concluded without federal legislation.