We all knew him at the mosque, and we all called him Abu Ezz. The name on his ID was Mansour Kaziha. He was seventy-eight years old. He'd been the custodian since the mosque was built, back in the eighties. It's the largest mosque in San Diego, and he was there before the walls were.

Forty years in the same courtyard. Forty years keeping the same place in order. We knew that broomstick the way we knew him: worn down on one side only, because he always pushed in the same direction, and a broom, after forty years, takes the shape of the hand that holds it.

He opened the doors every morning in the same order. First the gate onto the street. Then the door to the main hall. Then the children's classrooms, one by one. He'd wet down the courtyard tiles before the heat came in, because he said a wet courtyard in the morning is a cool courtyard by noon. He greeted everyone who arrived by name. He knew the names of fathers, sons, and sons of sons.

A mosque, to someone who's never been inside one, is a building. To us, it was Abu Ezz's courtyard. He was the one who opened it when the sky was still grey. He was the one who locked it when the last of us had gone. Forty years, like that. A man who does the same thing for forty years doesn't do it with his hands anymore. He does it with his whole body, without thinking, the way you breathe. In forty years, every one of us had passed through that courtyard.

The eighteenth of May was a Monday, and it was morning. The children were in their classrooms, at their lesson, with the ones who taught them. At the entrance was Amin Abdullah, the security guard, fifty-one years old. In the courtyard was Abu Ezz, with his broom, like every morning for forty years. Nadir Awad, fifty-seven years old, hadn't arrived yet that morning. He lived across the street and came to pray every day.

That Monday the lesson had just begun. There were young children, the kind learning their first words. There were the older ones. There were those who'd come in late, and Abu Ezz had let them in, the way he always did, without scolding anyone.

Then two young men arrived at the gate. One was eighteen, the other seventeen. They were armed. Afterward, people found out about the video they'd been recording, the paper they'd written, the hatred they'd put into it. But that morning, in the courtyard, there were only two armed young men, and a door, and behind the door the children and the ones who taught them.

Abu Ezz had his door two steps away. He could have gone inside. He could have gone inside and bolted it behind him. A seventy-eight-year-old man with a broom, standing in front of two armed young men, had every reason in the world to take cover. No one would have blamed him. A custodian isn't a guard. A custodian keeps things clean, opens and closes doors. No rule told him to stay.

He didn't go inside.

He stayed in the courtyard. Amin Abdullah, from the entrance, had already moved toward the two young men. And from across the street, Nadir Awad heard the shots. A man who hears gunfire at the place where he prays every morning, where his wife teaches, doesn't count his steps. He crossed the street, came in through the gate, toward the sound and not away from it. There were three of them. They placed themselves between the gate and the classroom door. A custodian with a broom, a security guard, a man who'd come in from outside. Three men who made themselves slow, broad, loud. Three men who spoke to the young men, called out to them, filled the courtyard with their bodies and their voices. Every second those two young men spent with them, in the courtyard, was a second they didn't spend on the other side of that door.

We don't know what the three of them said, in the courtyard. We don't know if they said anything at all. We know what they did. They stayed. One second after another, they stayed.

Behind the door, in the classrooms, the staff kept the children down, still, silent. The children could hear the courtyard. They couldn't see it. They stayed where the ones who taught them had put them.

The two young men never reached the classrooms. In the courtyard they shot Amin Abdullah, Nadir Awad, and Mansour Kaziha. Then they turned their weapons on themselves. In the courtyard that morning, five people died. Three of them were ours.

Amin Abdullah was fifty-one years old. Nadir Awad was fifty-seven. Mansour Kaziha was seventy-eight. We write their names out in full, because a name written in full is a person, and three people, that Monday, stayed in the courtyard in our place.

Abu Ezz didn't see the children come out. They came out later, one by one, held by the hand by their teachers, through that door he had kept clear. They were alive. They are all alive.

The parents came to pick them up in the afternoon. Every child went home to a house. Every house that evening had someone to hold close. Three houses in San Diego did not.

The broom stayed in the courtyard, where it had fallen.

The next morning someone picked it up. A mosque is a place that someone opens at dawn and keeps clean, and three men, on the eighteenth of May, stayed in that courtyard so there would still be a place to open. We still do it, every morning. Someone picks up that broom, worn down on one side only, and wets down the courtyard tiles before the heat comes in. In the same order as always.