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Sheriff: Calif. shooter Rodger flew ‘under the radar’ when deputies visited him in April Sheriff: Calif. shooter Rodger flew ‘under the radar’ when deputies visited him in April
(about 5 hours later)
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said the college student who killed six people and himself in a murderous rampage Friday night in nearby Isla Vista was able to “fly under the radar” when his deputies visited the young man’s apartment just a month before the shootings. SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — In the months leading up to Friday night’s rampage, which left six victims and the killer dead and 13 others injured, there were warning signs that Elliot Rodger, a lonely and sexually frustrated college student, harbored violent tendencies.
Brown said Sunday morning that when sheriff’s deputies visited Elliot Rodger’s apartment on April 30, following a request from Rodger’s family to check on his welfare, Rodger appeared “rather quiet and timid.” In an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Brown said he was unsure of whether the deputies checked for weapons at the residence but said the authorities concluded Rodger did not present a threat. When some young women neglected to smile at him at a bus stop one day, Rodger wrote, he splashed them with his Starbucks latte. When he saw a cluster of undergraduates frolicking happily in a park another day, Rodger grew so jealous and angry that he loaded a Super Soaker water gun with orange juice and sprayed them.
Rodger “was able to make a very convincing story that there was no problem, that he wasn’t going to hurt himself or anyone else, and he just didn’t meet the criteria for any further intervention at that point,” Brown said. “Obviously, we certainly wish that we could turn the clock back and change some things, but at the time the deputies interacted with him, he was able to convince them that he was okay.” Rodger, who police say fatally shot himself after his killing spree Friday, had been receiving treatment for years from several psychologists and counselors. Last month, the 22-year-old wrote, his mother was so concerned about his well-being after seeing some of his videos on YouTube that she contacted mental-health officials, who dispatched sheriff’s deputies to check on him at his apartment near the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Brown also said a number of people injured in the shooting have recently been released from medical care. “There are two, I believe, that are still in serious condition, and the remainder are either in good or fair condition,” he said. “At this point, it doesn’t appear that there are any more that have life-threatening medical situations.” Had the officers sensed something awry during their April 30 visit, they might have searched Rodger’s home. They would have found his three semiautomatic handguns, dozens of rounds of ammunition and a draft of his 137-page memoir-manifesto. They would have read about his plot for a “Day of Retribution” — when, as Rodger wrote, he planned to “kill everyone in Isla Vista, to utterly destroy that wretched town.”
President Obama, who was visiting U.S. troops in Afghanistan on Sunday, was being updated on developments and had been briefed by Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterroism, the White House said. But the deputies did not look. They concluded that Rodger seemed “quiet and timid . . . polite and courteous,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“The president and first lady’s thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends who lost a loved one as a result of the horrific shooting,” said White House assistant press secretary Bobby Whithorne. “The president will continue to be updated as new information becomes available.” So they left and never returned.
On Friday, Rodger, a 22-year-old college student, taped a chilling video vowing a “day of retribution” against women who had sexually shunned him, then went on a murderous rampage in Isla Vista, close to the University of California at Santa Barbara. He killed six people, including three men whom police discovered stabbed to death in Rodger’s Isla Vista apartment. “He was able to make a very convincing story that there was no problem, that he wasn’t going to hurt himself or anyone else, and he just didn’t meet the criteria for any further intervention at that point,” Brown said. “Obviously, we certainly wish that we could turn the clock back and change some things, but at the time the deputies interacted with him, he was able to convince them that he was okay.”
Rodger then shot three university students to death and injured 13 people, including four struck by his black BMW as he careened across town exchanging gunfire with sheriff’s deputies. Simon Astaire, a friend speaking on behalf of the Rodger family, told the Los Angeles Times that minutes before the shooting Friday, Rodger e-mailed his manifesto to his mother and his therapist. His parents frantically raced to Isla Vista, but by the time they arrived Rodger already had killed six people and taken his own life.
He crashed his vehicle into a parked car, and when the deputies pulled him out and handcuffed him, they could clearly see that he was dead from a gunshot wound to the head, likely self-inflicted, Brown said Saturday night at a news conference. Astaire told the newspaper that the family did not know Elliot had an affinity for guns, and that he was “fundamentally withdrawn,” unlike the confidence he displayed in his YouTube videos.
The video, uploaded Friday to YouTube, and a separate, 141-page manifesto written by Rodger and detailing his plans suggest that “this atrocity was a premeditated mass murder,” Brown said. On Saturday, authorities identified the three of the victims: Katherine Breann Cooper, 22, of Chino Hills, Calif.; Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, 19, of Westlake Village, Calif.; and Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, 20, of Los Osos, Calif. On Sunday night, authorities identified the three remaining victims killed: Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, of San Jose; George Chen, 19, also of San Jose; and Weihan Wang, 20, of Fremont, Calif. All three were UCSB students and were found dead with multiple stab wounds in Rodger’s apartment. Hong and Chen are listed as tenants along with Rodger on the apartment’s lease. Authorities have not determined whether Wang was another roommate or was visiting the home.
The mass murder joins a long list of recent incidents — including in Newtown, Conn.; Rodger’s melee through this sunny beach town was many months in the making, and his mental state and desolation worsened throughout his adolescence, according to his writings.
Aurora, Colo.; and the Mall in Columbia, Md. — in which a young man, mentally disturbed, has tried to shoot as many people as possible to avenge some perceived slight or societal injustice. But signs of Rodger’s troubles, which grew increasingly frequent in recent months, failed to trigger decisive action from his mental-health providers, his roommates, his longtime friends or sheriff’s deputies, who had three separate encounters with him over the past 10 months.
Once again, there is the element of theatricality. In this case it took the form of the self-pitying “selfie” video in which Rodger, sitting behind the wheel of his luxury car, discussed his planned shooting spree as if he were a loquacious villain in a Hollywood movie. Here on UCSB’s serene campus, hugging the Pacific Ocean, some students blamed the senseless slaughter on a systematic breakdown.
“Hi. Elliot Rodger here,” the video began. “Well, this is my last video. It all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day in which I will have my revenge against humanity. Against all of you.” “This was premeditated,” David Ash, a 19-year-old freshman, said after Saturday night’s candlelight vigil. “He had been seeing psychologists. It definitely should’ve been prevented. But you can’t be angry. We’re just sad and mournful.”
In the video, which quickly spread across the Internet on Saturday, Rodger vows to enter the “hottest sorority” at the university and “slaughter every single spoiled stuck-up blond slut I see inside there.” He snickers as he ponders the crime and then says he will take to the streets of Isla Vista and “slay” every person he sees. Criminal forensic experts and mental-health professionals studying the episode said authorities missed important clues about his behavior. And in Washington, Obama administration officials and lawmakers renewed their calls to toughen the nation’s gun laws.
The gunman had a Hollywood connection: He was the son of Peter Rodger, an art photographer who served as the assistant director on the first “Hunger Games” installment. Peter Rodger, in turn, is the son of the late British photojournalist George Rodger, co-founder of Magnum Photos. Philip Schaenman, who studies mass murders and runs a public safety research firm, said authorities should have noticed the “acceleration of red flags.”
Elliot Rodger’s Facebook page is striking for the number of images of Rodger himself — including many head shots, as if he were posing for publicity stills. One image shows him with his father at the premiere of one of the “Hunger Games” movies. There are images of landscapes and fancy cars, but few other people, or any sign of close friends. “They get rejected by girls, they visit psychologists and social workers, their roommates say they act weirdly — taken individually, these things don’t matter much,” Schaenman said. “It’s the acceleration that’s being missed.”
He uploaded numerous videos to YouTube showing him driving his car on California roads. In one posted Friday, Rodger winks at the camera while listening to Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know.” Experts drew comparisons between Rogers and other mass killers, including Adam Lanza, who in 2012 fatally shot 20 small children in Newtown, Conn.; and Seung Hui Cho, who in 2007 killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University. Like Rodger, Lanza and Cho killed themselves.
“I consider myself a sophisticated, polite gentleman, unlike most boys my age,” he wrote in his Google+ profile. “My father is of British descent, and my mother is of Asian descent, so that makes me a Eurasian. I enjoy hiking, exercising, watching sunsets, traveling, cars, fashion, going to nice restaurants, and going to parties.” “It’s deja vu all over again,” said Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He added: “We need to look at identifying people early for these disorders, rather than just identifying violence. This can be a condition that hides in plain sight.”
But in a post in April, he bemoaned his loneliness in Santa Barbara: “As I’ve said many times, a beautiful environment can be the darkest hell if you have to experience it all alone, especially while having to watch other men walking around with their girlfriends. I wish girls were attracted to me. I don’t know why they aren’t.” But James Alan Fox, a noted criminologist at Northeastern University, said, “There is no way that we can identify would-be mass murderers in advance.”
The Associated Press reported that Alan Shifman, an attorney for Peter Rodger, issued a statement on behalf of the Rodger family identifying Elliot as the shooter and offering “their deepest condolences to all of the victims’ families involved.” “People call them ‘red flags,’ but they’re yellow flags,” he added. “They only turn red after the blood is spilled.”
Shifman said the family had been concerned by the young man’s erratic behavior in recent weeks and that law enforcement officials had interviewed him and found him to be “polite and kind.” After Richard Martinez, the father of Michaels-Martinez, told reporters Saturday that his son died because of “craven, irresponsible politicians and [the] NRA,” several lawmakers said Sunday they hoped the Isla Vista rampage revives the dormant gun-control debate.
Shifman said the younger Rodger was a student at Santa Barbara City College. He said Rodger had been seeing multiple therapists, and that a social worker had contacted police recently about him. Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said that the shooting underscores the need to expand background checks for firearm sales and enhance mental-health screenings. “This tragedy demonstrates once again the need to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill,” King said in an interview.
Brown, the county sheriff, said authorities had had three encounters with Rodger, including a domestic assault case last year and a strange incident earlier this year when Rodger made a citizen’s arrest of his roommate for stealing three candles valued at $22. In his manifesto — titled “My Twisted World” and distributed publicly shortly before Friday night’s shooting — Rodger described in graphic detail his plan to seek vengeance for his perceived societal slights. He said he wanted to target “good looking people” because he believed they were fulfilled sexually while he unhappily was not.
After Rodger’s family requested that officials check on his welfare, deputies on April 30 visited the young man, who, though complaining about his social life, seemed sufficiently pleasant that the deputies felt no need to make a report, Brown said Saturday. “He was polite and courteous,” the sheriff said. “I have lived a life of pain and suffering, and it was time to bring that pain to people who actually deserve it,” Rodger wrote.
Rodger owned three 9mm semiautomatic handguns, all legally purchased in his own name, and he had enough ammunition for a massacre — 41 magazines with 10 rounds each, Brown said. Two of the guns were Sig Sauer P226s and one was a Glock 34. Rodger tells the story of his life: born in London to a British aristocrat-turned-Hollywood-director and his Asian wife; relocated to the Los Angeles area as a young boy; lived a fulfilling childhood but was distraught by his parents’ divorce; felt ostracized as puberty hit and he struggled to woo girls; moved to Isla Vista and enrolled at Santa Barbara City College in search of a fresh start.
Police received the first report of gunfire at 9:27 p.m. Friday in Isla Vista, a village surrounded by the university that is about 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Rodger also describes his relationships, including with James Ellis, who grew up down the street in Topanga, Calif., and was Rodger’s best friend for 14 years. James’s father, Arte Ellis, reached by phone Sunday, said his son was Rodger’s “only friend.”
As Brown related the sequence of events: “There are so many others like Elliot,” Arte Ellis said. “There’s a lot of really, really lonely people — people that feel left out of life and estranged. And it creates in­cred­ibly intense emotional worlds for them that are not expressed outwardly to anybody, and it can be explosive.”
Rodger first killed the three men at his apartment. Next, he stopped at the Alpha Phi sorority. He pounded on the door violently for two minutes, but no one answered. He eventually retreated across the street. Last July, shortly before his 22nd birthday, Rodger went to a house party in Isla Vista in what he wrote was a last-ditch effort to “give women and humanity one more chance to accept me and give me a chance to have a pleasurable youth.” If he returned home that night “a lonely virgin,” he wrote, he would plan his “Day of Retribution.”
Moments later, he shot three female students who had been walking down the sidewalk. Two died, and a third who suffered multiple gunshot wounds survived. The two women who were killed were identified by Brown as Katherine Cooper, 22, and Veronika Weiss, 19, both UCSB students. At the party, he drank heavily and felt out of place. A he stood outside the house with other undergraduates, he wrote, a “dark, hate-fueled rage overcame my entire being, and I tried to push as many of them as I could from the 10-foot ledge. My main target was the girls. I wanted to punish them for talking to the obnoxious boys instead of me.”
The gunman then began driving wildly around town, firing into businesses and at people on the sidewalk. He killed a UCSB student who was a customer at a deli. Other party guests kicked and punched Rodger, and he ended up in the hospital, where on July 21, 2013, he had his first encounter with sheriff’s deputies. Rodger wrote in his manifesto that he lied to the police, alleging that other men pushed him off the ledge. The other men told police that Rodger was the aggressor. Without any evidence, the case was dismissed.
“He slowed down and drove by the store and shot into the store and drove away,” said Michael Hassan, 33, owner of I.V. Deli Mart. He said six or seven shots came through the deli’s glass windows. “A customer is dead. . . . You never hear of drive-by shootings in Santa Barbara.” Rodger’s crossed paths with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office again Jan. 15, when he accused his roommate of stealing three candles, valued at $22. Rodger tried to make a citizen’s arrest.
Cayla Bergman, 19, a sophomore who was working at a pizza restaurant, said it had been a typical Friday night until she heard “booms.” By April 30, when sheriff’s deputies met with Rodger for a third time, his plan for his “ultimate showdown in the streets of Isla Vista” was well underway. When several deputies arrived at his apartment to interrogate him after the call from mental-health officials, Rodger wrote, “the biggest fear I had ever felt in my life overcame me.”
“I hear a lot of fireworks go off, so I didn’t process it at the time, until everyone ran into the store and said, ‘Someone got shot! Someone got shot!’ It was really scary,” she said. If the deputies had searched his room, Rodger wrote, “that would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over. When they left, the biggest wave of relief swept over me.”
Rodger exchanged gunfire with sheriff’s deputies, many of them on foot, and continued to shoot at pedestrians as he drove through the community. He was hit by a bullet in the hip before crashing his car and apparently committing suicide. Astaire told CNN that Rodger’s parents now believe the sheriff’s deputies’ visit to their son’s apartment in April was a “missed opportunity.”
When investigators went to his apartment afterward, they found the three men stabbed to death. Sgt. Mark Williams of the sheriff’s office defended the deputies, saying the law would not have allowed them to confiscate Rodger’s guns unless he had documented mental-health problems or a record of violence.
“It was a pretty horrific crime scene,” Brown said. “He had some emotional trouble,” Williams said in an interview. “He was upset. We all get upset sometimes. . . . We have to have a pretty strong belief to take someone’s rights away — the right to bear arms, the freedom.”
Christopher Ross Martinez, a 20-year-old university student, died after being shot in the deli. His father, Richard Martinez, held a brief, emotional news conference late Saturday. This, said Carolyn Reinach Wolf, a New York-based lawyer who specializes in mental-health cases, is not enough.
“Our family has a message for every parent out there: You don’t think it’ll happen to your child until it does,” the grieving father said. “His death has left our family lost and broken. Why did Chris die? Chris died because of craven, irresponsible politicians and NRA. They talk about gun rights. What about Chris’s right to live? When will this insanity stop?” “If the police show up and the person pulls it together, that shouldn’t be the end of it and it shouldn’t be acceptable,” she said. “We’re seeing the ball dropped when an individual is somebody of concern, but looks and sounds okay on the surface.”
According to Stephen Kaminski, trauma director at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, seven of the wounded were still in the hospital’s trauma center as of Saturday night. Costa reported from Washington. Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
This is not the first mass killing in Isla Vista: In 2001, David Attias, the son of a film director, ran over five people in a car, killing four of them. He was convicted of second-degree murder, then ruled insane and sentenced to a mental hospital.
The university community gathered Saturday night on campus for a prayer vigil.
Achenbach and Costa reported from Washington. Mark Berman, Casey Capachi, Adam Goldman and Julie Tate contributed to this report.