KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:
Claudia Peschiutta is a reporter with KNX newsradio in Los Angeles, and she has been talking to people who've been evacuated from the Inland Regional Center and to family members of those who work there. We reached her near the command post that's been set up outside the Inland Regional Center.
CLAUDIA PESCHIUTTA: This is where they had school buses lined up. They were bringing the evacuees here, escorted by law enforcement officers. They were loading them onto the buses and taking them to another location to be interviewed by investigators. I talked to one man who says his wife is a social worker coordinator there. He was actually on the phone with her while this was happening. He said she called him, she told him that she'd seen a masked gunman on the first floor, and she was on the third floor. She and her coworkers used desks to barricade themselves inside their office. He said as he was talking to her he could hear screams in the background. At some point, he lost communication with his wife, but he was able to reach her, hours later. That's around the time I ran into him. Obviously, she was incredibly relieved. She was crying. You know, he says (inaudible). And he was just so worried over those few hours that he wasn't able to communicate with her. I talked to another woman here at the scene, a 21-year-old whose older brother was a social worker at the center. And she told him that he and his coworkers had barricaded themselves in their office and it wasn't until law enforcement came and tore down their barricade and took them to safety that they were able to get out. And he told her that he'd seen several people shot. She wasn't sure if the people her brother had seen were dead.
MCEVERS: That's KNX reporter Claudia Peschiutta. We reached her in San Bernardino, Calif., near the Inland Regional Center. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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