Nolan Rian Hurd, 23, was charged last September with one count of murder in the death of 20-year-old Nikha Marcella DeGuzman. Though the charges were filed more than three months ago, Nolan was not arrested until Dec. 15, when police in Stockton took him into custody. He is scheduled to make his first court appearance Thursday.

A probable cause statement, filed by Fremont police, lays out in horrifying detail how Hurd went from being viewed as a potential witness of DeGuzman’s suicide to being wanted for murder and suspected of covering up a homicide. The shooting occurred in room #219 at a Fremont hotel, but police have not revealed the location of the shooting, nor was it initially reported by local media.

Hurd was identified as a suspect based on the angle of the bullet, gunshot residue tests, witness statements, and his own conflicting accounts of the shooting, authorities say. Despite all this, police initially recommended that Hurd be charged with a lesser count of involuntary manslaughter, not murder, though no explanation is offered for the disparity.

The shooting took place a little before 10 p.m. on Jan. 27, 2022. Police say that DeGuzman was initially shot behind the ear, but that the bullet missed her skull and she was initially conscious and alert. According to police, it was Hurd who called 911 — though investigators believe it was several minutes after the shooting — and that DeGuzman could be heard talking in the background.

Fremont police Det. Rachel Nieves wrote in court records that, “Based on the calls I believe that Hurd was trying to influence her to say she shot herself and convince the witnesses as they arrived that it was self-inflicted.”

The pistol was found underneath DeGuzman’s right leg.

Other hotel guests reported seeing Hurd banging on doors and asking for help after the shooting, while DeGuzman was seen crawling in a hotel hallway before losing consciousness, while Hurd allegedly told her not to leave and trying to get her back into their room. Some heard the couple arguing before the shot was fired, police say.

Nieves also reviewed police body-worn cameras showing Hurd’s initial interacts with the responding officers.

At one point, he can be heard saying, “I love you… what did I do… Please I did the best I can… I did the best I can,” according to police. At his initial interview at the Fremont police department, Hurd simply placed his head on the table, began crying, and ignored an investigator’s attempts to talk to him for 30 minutes, at which point he was released.

DeGuzman was hospitalized and died two days later, on Jan. 29, 2022. Her obituary describes her as a James Logan High School graduate who attended Chabot College and worked as a service representative for Apple, Tesla, and Round Table Pizza. It says she loved animals, was a talented artist, and wrote poetry, literature, and music in her spare time.

“She was a devoted worker, and often took the responsibility of working late nights. She always was self-sufficient and an independent young lady,” the obituary says.

In April, police interviewed Hurd for a second time at the Santa Rita Jail, where he was in custody for an unrelated criminal investigation. They say that this time — after initially claiming he was in the room when DeGuzman shot herself — that he was actually in the bathroom, but he denied touching the gun. Hurd’s mother allegedly told police that he had confided in her that he had, in fact, handled the pistol after DeGuzman shot herself.

Finally, police say they calculated the trajectory of the gunshot, and believed it was fired from the bed. Nieves wrote that “based on the angel of the entrance wound and trajectory of the fired round I believe that it is physically impossible” for DeGuzman to have shot herself.

Hurd is being held without bail at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A shooter stood over a 16-year-old mother clutching her 10-month-old baby and pumped bullets into their heads in a brazen attack in a central California farming community that left six dead at a home linked to drugs and guns, a sheriff said Tuesday.

Tulare County Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said the teenager was fleeing the violence early Monday when the killers caught up to her outside the home in Goshen, a central California community of about 3,000 residents in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, and shot the young mother and her child “assassination-style.”

The other four victims ranged from 19 to 72 years old, including a grandmother who was shot as she slept. Their autopsies are expected to be completed later in the week.

Authorities said they were searching for two suspects and offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to their arrests.

“None of this was by accident,” Boudreaux said during a news conference Tuesday. “It was deliberate, intentional and horrific.”

Boudreaux walked back his earlier comments to reporters that the attack was likely a cartel hit, saying that investigators are also looking into whether it was gang violence.

“I am not eliminating that possibility,” the sheriff said. “These people were clearly shot in the head and they were also shot in places where the shooter would know that a quick death would occur … This is also similar to high-ranking gang affiliation and the style of executions that they commit.”

Law enforcement is familiar with the home, the sheriff said, citing gang activity there that “has routinely occurred in the past” without giving any specifics. He added that not everyone who was shot was a drug dealer or gang member — and said that among the victims believed to be innocent are the teen, her grandmother, and of course, the baby.

The sheriff’s department on Tuesday identified the victims as: Rosa Parraz, 72; Eladio Parraz, Jr., 52; Jennifer Analla, 49; Marcos Parraz, 19; Alissa Parraz, 16; and Nycholas Parraz, 10 months.

Boudreaux said “there was no reason” for the shooters to kill the young mother and her child.

“I know for a fact this 10-month-old baby was relying on the comfort of his mother. There was no reason for them to shoot that baby, but they did,” he said.

Samuel Pina said Alissa was his granddaughter and the baby, Nycholas, was his great-grandson.

“I can’t wrap my head around what kind of monster would do this,” he told The Associated Press on Monday.

Pina said Parraz and her baby were living with her father’s side of the family in Goshen, and that her dad’s uncle, her dad’s cousin, her grandmother and her great-grandmother were also killed.

He said the family is in shock.

“It comes in big waves,” he said.

Authorities received a call at 3:38 a.m. Monday about multiple shots being fired — so many that it initially seemed like an active shooter situation — at the residence in the town of Goshen, some 170 miles (273.59 kilometers) south of downtown Los Angeles.

It was later determined the person who made the call was someone hiding at the property. Deputies arrived seven minutes later and found two bodies outside the home in the street, and a third body at the doorstep, Boudreaux said.

Deputies found more victims inside the home, including the grandmother. Down the street they discovered the teen mom and her baby. A forensics investigation revealed she had tried to run away before the shooter caught up with her and stood over her and fired multiple rounds into her skull, Boudreaux said.

“It is very clear that this family was a target,” he said.

Three people survived and will be interviewed by authorities. They include a man who hid in the home as the killings happened.

“He was in such a state of fear that all he could do was hold the door, hoping he was not the next victim,” Boudreaux said.

On Jan. 3, a search warrant at the home led to the arrest of Eladio Parraz Jr., a convicted felon who was killed in the shooting Monday — though Boudreaux said Parraz Jr. was not the “initial intended target” and declined to elaborate. Parraz Jr., 52, had an extensive criminal record including driving recklessly to evade arrest, and possessing firearms and drugs, according to prison records.

The search warrant stemmed from a parole compliance check during which investigators found shell casings on the ground, the sheriff said. The occupants refused to let officials inside the home, Boudreaux said.

They returned with a search warrant and arrested Parraz Jr. after discovering ammunition, a rifle, a shotgun and methamphetamine in the home, court records show. He was released on bail four days later.

Rural California is no stranger to drug-related violence. In 2020, seven people were fatally shot in a small, rural Riverside County town where the property had been used for an illegal marijuana growing operation — a common practice in that area.

The following year, a man accidentally shot himself while working at his family’s illegal marijuana grow in Butte County’s Forbestown. His father and two brothers were accused of moving his body to prevent investigators from discovering the grow site.

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Associated Press writer Martha Mendoza in Santa Cruz contributed to this report. Researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York and Video Producer Javier Arciga in San Diego contributed to this report.

Amid dramatic ocean swells and drenching atmospheric rivers, a new report lays bare a hidden aspect of sea level rise that has been exacerbating flooding in the Bay Area.

The report, which was released Tuesday, maps areas that could flood from groundwater hovering just a few feet, or even inches below ground. This layer of water gets pushed upward as denser water from the ocean moves inland from rising tides. On its way up, even before the water breaks the surface, it can seep into the cracks of basements, infiltrate plumbing, or, even more insidiously, re-mobilize toxic chemicals buried underground.

Communities that consider themselves “safe” from sea level rise might need to think otherwise, said Kris May, a lead author of the report and founder of Pathways Climate Institute, a research-based consulting firm in San Francisco that helps cities adapt to climate change.

“I started working on sea level rise, then I went into extreme precipitation, and then groundwater … but it’s all connected,” May said. She noted that hot spots where the soil is already saturated with rising groundwater were some of the first to flood when a recent series of atmospheric rivers dumped record rainfall onto California: “These huge storms really highlight the magnitude of the risk.”

The report unfortunately does not include all Bay Area counties. May said they expect to publish updated groundwater level data for Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties in about a year.

The new findings are the result of an unprecedented joint effort by May, the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI), UC Berkeley and a wide-ranging team of regulators, building officials, and flood-control agencies to identify where the groundwater along the bay shoreline is close to, or already breaking, the surface. A set of searchable maps, available online to the public, zooms in on Alameda, Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties — the first of many jurisdictions that researchers hope will undergo this intensive data-refining process.

The maps build on a new but growing body of research. In 2020, another study led by the U.S. Geological Survey laid the groundwork for this issue along California’s 1,200-mile coast, and state toxic substances control officials have since started their own mapping efforts to better understand how rising groundwater might affect contaminated land.

Similar research into vulnerable communities in Southern California is now also being conducted by a team led by Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Northridge.

This emerging flood risk raises many tough questions, but the data so far make clear the need for urgent action.

“We really need to focus on where contaminants may be mobilized by rising groundwater, because that could have an immediate impact on a 6-year-old, or a pregnant woman, or someone who has extra vulnerability in their immune system,” said Kristina Hill, a UC Berkeley researcher who has been particularly concerned about underserved communities like Marin City and historically industrial areas like East Oakland, where much of the soil is contaminated. “This [remobilization] could be happening now while it’s wet outside.”

When talking about groundwater, there are two types to keep in mind: One, the kind researchers are now worried about, is the unconfined water that gathers in the pore spaces of soil very close to the surface. This is the water that runs off streets and soaks into the ground. The other type, confined in aquifers many hundreds of feet deep, is the water that we tap for drinking.

When the tide moves inland, the shallow freshwater tends to float on top of the denser saltwater — and gets pushed upward toward the surface as sea levels rise. Because the shallow groundwater is not consumed, few people have studied this layer of water in California.

Hill, who directs the Institute of Urban and Regional Development at UC Berkeley, first realized almost a decade ago that this shallow groundwater layer had been overlooked in sea level rise conversations. Together with May and Ellen Plane, who is now an environmental scientist at SFEI, she analyzed data from 10,000 wells across the Bay Area and concluded more than twice as much land could flood from groundwater as the ocean continued to rise.

Then, in a remarkable move to turn these first approximation studies into data that government agencies would actually use, the researchers called on the officials themselves to help fill in the data gaps. City and county staff tracked down geotechnical reports and other possibly useful records that had been archived in various (and often siloed) departments. They sifted through hundreds of PDFs and spreadsheets to compile all the underground data that had been gathered for construction permits and projects.

Public works staff then vetted the updated maps with their own observations — such as storm drains that back up during high tide and roads that tend to flood even when it’s not pouring.

Patterns emerged. Many of the communities most exposed to flooding were built along historical creeks or on top of filled-in wetlands. When you overlay 5.5 feet of sea level rise on the map, the water is projected to move back in to essentially every wetland area that has been filled.

Officials in San Francisco are already taking this data into account as they consider new building projects. Other cities and counties are starting to rethink their flood-protection options — a traditional levee or seawall, after all, would do nothing to stop the groundwater as it moves with the rising sea.

Ultimately, officials need to figure out what to do with all the contaminated sites along the bay that are still awaiting cleanup — or those that need to be further remediated, said Hill, who has been finalizing another set of maps that will show where, and in which direction, rising groundwater might remobilize harmful chemicals underground. The oft-used approach of “capping” a toxic waste site rather than actually removing the contamination from the soil, for example, may no longer be sufficient

Regulators at the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board have been following all this research with great interest and are already diving into the updated maps, said Assistant Executive Officer Lisa Horowitz McCann. The board recently ordered 16 bayfront landfills to account for groundwater rise in their long-term flood protection plans, and caseworkers are now going through hundreds of cases to figure out which sites need further action.

“This data further empowers — and actually legally supports — stronger actions that we can take,” Horowitz McCann said. “We’re looking at a bigger universe of cases now.”

Researchers hope to continue this mapping work for the rest of the Bay Area. Next up is Contra Costa County in the East Bay, where a number of historically contaminated sites are being considered for redevelopment along the industrialized shoreline of Richmond.

A lot more work also needs to be done to understand what the actual damage will look like for gas lines, septic systems, foundations and other buried infrastructure, said Patrick Barnard, whose research team at the U.S. Geological Survey has done extensive flood modeling that is used by officials across the state.

“We need to start merging this information with the engineering world,” he said.

“We built everything assuming the soil is dry… what does it mean to have it now be saturated all the time?”Barnard has also been studying what scientists are starting to call “compound extremes.”

What do we do when seawater is trying to push in during a high tide, at the same time our rivers and storm drains are trying to flush excess rainwater into the ocean, and the ground can’t absorb anything because the groundwater is also flooding?

“We looked at this in one case for the Napa River, and basically, your average annual winter storm could turn into the 100-year flood event if the ground is already saturated,” he said. “Add any amount of rain on top of it, even amounts that are not usually catastrophic … and they turn into catastrophic impacts.

”For Chris Choo, the planning manager for Marin County, helping the latest mapping effort has been eye-opening in more ways than one. She has spent years helping communities plan for climate change, and the challenges have only gotten more complicated the more each disaster seems to overwhelm the next.

“We went from drought, drought, drought and being really worried that we don’t have enough water, to suddenly, within two weeks, seeing the impacts of having way too much of it,” she said, noting not just the flooded roads that have kept her colleagues working around the clock, but also the powerful surf that ripped through much of California earlier this month and even split a pier in two.

“People still tend to think of these things as isolated terrible things, rather than as part of a collective shift … in what the future might hold,” she said. “We live in nature and too often think of ourselves as separate from it … but nature is still very much in charge.”

Staff writer John Woolfolk contributed to this report.

New rainfall totals show that no person alive has experienced a three-week period in the Bay Area as wet as these past 21 days. The last time it happened, Abraham Lincoln was president.

From Dec. 26 to Jan. 15, 17 inches of rain fell in downtown San Francisco. That’s the second-wettest three-week period at any time in San Francisco’s recorded history since daily records began in 1849 during the Gold Rush. And it’s more than five times the city’s historical average of 3.1 inches over the same time.

The only three-week period that was wetter in San Francisco — often used as the benchmark for Bay Area weather because it has the oldest records — came during the Civil War when a drowning 23.01 inches fell from Jan. 5 to Jan. 25, 1862, during a landmark winter that became known as “The Great Flood of 1862.”

“The rainfall numbers over the past three weeks just kept adding up. They became a blur,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services in Half Moon Bay, who compiled the totals. “We had a strong jet stream that was bringing in storms, one after another. It was hard along the way to separate the individual storms.”

So much rain fell since Christmas in Northern California that some cities, including Oakland, Stockton, Modesto and Livermore, already have reached their yearly average rainfall totals. In other words, if it didn’t rain another drop until October, they would still have a normal precipitation year.

The parade of soaking storms, which have caused flooding in the Central Valley, Salinas Valley and Santa Cruz Mountains, along with power outages, mudslides and at least 20 deaths statewide, left the Sierra Nevada with a statewide snowpack 251% of normal on Tuesday.

Light rain is expected Wednesday night, but otherwise forecasts call for dry conditions for much of the rest of January. River levels now are dropping.

“We’ve gotten so much water and so much snow,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “It’s going to help us dry out and dig out heading into late January. It’s really good news because it takes off the trajectory toward worsening flooding.”

For a sense of how much worse it has been, consider the winter of 1861-62.

Between November 1861 and January 1862, it rained so much that the Central Valley became a vast inland sea, 30 feet deep, for 300 miles. Leland Stanford, who had been elected governor, took a rowboat through the streets of Sacramento to reach his inauguration.

Warm storms on a massive snowpack that winter caused immense flooding, wiping farms, mills, bridges and in some case whole towns off the map. An estimated 4,000 people died, roughly 1% of California’s population at the time, and more than the death toll in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

Now, California has large dams and reservoirs that limit flooding in wet years. There also are thousands of miles of levees and pumps, weirs and other flood control projects that were not in place in the 1860s.

And despite the recent wet weeks, Northern California is nowhere near the final yearly rainfall total of 1861-62. San Francisco on Tuesday had 21.75 inches of rain since Oct. 1. That total would have to more than double in the coming months to reach the 49.27 inches that fell in 1861-62, or the 47.19 inches that fell in the second-wettest year in history, 1997-98.

Weather experts have become increasingly concerned that if another massive winter like 1861-62 hit — and tree rings and other historical records show they have occurred roughly every 100 to 200 years — millions of people could be trapped by floods, freeways could be shut for weeks, and the damage could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

A study last summer by scientists at UCLA found that the chances of such a series of huge storms, while still remote, have roughly doubled due to climate change. Climate change has warmed ocean waters, allowing more moisture to be absorbed in atmospheric river storms.

Swain, a co-author of that study, said that climate change is already increasing the amount of moisture in such storms by about 5%, and that will climb as temperatures continue to warm.

Very wet winters are nothing new in California. Since July 1, San Francisco has had the fifth most rainfall on record. But all four of the wetter periods were in the 1800s.

“California has always had big storms like this,” said Park Williams, an associate professor of geography at UCLA, whose research has shown that droughts and wildfires are becoming more severe due to warming. “Climate change can make them more intense. But we might have had a year this wet whether or not we had climate change. And 1862 proves that.”

None of the canines or felines were injured and they were taken into temporary custody by Contra Costa Animal Services Department officers,  authorities said.

Three residents of the two-story home on Barber Lane were able to get out on their own and one was taken to a hospital for smoke inhalation, Contra Costa County Fire Protection District spokesman Steve Hill said.

The fire started in the garage of the home about 11 a.m. and spread to the second floor, Hill said.  Flames and smoke were coming out of the house when firefighters got to the scene.

Firefighters discovered the animals when they made entry into the house and brought them outside, Hill said.

Hill said the fire was brought under control about 11:30 a.m.  No firefighters were injured.

The cause of the fire is under investigation. A damage figure was not immediately available.

Animal Services Lt. Alana Weissman,  said the dogs, including some puppies,  had been left in the care of the house residents about a week ago by their owner who lives out of the county. The owner was enroute to the house Tuesday afternoon to retrieve the dogs, she said.

She said animal services officers would remain on the scene to wait for the dogs’ owner to arrive.

She said officers  were “happy to come out and assist and give the animals a quick onceover to make sure they were healthy. They all look happy and healthy.”

The Tesla Model S that braked sharply and triggered an eight-car crash in San Francisco in November had the automaker’s controversial driver-assist software engaged at the time, according to data the federal government released Tuesday.

The Tesla Model S slowed to 7 mph on the highway at the time of the crash, according to the data. Publicly released video also showed the car moving into the far-left lane and braking abruptly.

The Tesla’s driver told authorities that the vehicle’s “full self-driving” software braked unexpectedly and triggered the pileup on Thanksgiving day. CNN Business was first to report last month the driver’s claim that “full self-driving” was active.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration then announced that it was sending a special crash investigation team to examine the incident. The agency typically conducts special investigations into about 100 crashes a year.

The pileup took place hours after Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that its “full self-driving” driver-assist system was available to anyone in North America who requested it and had paid for the option. Tesla had previously restricted access to drivers with high scores on its safety rating system.

“Full self-driving” is designed to keep up with traffic, steer in the lane and abide by traffic signals, but despite Tesla’s name for it, it requires an attentive human driver prepared to take full control of the car at any moment. It’s delighted some Tesla drivers but also alarmed others with its flaws. Drivers are warned on an in-car screen by Tesla when they install “full self-driving” that it “may do the wrong thing at the worst time.”

Tesla generally does not engage with the professional news media and did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

“We are proud of Autopilot’s performance and its impact on reducing traffic collisions. The benefit and promise of Autopilot is clear from the Vehicle Safety Report data that we have been sharing for 4 years,” Tesla said this month in an update to its vehicle safety data.

Traffic safety experts have long questioned the merits of Tesla’s findings, which show fewer crashes when the driver-assist technologies are active, because among other things they’re generally used on highways where crashes are already rarer.

Tesla’s driver-assist technologies, Autopilot and “full self-driving” are already being investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration following reports of unexpected braking that occurs “without warning, at random, and often repeatedly in a single drive,” the agency has said in a statement.

The agency has received hundreds of complaints from Tesla users. Some have described near crashes and concerns for their safety.

Bryan Reimer, an autonomous vehicle researcher with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab, told CNN Business the revelation that driver-assist technology was engaged raises questions about when NHTSA will act on its investigation, and what the future holds for Tesla’s driver-assist features.

“How many more crashes will there be before NHTSA releases findings?” Reimer said.

Reimer said it remains to be seen if there’s a recall of any Tesla driver-assist features, and what it means for the automaker’s future. Musk has said before the company would be “worth basically zero” if it doesn’t provide “full self-driving.”

Alkhem Session, 30, and Armond Hamilton, 35, pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter in the 2016 killing of 22-year-old Damien Traylor. They were both transferred to the state prison system on Nov. 16 from Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, records show.

Session and Hamilton were identified as two of the three people who attacked and shot Traylor outside an apartment on the 800 block of East 24th Street in Oakland on Nov. 4, 2016. One of Traylor’s friends told police that she, Traylor, and another man had travelled from Las Vegas to Oakland that day, and at about 9 a.m. the third friend stopped in that location and burglarized an apartment while she and Traylor slept in their Mercedes.

She told police they were awakened when three angry men confronted her and Traylor about the burglary. During this confrontation Traylor was beaten and shot. She later identified Session and Hamilton from police photo lineups, according to police testimony at the 2017 preliminary hearing. They were arrested about six weeks after the shooting.

The third suspect has not been charged, according to court records. Session and Hamilton will receive credit for the roughly six years they spent behind bars while the case was pending, and will be eligible for parole sometime in 2028.

Both Session and Hamilton are incarcerated at Wasco State Prison, roughly 250 miles from the Bay Area, records show.

Darrin “Mississippi” Lynch, 55, was transferred Dec. 23 to North Kern State Prison to begin serving his sentence. Last August, a Contra Costa jury convicted Lynch of murdering 47-year-old Andrew McCoy.

McCoy was shot and killed on the evening of May 6, 2019, on Shoreline Drive in Pittsburg. Prosecutors argued Lynch hid in a bush for two minutes waiting for McCoy to pass by, then yelled out, “Hey bro,” and shot him when he turned. Because of that, Lynch was convicted of a special circumstances enhancement of lying in wait, which made him eligible for life without parole.

Prosecutors didn’t spell out a clear motive, but a relative of McCoy testified she saw him arguing with Lynch a month before the shooting.

Lynch’s attorney argued during trial that prosecution witnesses were liars who were “spoon fed” testimony as part of a lazy police investigation. Lynch is appealing his conviction and sentence, a process that typically takes years.

The 220 passengers and all crew members were unharmed, according to the spokesperson. As of 11 a.m., the passengers were currently being rescued and being returned to the nearby Pleasanton station. The train was not derailed in the incident.

Service may be impacted throughout the day as crews work to clear the tracks before they can make determinations on what to do with the impacted train.

The five anonymous people were challenging a provision of Assembly Bill 173, which passed in 2021 and permits the sharing of data about firearm and ammunition purchases in California with “bona fide research institutions.”

The plaintiffs contend the law violates their rights under the Second and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which address gun ownership and equal protection under the law.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Larry Alan Burns in San Diego granted a request by Attorney General Rob Bonta to dismiss the suit.

Burns noted that AB 173 only permits sharing, under strict protocols, of information that the state already has about gun buyers and applicants for concealed-carry permits.

“The limited disclosure of private information for research purposes permitted by AB 173 doesn’t expose Plaintiffs to any novel risks or impose new burdens on them,” the ruling says.

Addressing the incident last year in which the state Justice Department publicly exposed personal information about applicants for concealed-carry permits, the ruling noted that none of it came from Stanford or UC Davis.

Speculation that such data could be hacked or deliberately disclosed has had no apparent “chilling effect” in the past on gun purchases, the ruling added.

So far, the two universities are the only institutions eligible to access the information, which includes gun owners’ names, addresses and ages. The database is to be used for studying and preventing gun violence, shooting accidents and suicide.

The plaintiffs have until Feb. 10 to file an amended complaint.