A method has been developed allowing the direct inversion of near source strong motion records to obtain an estimate of the seismic source from a moment tensor. The inversion is implemented in the time domain, and the least-square method is used to estimate the source mechanism. Significant verification using synthetic seismograms including artificial noise was done. The inversion of synthesized data suggests that with this method it may be possible to retrieve the source information of local earthquakes using only a few high-quality, three-component seismograms. This method has been applied to the study of the source parameters of the ML=5.4 event of May 28, 1992 in southeastern Taiwan using only the strong motion data recorded at Chengkung. The retrieved-source mechanism is in agreement with the distribution of the few observed first P motion of short-period network data and is similar to the CMT solution. The advantage of this method is its capability for fast determination of the source mechanisms for locally felt events using strong motion data from the currently distributed seismic stations.