Video Rant, Then Deadly Rampage in California Town

International New York Times | 24 May 2014

Deputy sheriffs inspect the vehicle of the shooting suspect. Credit Diego Robles for The New York Times

ISLA VISTA, Calif. — A gunman who documented his rage against women for rejecting him killed six people and wounded 13 others during a spasm of terror on Friday night, some stabbed to death in his apartment and others methodically shot while he drove through the crowded streets of this small college town.

The gunman, identified by the police as Elliot O. Rodger, 22, was found dead with a bullet wound to his head after his black BMW crashed into a parked car following two shootouts with sheriff’s deputies near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara; the police said it appeared that he had shot himself. A semiautomatic handgun was recovered from the car, the police said.

Later Saturday, the police said they had recovered the bodies of three men from the apartment complex where Mr. Rodger lived. All three had been stabbed.

Barely 24 hours before the killing spree, Mr. Rodger had posted a video on YouTube in which he sat behind the steering wheel of his black BMW and for seven minutes recounted the isolation and sexual frustrations of his life, pausing for an occasional self-mocking laugh.

Santa Barbara

Mr. Rodger posted other videos expressing his frustration, and a lawyer for the family told reporters that they had expressed their concern about some of these videos to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office. The police confirmed that sheriff’s deputies were sent to check on Mr. Rodger’s well-being on April 30, but found no reason to involuntarily commit him for a mental health evaluation. The police also reported two other encounters with him, including once when he reported that he had been attacked.

In his last video, Mr. Rodger spoke of the women who rejected him, the happiness he saw around him, and his life as a virgin at the age of 22. He called his message “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” and said it was the last video he would post.

“It all has to come to this,” Mr. Rodger said, his voice at once placid and chilling. “Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day I will have my retribution against humanity. Against all of you. For the last eight years of my life ever since I hit puberty, I’ve been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires. All because girls have never been attracted to me. In those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness.”

“I do not know why you girls aren’t attracted to me,” he said, “But I will punish you all for it.”

On Friday, at 9:27 p.m. in this college town just up the coast from Santa Barbara, the police said that Mr. Rodger launched his revenge.

Investigators spent Saturday working nine crime scenes along Mr. Rodger’s deadly route. Late in the afternoon, they added a 10th — his apartment.

In addition to his chilling video, Mr. Rodger had prepared a 140-page manifesto in which he laid out his plan for the killings, starting with luring potential victims to his apartment.

“We have obtained and are analyzing written and videotaped evidence that suggests that this atrocity was a premeditated mass murder,” Bill Brown, the Santa Barbara County sheriff, said at a news conference early Saturday.

Mr. Rodger’s decision to target young women — in his video, he spoke bitterly of “stuck-up blond” women who had refused his advances, preferring the “obnoxious young brutes” he saw walking along the beach or on the tree-lined campus — was particularly chilling. On what should have been a festive Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer, the day was instead filled with images of women sobbing; in one case, a young woman recounted how a bullet had narrowly passed her head.

Kyle Sullivan, 19, a student at Santa Barbara City College, told CNN that he saw three women sprawled in the grass in front of the Alpha Phi sorority house. Only one of them appeared conscious and she had called her mother on her cellphone and told her in a frantic voice she was not sure if she would survive, he said.

In his videos, a blog, his Facebook, and the manifesto, Mr. Rodger — the son of a Hollywood director — portrayed himself as a loner in a pleasant and perpetually sunny college town along the California coast. He spoke of going to beaches and watching with rage as couples held hands or kissed, of escaping to serenity on the local golf course because he knew, he said, he would never see a couple there.

The gunman is believed to be Elliot Rodger, 22, who in a YouTube video said he was sexually frustrated and about to go on “a mission of retribution.”

He posted on sites where other young men shared their rages and frustrations of being sexual virgins, and complained about the difficult of meeting women to his classmates. He referred to himself as an “INCEL,” shorthand for “involuntary celibate.”

“Why do girls hate me so much?” was the name of one of the videos he posted.

His agitation appeared to grow over the last few days.

Mr. Rodger’s father, Peter Rodger, who is British and lives in Los Angeles, has written screenplays and was the second unit director on the film “The Hunger Games.” His son boasted, on his Google Plus page, of attending the world premiere of that and other films.

The family, through their lawyer, Alan Shifman, issued a statement expressing their sympathy for the victims.

“We offer our deepest compassion and sympathy to the families involved in this terrible tragedy,” said the statement, read by Mr. Shifman. “We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain and our hearts go out to everyone involved.”

Mr. Rodger was, from a young age, emotionally disturbed, particularly since the divorce of his parents when he was in first grade, family friends said. Patrick Connors, 23, who was his classmate at Crespi Carmelite High school, a private Catholic boy’s school in Los Angeles, said Mr. Rodger had left school before graduation. He said that Mr. Rodger was treated by his classmates as an oddball, and students mocked him and played jokes on him; once when Mr. Rodger fell asleep in his seat, classmates taped his head to his desk, Mr. Connors said.

“We said right from the get-go that that kid was going to lose it someday and just freak out,” he said. “Everyone made fun of him and stuff.”

George Duarte, who attended a mathematics laboratory with Mr. Rodger at the college, said he complained about his roommates for having a bong in the room, but mostly about girls.

“He kept talking about how annoying the girls were,” Mr. Durate said. “He was stuck on the same topic.” Kathy Bloeser, a family friend of Mr. Rodger’s as he was growing up — Elliot and his sister would play at her house — said he was “emotionally troubled” and traumatized by the trouble at home.

“We used to have him over here almost every day with his sister,” she said. “He would hide. He wouldn’t say much, I think he was bullied a bit.”

Students from the university. Credit Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters

She said that Mr. Rodger had recently posted on Facebook that he was a virgin and was met with a barrage of taunts, so he took the post down. “He was so tired of being made fun of,” she said.

The six people killed, as well as Mr. Rodger, were declared dead at crime scenes scattered across the grid of streets the gunman traveled. At least seven people were hospitalized, including one with life-threatening injuries, the authorities said.

The identities of the victims began trickling out through the day, some in distraught postings on Facebook by devastated parents. “Veronika Weiss. 1995-2014. Innocent victim of the Goleta shooting rampage last night,” read a posting by Bob Weiss. Another was Katie Cooper, whose death was confirmed by her mother, Kelli, in a telephone conversation before she broke down in tears and said she could not talk anymore.

 

The father of Christopher Martinez, one of the men killed in the shootings, emerged to offer a brief and emotionally wrenching denunciation of gun advocates and policies that he said lead to the death of his child.

“This death has left our family lost and broken,” the father, Richard Martinez, said. “Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven irresponsible politicians and the N.R.A. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live. When will this insanity stop?”

Christopher Martinez appeared to have died in front of the IV Deli Mart on Pardall Road, a Friday night gathering spot where Mr. Rodger stopped and opened fire. Witnesses said bystanders, confused at first by the pop-pop-pop of gunshots, began diving to the ground or running for cover.

Ian Papa, 20, a student at Santa Barbara City College, said he had been walking to get a slice of pizza when he encountered the gunman. He said the car was driven swiftly and wildly through the streets, at one point knocking down two bicyclists and mangling the leg of one of them.

“We saw a BMW driving slowly, and then in seconds it hit the accelerator — it was going 60-plus,” Mr. Papa said Saturday morning. “He hit two bikes. One he barely grazed. The other was plowed down. The biker went through the windshield, and the driver took off.”

Carolina Bowles, 19, a freshman at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said she had been in her apartment complex when she heard a barrage of gunfire.

“We looked out the window, and three girls were running, ducked down, trying to get back down into the store,” she said.

The police repeatedly described Mr. Rodger as a mentally disturbed person.

“It’s obviously the work of a madman,” Sheriff Brown said.

The university is about 10 miles from downtown Santa Barbara and has just over 22,000 students. On his blog, Mr. Rodger said he lived in Isla Vista. Santa Barbara sheriff’s deputies, wearing latex gloves and sterile coverings over their feet, pulled dozens of bags of evidence out of an apartment complex just a couple blocks from the site of the shooting. The bags were labeled “handwritten journal,” “2 machetes, 1 knife, 1 hammer,” and “Bags of empty Ammo boxes found under bed.”

Correction: May 24, 2014
An earlier version of this article misstated one word in the name of the college where Elliot Rodger was a student. It is Santa Barbara City College, not Santa Barbara Community College. ​In addition, a picture caption with this article misstated the name of the college campus near the shooting. As the article correctly notes,​ ​it is the University of California, Santa Barbara — not ​​the University of Santa Barbara.​