Before meeting Smith, Anderson lived around Atlanta, Georgia; Las Vegas, Nevada; and other cities in Southern California. In the late 1990s or early 2000s, he participated in an exposé by Las Vegas NBC affiliate KSNV on housing fees at Nellis Air Force Base. The report said that Anderson had been in the U.S. Navy for eight years and was married to a nineteen-year Air Force veteran who had been deployed to Pakistan. However, a military spokesman said that no one with Anderson's name appeared to have served in the Navy, according to official records. Anderson went on to post a video of the exposé on YouTube.
Anderson's history of domestic violence accusations was extensively documented in filings obtained by the New York Daily News. According to the filings, he had been married to another woman for eleven years before their marriage ended in 1996. In January 1997, the ex-wife filed a petition for a domestic violence restraining order against him. In the petition, she claimed that Anderson had threatened to kill her, their three sons, and himself, then later threatened to kidnap their children. In a follow-up filing, the woman claimed that Anderson had assaulted her in front of his sister after he dropped off their children. She reported the assault to police, but did not let officers arrest him in front of their sons. According to her, Anderson later "talked" her into dropping the restraining order, but continued to verbally abuse her afterwards. Their divorce was finalized later in 1997. In 2013, a former live-in girlfriend won a three-year restraining order after claiming that Anderson assaulted her on two occasions, one of which nearly killed her.
About 500–600 other students were in attendance at the time of the shooting. By about 12:00 p.m., they were all transported by bus to the CSUSB campus, then to the nearby Cajon High School.
The shooting followed a terrorist attack that occurred in San Bernardino in December 2015. After that attack, the San Bernardino City Unified School District reexamined its security measures and gave all of the school principals lockdown training. North Park Elementary School is located about 7 miles (11 km) from the Inland Regional Center, the main location of the 2015 terrorist attack.
Cedric Anderson (1963 – April 10, 2017), a resident of Riverside, was identified as the perpetrator. He was in a four-year-long relationship with Karen Elaine Smith, the slain Teacher, but the two were only married from January to March. Their marriage ended by separation. At the time of the shooting, he was unemployed and attempting to start his own Business. He had a Criminal history of weapons charges, accusations of domestic violence, and drug charges spanning from 1982 to 2013, but no convictions ever resulted from those arrests. These charges predated his marriage to Smith.
