Positively Jen: How Jennifer Stevens lived through the San Bernardino shooting and kept her kindness intact
Jen Stevens at home in Redondo Beach recovering from the December 2nd attack. photo
by Ed Solt
Jennifer Stevens recognized Syed Farook.
They both worked for the San Bernardino Environmental Services Department, where Stevens had started working part-time last May, shortly before graduating from UC Riverside. In mid-November, Stevens was hired full time. Her goal was to become an environmental health inspector. It was work she loved. Stevens, 22, grew up in Redondo Beach. She surfed and swam and had a deep and abiding love for the ocean. Her father, the late Terry Stevens, was a former professional surfer and local waterman who’d passed his passion on to his children. The occupation Jennifer had chosen had everything to do with this — she wanted to help protect the local marine environment that had given she and her family so much.
On the morning of December 2, Stevens was feeling particularly grateful for the nurturing work environment she’d found. She was attending a holiday party with her co-workers, so many of whom were taking an active role in helping her achieve her dreams.
“I was the shy one,” she said. “They are all great people. They all made me really happy.”
Farook, 28, had worked five years as an environmental health specialist for the department. Stevens barely knew him, but his was a familiar face. He seemed quiet and rarely made eye contact, she later recalled.
“He [Farook] was from a different part of the office,” she said. “He let me inside the building once or twice when I was part time. That was about it with our interactions.”
The party was inside a banquet room at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernadino, and about 80 employees were in attendance. It was to be followed by a general education meeting, or “GEM”, which neither Stevens nor most of her co-workers expected to stick around for.
“At first it’s holiday fun, an ice breaker, getting to know your fellow employees, and after it’s educational,” Stevens said in an interview this week. “Not all of us stay for it. I didn’t think I was going to.”
Much to her own surprise, Stevens was having so much fun with her co-workers that she stuck around. What happened next rendered everything unrecognizable.
According to subsequent accounts, at 10:59 a.m., Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malek, entered the banquet room wearing black ski masks, armed with semi-automatic pistols and rifles. Stevens saw a man in a mask carrying a “big gun” but didn’t recognize him as Farook. Even as the shooting began, she’d didn’t believe it was really happening. She thought maybe it was some kind of unexpected safety drill and the gun was firing non-lethal “bean bag” rounds.
When she felt a pain in her stomach, she remembers thinking it really hurt for what she thought was a shot from a “bean bag” round.
“You would never think it was a terrorist attack,” she said. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, that really hurt,’ and ‘Who would shoot me with one of those [bean bag rounds]?”
What Stevens thought was a bean bag was really a .223 caliber bullet from an assault rifle that pierced through her back and came out of her abdomen.
“It didn’t feel real at any point,” she said. “Who thinks that they got shot?”
Stevens lay on the ground while the massacre continued. The couple sprayed bullets, seemingly at random, picking victims off. Police later determined that between 75 and 80 shots were fired, killing 14 people and wounding another 21.
“The person next to meet was shot five times and was laying on me for while,” Stevens said. “I’m very lucky.”
The entire shooting lasted about four minutes, police later reported, and as the attack ceased and the assailants fled (they were both subsequently killed in a shootout with police), Stevens texted her sister and called her mother.
Lisa Stevens, Jennifer’s mother, later told NBC News that she was with a patient — she works as a psychotherapist — when she saw her daughter was calling her cell phone. As it kept ringing, she asked her patient if she minded if she picked up.
“She told me she’d been shot,” Lisa told NBC. “And then you heard a lot of noise in the background, on the phone. Then it went dead.”
Though seriously injured, Jennifer Stevens had just survived one of the deadliest mass shootings in California history. In addition to an abdomen wound the size of a fist, Stevens was also hit in the arm and suffered a shrapnel wound on her ankle.
“The rush of adrenaline did help. I didn’t even know I got shot in the arm,” Stevens said. “I tried to get up on my own when we all were getting out of the building. I asked my friend if I needed to get help because it didn’t hurt that badly. And he was like, ‘Yes. You got shot.’”
Stevens, a 2011 Redondo Union High School graduate, underwent surgery at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center and spent five days recovering in the hospital before she was transported to her mother’s home in Redondo Beach to continue healing.
Her friends and her family — who have always known her simply as “Jen” — have been astonished at how positive she’s remained throughout the ordeal.
“Jen’s a brave girl especially after being wounded by a .223 bullet that spirals inside a person right after impact,” said Wright Adaza, a close family friend who was at Jennifer’s bedside during her stay at the hospital. “I can’t imagine the amount of pain she felt.”
“Jen is one of the toughest people I know,” said her boyfriend, Simon Peters. “She’s had a positive outlook and a smile even through something like this.”
Stevens said that despite the pain, her overriding thoughts are about how differently it could have been. Her heart, she said, is with co-workers who were not as fortunate.
“I got shot really close to my spine and one inch to my left I would of been paralyzed.” she said. “I feel very lucky. My thoughts and prayers go to the victims, some that are still in the hospital.”
Beach girl
Stevens was sitting in her family living room for the first time just hours after being released from the hospital a week ago Monday.
“I’m just a born and raised beach girl,” she said, before her attention was momentarily captivated by the candlelight vigil of friends and family held near her alma mater, Redondo Union High School, which was showing on the local television news.
She was touched by the show of support, but a little uneasy with the attention. Gunshot wounds to the abdomen are considered among the most painful, and she’d just emerged from some of the most horrific days of her young life. But what she couldn’t stop thinking about was her co-workers still in the hospital, and more tragically, those who did not survive.
“It was the most frightening day of my life,” she said. “Being part of a terrorist attack…It’s just crazy. I mean, it’s your co-workers, the people you see every day.”
Stevens has given a handful of interviews, including one to the nationally televised Today Show. Her message has not been about herself.
“For all my interviews, I don’t want to focus on me but give out all my thoughts and prayers to other victims — the victims who are suffering, and their families,” she said.
Her strength in the face of what she’d just experienced had something to do with how she was raised. Her father passed away in 1998, when she still a young child, but his legacy stayed with her. She grew up on the water and was a junior lifeguard. The ocean, among other things, taught her resiliency.
“Jen is part of a South Bay waterman legacy,” said Adaza, who in addition to being a friend of the Stevens family serves beach marshall the event that carries Jennifer’s father’s name, the Pier-to-Pier Velzy-Stevens Paddleboard Race that takes place during International Surf Festival. “The ocean is in her blood.”
Jennifer Stevens with her brother on the shoulder of longtime family friend Troy Campbell at the August 2009 Velzy-Stevens International Surf Festival Paddlebord race. photo
Stevens father is the late Terry Stevens, who was a top surfer from the South Bay. He made a name for himself in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in the worldwide surf scene riding for Mike Purpus’ Hot Lips Surfboards and Tuzo and Kip Jerger’s Kanoa Surf teams. A champion paddler, Stevens won the Catalina Classic stock division in 1982 — the year the famed waterman’s right-of-passage, a 32-mile race from Catalina Island to the Manhattan Beach pier, was revived after two decades of dormancy.
“My dad is a big influence on my love with the beach and is an inspiration to get in water,” Jen said. “I’m second-generation Redondo Beach. My parents know a lot of people in this community.”
During high school, she spent her summers working with Kip Jerger in his surf camps.
“I loved being in the water all day, meeting new people, and giving out good vibes,” Jen said, laughing. “Except putting on a wetsuit for the third time in one day.”
Redondo Beach Mayor Steve Aspel first met Stevens in her youth, through AYSO and in club softball. She and his daughter, Brett, were teammates and friends.
“My wife was her soccer coach and I was her soccer referee and my daughter was on the same sports teams,” Aspel said. “She was always a phenomenal athlete and a sweet kid.”
In middle school Stevens won Female Athlete of the Year and in high school she was named “Female MVP” of all sports.
“I was always very passionate about sports especially soccer and softball,” Jen said.
After attending Alta Vista Elementary School, Tulita Elementary School, Parras Middle School, and graduating from Redondo Union High School in 2011, Stevens was accepted to UC Riverside.
“With my beach background, I always had a passion for keeping the environment clean,” she said. “I thought of becoming a physician but I can’t deal with blood, so I became an Environmental Science major with an emphasis on toxicology.”
She balanced a full class schedule — including being a part of the research program on the toxicity of e-cigarettes and vaporizers — while also playing for the college’s soccer team.
“My college is a D1 school,” she said. “So I had a good challenge of playing soccer and being a science major.”
Last spring, as she was preparing to graduate, Stevens was hired part time at the San Bernardino County Environmental Services Department.
“I started off with just a 24 hour week and was so excited,” Jen said. “Working there felt comfortable. They even let me take five weeks off after I graduated to tour Europe with my Mom in the summer, a trip I’ll never forget.”
Her fit with the San Bernardino Environmental Services Department was nearly perfect. On Nov. 16, when she was promoted from part-time to full-time, she could not have been much happier.
“When I finally got a badge, it was cool be a part of the office because before when I was part time I was basically working solo,” she said. “It was cool to talk to people and it was nice to be included.”
Her goal was to become a certified RHS Environmental Health Inspector. And then, two weeks into her new career, the events of December 2 happened.
Steven’s healing process will take time. The wound to her abdomen will need to heal before doctors can perform a skin graft. An eight-inch line of stitches crosses her stomach from where a surgeon sliced in to check her vital organs immediately after the shooting.
She admits that she spends part of each day in sadness, mourning the people she lost in San Bernardino.
“It’s also part of the healing process,” she said. “Being sad every day.”
But being home in Redondo Beach, surrounded by family, supported by the community she’s been a part of all her life, has helped.
“My dad and my mom are friends with everybody in the South Bay and everybody has stopped by,” Jen said. “My mom needs her friends, too — it’s not every day your daughter gets shot.”
“There is a lot of support,” she added. “Being here, seeing my Mom’s friends, it really just makes me feel loved, and helps me recover.”
Those around her continue to be amazed at how Stevens has not let her sense of sadness prevail. She’s still more given to smiling than to tears. Despite what she’s experienced, she’s the same Jen everyone has always known.
“Although Jen is shy, she’s always had that positive smile,” Aspel said. “All through her years in sports with my daughter, she smiled.”
“Jen is a special girl and comes from a good family that will help her ride through this,” said Adaza. “She’s been a positive girl all through her life, and will continue doing so.”
Stevens said there’s no other option.
“I feel that being happy is better than being sad,” she said. ER