Finalist: Los Angeles Times, by Staff
For a quick but thoughtful response to a shooting spree, beginning with minute-by-minute digital storytelling and evolving into print coverage that delved into the impact of the tragedy.
Nominated Work
May 24, 2014
By Adolfo Flores
A series of drive-by shootings in the Isla Vista area near UC Santa Barbara on Friday night left seven people dead, including a man believed to have carried out the attacks, and seven injured.
The man believed to be the shooter was found dead inside his vehicle with a gunshot wound after engaging in two separate gunfights with deputies, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s office said. It’s unknown if the gunshot was self-inflicted or if the suspect was shot by authorities.
The deadly shooting spree started at 9:27 p.m. in Isla Vista. As deputies were tending to the injured in the first round of shootings, reports of gunfire in several other areas of the college community were reported.
Six minutes after the first 911 call came in, the unidentified man began shooting at deputies, who returned fire. He fled and seconds later was spotted by another deputy, prompting another firefight.
He then took off down Del Playa Drive and crashed into a parked vehicle, the sheriff’s office said. When deputies approached the vehicle they discovered the man was dead and recovered a semi-automatic handgun.
He has been preliminary identified, but his name hasn’t been released pending positive identification, authorities said. Investigators believe he acted alone and they’re currently analyzing video and written evidence that suggests the killings were premeditated.
The seven injured people are being treated for gunshot wounds or traumatic injuries; their conditions are unknown. At least one of them has undergone surgery.
The identities of the six people killed, possibly by the suspected shooter, are not being released until next of kin are notified.
Authorities are investigating nine crime scenes and are interviewing a large number of witnesses, sheriff officials said.
Nikolaus Becker was eating outside the Habit, 888 Embarcadero Del Norte, near the scene when the first set of shots was fired about 9:30 p.m. At first he thought it was firecrackers. A group of three to five police officers who were nearby started to casually walk toward the sounds, said Becker, but ran when a second round of shots broke out.
"That's when they yelled at us to get inside and take cover," Becker said.
A BMW took a sharp turn in front of the Habit, Becker said, and moments later a third round of shots was heard. Becker and his friends moved toward the restaurant's kitchen but were told to wait in the seating area by employees.
He estimates there were at least 13 to 15 shots total at three locations. The locations were about 100 yards from one another.
Becker said one of his friends who came into the restaurant after the shootings saw a police officer trying to resuscitate a bloody male who was hit.
Another woman came into the Habit crying and said her sorority sister had also been struck.
When Becker emerged from the restaurant about 30 minutes later, he saw three light-colored body bags.
"It was chaotic and there's a lot of rumors flying around," Becker said. "It was so strange, afterwards there was still people outside riding their bikes. One guy was doing his homework."
Witness Xavier Mozejewski told KEYT-TV that the incident resembled an "old Western shootout."
TV footage showed ambulances and police cars swarming the scene. Witnesses said multiple shots were fired from a car and that several people were hit. The Daily Nexus, the campus newspaper, reported a witness saying the car hit several pedestrians.
May 24, 2014
By Richard Winton and Adolfo Flores
Police said they are analyzing a video that might be connected to the shooting deaths of six people in Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara on Friday night.
A series of drive-by shootings left seven people dead, including a man believed to have carried out the attacks, and seven injured.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said the video titled "Elliott Rodger's retribution" "appears to be connected at this time." The video appears to have been done by a young man who identified himself on his blog as a student in Santa Barbara.
“I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one, the true alpha male,” the man says on the video, sitting in a car.
On the six-minute video, he talks about feeling alienated and rejected by women.
“I will be a god compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals, and I will slaughter you like animals. I hate all of you. Humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species," he says.
"Yes, after I have annihilated every single girl in the sorority house I'll take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there."
Authorities said they are looking at videotaped as well as written evidence related to the shooting but would not elaborate.
The deadly shooting spree started at 9:27 p.m. in Isla Vista. As deputies were tending to the injured in the first round of shootings, reports of gunfire in several other areas of the college community were reported.
Six minutes after the first 911 call came in, an unidentified man began shooting at deputies, who returned fire. He fled and seconds later was spotted by another deputy, prompting another firefight.
He then took off down Del Playa Drive and crashed into a parked vehicle, the sheriff’s office said. When deputies approached the vehicle they discovered the man was dead and recovered a semi-automatic handgun.
He has been preliminarily identified, but his name hasn’t been released pending positive identification, authorities said. Investigators believe he acted alone and they’re currently analyzing video and written evidence that suggests the killings were premeditated.
The seven injured people are being treated for gunshot wounds or traumatic injuries; their conditions are unknown. At least one of them has undergone surgery.
Authorities are investigating nine crime scenes and are interviewing a large number of witnesses, sheriff officials said.
Nikolaus Becker was eating outside the Habit, 888 Embarcadero Del Norte, near the scene when the first set of shots was fired about 9:30 p.m. At first he thought it was firecrackers. A group of three to five police officers who were nearby started to casually walk toward the sounds, said Becker, but ran when a second round of shots broke out.
May 24, 2014
By Kate Mather, Matt Stevens and Stephen Ceasar
A parent of a college student suspected of a shooting rampage in Isla Vista near UC Santa Barbara had become concerned about videos he was posting and alerted police a month ago, according to a source close to the family.
The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the family of Elliot Rodger made the report to police last month. It was unclear which videos they saw because Rodger appeared to have posted several on YouTube in which he talks about his alienation and threatens violence.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department officials investigating the Friday night shooting that left seven dead, including the gunman, said they are looking at a video titled "Elliot Rodger's Retribution” in which a young man who identifies himself on his blog as a student in Santa Barbara vows to kill people. That video was posted Friday shortly before the rampage. It has since been removed from the site.
“I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one, the true alpha male,” the man says on the video, sitting in a car.
In the video, he talks about feeling alienated and rejected by women.
“I will be a god compared to you. You will all be animals. You are animals, and I will slaughter you like animals. I hate all of you. Humanity is a disgusting, wretched, depraved species," he says.
"Yes, after I have annihilated every single girl in the sorority house I'll take to the streets of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there."
In the video he says: "For the last eight years of my life, 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. Girls gave their affection and sex and love to other men, never to me."
A law enforcement source told The Times that Elliot Rodger is the suspect in the Isla Vista shootings.
Rodger’s father, Peter, said through an attorney that he believes Elliot Rodger is the suspect. “I cannot confirm that but we believe it,” the attorney, Alan Shifman, told reporters gathered in front of the family's home in Woodland Hills.
“Police would not tell us with 100% certainty” that it’s his son, the attorney said. He said he hasn’t seen the video allegedly made by Elliot Rodger in which he talks about his plans. But “from what I understand, it was disturbing,” Shifman said.
Peter Rodger was an assistant director on the 2012 film “The Hunger Games.” He also directed a 2009 documentary, “Oh My God,” in which various people were asked to answer the question, “What is God?”
“The Rodger’s family offers our deepest compassion and sympathies to the families involved in this terrible tragedy," the family said in a statement. "We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain and our hearts go out to everyone involved.”
Neighbor Boris Bakalinsky said he knows the father and his son. He said the elder Rodger had lived in the neighborhood for about 20 years.
“The boy, it’s just shocking, we just never expected it,” Bakalinsky said.
May 25, 2014
Student dies of gunshot after killing 6, wounding 13
By Adolfo Flores, Kate Mather and Scott Gold
At first, when it began, it was lost to the soundtrack of another Friday night in this bluff-top college town: screeching tires and what sounded like fireworks.
But then — shattered glass. Sirens. Screams.
Within 10 minutes, it was done — seven dead, 13 wounded, a tormented young man slumped at the wheel of a shattered BMW, a gunshot wound to his head, three semiautomatic handguns and more than 400 rounds of ammunition at his side.
Behind him, there were 10 distinct crime scenes in a single square mile — skateboarders and bikers run down and tossed into the air; bullets bursting through the windows of shops; police officers tackling pedestrians and hauling them indoors to protect them; two young women dying on the lawn of a sorority.
For months, Elliot Rodger, 22, had posed behind the wheel of that same BMW, posting videos of himself on social media.
The son of a Hollywood director, he was born to a rarefied world, but he had been suffocating in sadness and self-pity, lashing out at those he felt had rejected him. To the popular kids, the sorority sisters, "the brutes," he had promised "a day of retribution."
On Friday, the authorities said, it arrived. Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown called the rampage "premeditated mass murder," the "work of a madman."
A 137-page diatribe Rodger emailed to an online acquaintance before the killings appeared to shore up those contentions.
In the document, Rodger envisioned a future in which sexuality no longer existed, and women were housed in concentration camps. He pledged to do "everything in my power to destroy everything I cannot have."
"I am the true victim in all of this," he added. "I am the good guy. Humanity struck at me first."
Rodger's family, through an attorney, released a statement offering its "deepest compassion and sympathy to the families involved in this terrible tragedy."
"We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain, and our hearts go out to everybody involved," the family said.
On Saturday, marine clouds clung to the terraced bluffs of Santa Barbara County, creating a drab and eerie tableau. Bleary residents walked quietly through the streets, peering through bullet holes in windows, watching as scores of law enforcement officers combed through the residential neighborhood where the BMW crashed.
The still was punctuated by moments of heartbreak. The father of one victim, 20-year-old Christopher Martinez, collapsed in the arms of a police chaplain after he described how his family was "lost and broken."
Martinez, a sophomore at UC Santa Barbara, was an English major and planned to attend law school. He was shot and killed when he went to a convenience store for a snack, 45 minutes after speaking with his father on the phone.
"You don't think it will happen to your child, until it does," said his father, Richard Martinez.
The elder Martinez lashed out at gun-rights advocates and politicians who won't stand up to them. He held in his hands a photo of his son as a child, smiling in a baseball uniform.
Elliot Rodger saw numerous therapists, according to his family, and was on the autism spectrum.
He posted videos decrying the "cruelty of humanity" and recently made a "citizen's arrest" after accusing a roommate of stealing three candles with a value of $22.
Separately, just a month ago, family members asked sheriff's deputies to check on his welfare. When they arrived, the sheriff said, officers interviewed him and found him to be polite and lucid.
Hidden in his bedroom were handguns Rodger legally purchased from licensed dealers in Goleta, Oxnard and Burbank, authorities said. Investigators also recovered 41 10-round magazines — more than 400 unused bullets — from Rodger's car.
"They talk about gun rights. What about Chris' right to live?" Richard Martinez shouted, his shoulders shuddering with grief. "When will this insanity stop? We don't have to live like this."
Brown, the Santa Barbara County sheriff, said the violence unfolded like this:
Before his rampage through Isla Vista, Rodger stabbed and killed three people inside his two-story, charcoal-colored apartment building, where he lived in No. 7. It was, the sheriff said, "a horrific crime scene."
At about 9:30 p.m. Friday, he drove to the Alpha Phi sorority house and banged aggressively on the door.
The events were unfolding just as Rodgers had said in his videos and documents. He would kill people quietly at first, at his home, and then go to a sorority house to "slaughter" women.
"Fortunately, no one opened the door" at the sorority house, the sheriff said. Before leaving the sorority house, however, Rodger shot three women in the front lawn. Two of them, both UCSB students, died. A third survived multiple gunshot wounds.
Rodger then began piloting his BMW through the streets of Isla Vista, an unincorporated community on the coast of Santa Barbara County. Isla Vista is home to about 23,000 people, more than half of them students at the nearby university.
Rodger, who grew up in Calabasas and Woodland Hills, was enrolled at Santa Barbara City College, about 12 miles to the east. He had indicated to authorities that he might not return to school in the fall.
Lyssa Hopper, a 19-year-old student, was at the counter of the I.V. Deli Mart, a convenience store two blocks from his apartment, popular among students for its authentic shawarma and $1 corndogs. This was Rodger's next stop.
When bullets burst through the windows, Hopper dropped to the ground, looked up and saw a man lying near the door — Christopher Martinez.
"He was slumped over, and he was bleeding," Hopper said.
"It's such a tragedy," said Blake Batson, an assistant manager at the market. "It's absolute lunacy."
Manny Rodriguez, 57, was delivering sandwiches down the street when a girl ran from the convenience store screaming. The shooter, Rodriguez said, paused to reload. "The guy unloaded a full clip," Rodriguez said. "He was shooting fast."
Rodger drove to "The Loop," a horseshoe-shaped embarcadero that serves as a hub of the student community. He fired multiple rounds at two people before turning onto a nearby street, authorities said.
Rodger encountered a sheriff's deputy for the first time; the two exchanged fire. He then ran down a bicyclist and shot four more pedestrians before encountering four sheriff's deputies, who were running across Little Acorn Park, at the southern tip of The Loop.
Rodger exchanged gunfire with the deputies, none of whom was injured. The deputies shot Rodger's car and appear to have shot him in the hip. Rodger accelerated on Del Playa Drive, which rests at the rim of the Isla Vista bluff.
He hit another bicyclist, who was thrown onto the hood of the car, caving in the windshield. Rodger caromed off and between several cars before crashing into the back of a jeep and coming to a halt — the car's airbags deployed, its right front wheel well in flames, its driver's door thrown open.
Jahangir Siddiqui, a UCSB senior from San Diego, was at home and heard gunshots in the distance — about 30, he estimated. Then, he heard a crash outside his apartment. From his window, he saw the BMW, a hole in its windshield, a mangled bike in the road behind it. Rodger was in the passenger seat. "His body looked limp," he said.
A single officer ran to the BMW with his weapon drawn, Siddiqui said. Within a minute, a dozen officers swarmed the car. They dragged Rodger's body from the car and handcuffed him, but he was "obviously dead," Brown said. "It would appear as though he took his own life."
Authorities said 11 of the 13 people wounded during the assault required treatment at area hospitals. As of Saturday evening, four had been released, two were listed in good condition, three in fair condition and two in serious.
Eight of the 13 wounds were from gunshots, four from being struck by Rodger's car and one was of unknown origin.
Attention will focus in coming days on warning signs that might have been noticed by Rodger's family and by law enforcement.
Brown said his agency had three previous "contacts" with Rodger.
The first came in July 2013, when Rodger was being treated at the hospital for injuries he said he suffered when he'd been assaulted. A responding deputy learned that, in fact, Rodger might have been "the aggressor" in that incident, and the investigation was suspended, the sheriff said.
The second incident came in January 2014, when Rodger made the "citizen's arrest" of his roommate over the candles.
The third and most significant interchange between Rodger and law enforcement officials came in April, when deputies checked on his welfare.
Rodger's family had grown disturbed at some of the videos the young man had posted on social media. Brown said that at the time, Rodger "downplayed the concerns for his welfare," and did not meet the threshold for involuntary mental health counseling.
Only on Saturday, when authorities read the screed that Rodger had passed to an online acquaintance, did they learn how hard he had worked to manipulate the conversation.
"I heard a knock on my apartment door. I opened it to see about seven police officers asking for me," Rodger wrote. "As soon as I saw those cops, the biggest fear I had ever felt in my life overcame me."
The fear, he wrote, was that the authorities would find his cache of weapons in his bedroom, along with his written plans for his assault. If so, "I would have been thrown in jail, denied of the chance to exact revenge on my enemies. I can't imagine a hell darker than that."
But that didn't happen, Rodger wrote.
"I tactfully told them that it was all a misunderstanding, and they finally left. If they had demanded to search my room … that would have ended everything," he said.
"For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over. When they left, the biggest wave of relief swept over me …. During the last few weeks of my life, I continued my daily adventures around town, trying to experience as much of the world as I could before I die."
Times staff writers Julie Cart, Amanda Covarrubias and Stephen Ceasar in Isla Vista and Richard Winton, Rong-Gong Lin II, Rosanna Xia, Garrett Therolf, Matt Stevens, Monte Morin and Bob Pool in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
May 25, 2014
By Joe Mozingo, Amanda Covarrubias and Richard Winton
In video after video, Elliot Rodger roamed Santa Barbara like an invisible man, narrating his lonely existence in a strange, clinical tone, consumed by a feeling of total alienation.
"Look at them," Rodger said to his camera phone, staring at a couple on a picnic bench at the beach. "He's in heaven right now, sitting on this beautiful beach, kissing her, feeling her love, while I'm sitting here alone, 'cause no beautiful girl wants to be my girlfriend."
But that appearance of childlike guilelessness — a 22-year-old man lamenting that he was still a virgin and expressing the simple desire to be loved by a woman — gave way to cold rage, then smirking pledges of revenge to come.
"I don't know why you girls haven't been attracted to me, but I will punish you, for it is an injustice," he said. "I'll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you. You will finally see that I am the superior one, the true alpha male."
He posted eight such videos on YouTube on Friday evening before, officials say, he went on a rampage. Authorities said he stabbed three people to death at his apartment building in Isla Vista; opened fire on women standing outside a sorority, killing two; and then fatally shot someone at a nearby deli. After a gun battle with deputies, he was found dead in his BMW with what officials believe was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
In other mass killings, authorities have had to grope for reasons behind the attacks. But Rodger trumpeted his motives, posting the videos and sending a 137-page typed diatribe titled "My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger" to an online acquaintance.
Together they showed a spiral of self-pity and pining for his childhood that warped into a hatred of women and the men with whom they had relationships.
A child of privilege and divorce, with a taste for Gucci and Prada, Rodger was the son of Peter Rodger, a Hollywood director and photographer, who was an assistant director on the first "Hunger Games" movie. Elliot Rodger was raised in Woodland Hills and attended Santa Barbara City College, according to his social media accounts.
An attorney for his father said Rodger was diagnosed as a high-functioning patient with Asperger's syndrome and had trouble making friends.
In Rodger's screed, he said his parents had arranged for him to see a psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Sophy. But he did not elaborate further.
The ramblings describe the internal turmoil of a young man at once both arrogant and pathetic, unable to see a better future, sinking deeper into despair and anger.
He wrote that he was born in England — his father British, his mother Chinese — and went to an upscale private school. He moved to Woodland Hills when he was 5, and his parents divorced when he was 7, which he called a "life-changing event." He remained close to his mother but had a falling out with his father that lasted several years. After the divorce, he said, he realized he was uncool and timid with "a dorky hairstyle" and became self-conscious about his race.
"I was shy and unpopular.... On top of this was the feeling that I was different because I am of mixed race. I am half white, half Asian, and this made me different from the normal fully white kids that I was trying to fit in with."
He said he dyed his hair blond to fit in but was increasingly bullied by ninth grade.
"I felt very small, weak, and above all, worthless. I cried by myself at school every day."
The evolution of his breakdown is not clear from his text, but he wrote of losing his only friend sometime around the beginning of 2012.
"He blatantly said he didn't want to be friends anymore. He didn't even deign to tell me why.... It was the ultimate betrayal. I thought he was the one friend I had in the whole world who truly understood me."
He wrote that his mother bought him the BMW to give him confidence, but it didn't. Seeing any couple set him off. In particular he vented about Indian, Asian and black men dating the blond women he desired.
An earlier plan to exact revenge on women backfired. He wrote that he tried to shove "girls" at a party over a ledge, but he couldn't do it, and then men rushed to him and pushed him over.
"When I landed, I felt a snap in my ankle, followed by a stinging pain. I slowly got up and found that I couldn't even walk. I had to stumble, and stumble I did. I tried to get away from there as fast as I could."
But he realized someone had taken Gucci sunglasses his mother had given him, and went back to get them. The same people he had tangled with before began mocking him and calling him names, then dragged him into the driveway to beat him up, he wrote. He staggered away in pain.
A 22-year-old neighbor at Capri Apartments in Isla Vista said he saw Rodger come home, crying, "his face all bashed in, his knuckles cut up."
The neighbor, who asked not to be identified, said he had tried to get Rodger to hang out and party with him and others in the communal courtyard. Rodger usually said no, and the few times he agreed, "he just sat in the chair and stared at everyone the entire time."
Seeing Rodger injured, the neighbor asked what happened. Rodger said he was jumped by a group of men.
"I'm going to kill them, and kill myself," the neighbor recalled him saying.
Rodger wrote that he first began to plan his "Day of Retribution" in the spring of 2013. He bought his first gun at "Goleta Gun and Supply," a Glock 34 with $700 he had saved from money given to him by his parents and grandmothers.
"After I picked up the handgun, I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power," he wrote. "If only one pretty girl had shown some form of attraction to me, the Day of Retribution would never happen. I'd never even consider it."
He wrote that he next bought a Sig Sauer P226 for $1,100.
As he planned the attack, he left a trail of bitter comments on online forums.
The Southern Poverty Law Center collected a string of racist and misogynistic comments he made on a site called PuaHate.com. In one he ridiculed an Asian man trying to date a white girl, and said it was "rage-inducing" to see a "black guy chilling with 4 hot white girls."
The videos give a more intimate view of his pathos. One afternoon, he was walking through the parking lot of the Sandpiper Golf Club on the bluffs just west of Isla Vista.
"I come here to admire the whole beauty and serenity of the place," he said, affecting a haughty voice. "The world is such a beautiful place. It's such a tragedy that I've had such a pathetic life in it, all because of the cruelty of humanity and women."
He said he went there regularly to watch the sunset because usually there were no couples to envy.
He approached his car, and the camera caught his reflection on it. "There's me, in all my fabulousness," he said with disdain. "Elliot Rodger. I am so awesome."
He sat in the driver's seat.
"Sex, love, companionship — I deserved those things.... But girls are not sexually attracted to me."
His tone turned more menacing.
"That's a problem I'm going to rectify. I, in all my magnificence and power, I will not let this fly."
With a smirking snort, he signed off. "It's an injustice that needs to be dealt with."
Times staff writers Rosanna Xia, Rong-Gong Lin II, Randy Lewis and Mark Olsen in Los Angeles and Stephen Ceasar in Isla Vista, Calif., contributed to this report.
May 26, 2014
Severity of killer’s mental ills slipped through cracks
By Scott Gold, Abby Sewell and Lee Romney
Eliot Rodger enjoyed sunsets, mountain vistas, retro pop music. He said it time and again: The world was a magical, beautiful place, but only in stark contrast to his small, pitiful life. "No friends," he said one day this spring, in a video recorded on his phone. "No love."
It's tempting, now that the finale has been written, to think that someone could have stepped in before Rodger killed six people and wounded 13 Friday before apparently killing himself, that the law could have been crafted to raise a red flag, to compel someone to act.
But according to interviews with Rodger's acquaintances, law enforcement officials and mental health professionals, all that was known about the 22-year-old college student was that he was terribly sad. And being sad is not a crime, nor the sort of mental state that would, alone, cross a legal threshold requiring official response.
The mental health system is imperfect, by design — a teeter-totter that weighs patients' civil liberties against public safety. Rodger existed in the middle, on the fulcrum, simmering and disturbed, just beyond arm's reach.
In that quiet space he planned his attack — lonely, but highly functioning; worrisome, but never explicitly threatening himself or anyone else; bumping into police, but never landing in jail; resistant to medication, but never outright rejecting care; able to articulate his misery, but conniving enough that authorities did not see a need for involuntary hospitalization.
The writing may have been on the wall, but no one — despite the apparently diligent efforts of his family, therapists and doctors, and law enforcement — knew what it said until it was too late.
"We never, as a society, got that opportunity with this boy — to find out if society could have intervened," said Carla Jacobs, a prominent advocate for an effective mental health system in California.
The son of a Hollywood director, Rodger grew up privileged in Calabasas and Woodland Hills. He had traveled extensively, to Morocco, Singapore and England. All along, he harbored a crushing darkness. His family suspected he was somewhere on the autism spectrum, and he had been in therapy since childhood. He was prescribed psychotropic drugs but declined to take them, he wrote.
Belying the aggressive personality seen on his now-notorious videos, he spoke haltingly and did not look people in the eye, said Simon Astaire, a family friend. "He was fundamentally withdrawn," Astaire said.
"He was very standoffish," said Thom McFadden, who lived next door to Rodger's father, Peter, in Woodland Hills. "A loner."
Dr. George Woods, a San Francisco psychiatrist who lectures on mental health and the law, said Rodger appeared to have been in an early phase of pre-psychosis. The ability to mask symptoms is common, he said.
"Oftentimes you'll see that the paranoia is in the service of the delusion," Woods said. "They aren't telling people their business."
The family was caring and attentive, said family friend Adam Krentzman. Peter Rodger "is the sweetest, nicest, most genuine, caring person, and he did everything he could," Krentzman said.
But after Elliot turned 18, he started rejecting mental health care that his family provided, Krentzman said. "He turned his back on all of it," he said. "At some point, your kid becomes an adult."
Elliot Rodger became increasingly isolated, sometimes by his own design. He complained that he couldn't make friends, but acquaintances said in interviews that he rebuffed their attempts to be friendly.
Bitterness rising, Rodger began to resent the carefree students in the tight-knit Isla Vista community, where more than half of the 23,000 residents are students at the nearby UC Santa Barbara. He viewed himself as a sophisticate and a catch, and reserved much of his venom for attractive women, who he believed spurned him, and men who had more success in dating.
One night last summer, he went to a party and tried to shove women off a ledge where they had been sitting. Several men intervened and pushed him off the ledge instead, and he injured his ankle.
He was treated at a clinic for his injuries, and police showed up to interview him. In theory, this was an opening for formal, official intervention. But the officers determined that Rodger was "not a victim," a Santa Barbara County sheriff's spokeswoman said Sunday — that he had instigated the altercation.
Asked if there was anything about that incident that would have prompted authorities to follow up with Rodger, spokeswoman Kelly Hoover replied: "No."
Around the same time, Rodger hatched his plan for what he called "slaughter" and began buying semiautomatic handguns. Again, here was an opportunity for official scrutiny — he was making the purchases legally, abiding by California's background check system and waiting periods.
But Rodger sailed through, because despite his troubles, it does not appear that he triggered any warnings — he had no criminal history; he had never explicitly threatened anyone or been deemed a risk to himself or others; he had never been ordered to submit to involuntary mental health treatment; he had no history of addiction.
Even a diagnosis of serious mental illness, in itself, would not have prevented Rodger from buying a gun under California law, said Lindsay Nichols, staff attorney with the advocacy group Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
If Rodger had issued a threat of violence against specific, identifiable victims to a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist would have been required to report it to law enforcement, and Rodger could have been banned from owning guns for five years. That did not happen, and there is no evidence that Rodger made such a threat — in fact, his writings suggest that he had worked studiously to hide his violent plan.
Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and expert on gun laws, said that in general, a diagnosis of mental illness doesn't affect a person's right to own a gun in California unless it has been adjudicated by a court or the person has voluntarily checked into a mental facility.
"It's just not a surprise that someone with mental health problems would still be able to get a gun," Winkler said.
Chuck Michel, one of the most prominent gun-rights attorneys in California, said there was nothing in Rodger's background that would have prevented him from being able to buy a gun.
"California's got pretty much every gun control law the gun control lobby wants, and it didn't stop this," he said.
More recently, Rodger began to post numerous videos to YouTube. Some were innocuous. Most, though, were brooding and dark.
At one point, he filmed from his glistening BMW as two young people kissed on a park bench in the distance. "I hate the world because no girl would do this with me," he said.
Rodger's parents were disturbed by the videos, family friends said. Mental health professionals put them in touch with the Sheriff's Department, and in April, deputies visited Rodger at his apartment, the same one where he would soon stab and kill three men to launch his rampage.
Rodger would later write that he was terrified when deputies knocked on his door — terrified that they would find his weapons, his ammunition and the detailed written plans of his attack. He feared he would be "denied of the chance to exact revenge on my enemies."
Rodger wrote that he "tactfully" told the officers there had been a misunderstanding — that everything was fine. They believed him.
Hoover, the Santa Barbara County spokeswoman, said the April visit by sheriff's deputies is now under investigation, and she declined to discuss the details. But, she said: "Generally speaking, unless we have a lawful reason to enter a residence, we cannot do so without a warrant. An exception would be if deputies felt that a person was a harm to themselves or others or there was an immediate threat. In this case, we would have had to determine that Elliot Rodger or his roommates were in immediate danger."
That did not happen, said Sheriff Bill Brown. Rodger had "a very convincing story," he said.
Officers could have more aggressively investigated Rodger and his mental state. For instance, officers could have checked records to see if he legally owned weapons. "But if they're just saying someone is not functioning well and exhibiting signs of depression, I can't see that they'd have a reason to do that," Woods, the San Francisco psychiatrist, said.
Had officers found Rodger a danger to himself or others, they could have placed him on an involuntary psychiatric hold, known as a "5150." But the laws governing such aggressive action "are stringent," Woods said.
"And I think they're appropriately made that way. There has to be an acute reason, when you're talking a danger to yourself, a danger to others, or gravely disabled. There was no way that in these kinds of interviews and with his presentation that you could have made the conclusions."
Earlier this month, Orange County became the first large county in California to implement Laura's Law, allowing court-ordered treatment for the severely mentally ill. The law allows family members, licensed mental health providers, police officers and others to refer potential patients for treatment.
That law is not on the books in Santa Barbara County — but even if it were, proponents of the law conceded that Rodger would almost certainly not have qualified, given what was known about him at the time.
So the deputies left, and never came back. "The biggest wave of relief swept over me," Rodger wrote.
He decided to launch his attack on Friday because if he'd waited past the weekend, the semester would have begun to wind down at the nearby university, and many of his "enemies" would be leaving for the summer.
At 9:17 that night, 13 minutes before the first gunshots rang out, his mother, Chin Rodger, was at home in a western suburb of Los Angeles when her phone rang. It was one of her son's therapists. "Have you gotten Elliot's email?" he asked.
Chin Rodger opened the email, according to an account of the night provided to The Times by a family friend. Something had changed. Her dejected son was gone, replaced by a man with a savage view of the world, and a terrible plan.
"This is the story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be," the email said. "It is a dark story of sadness, anger and hatred." Then: "I will punish everyone. And it will be beautiful. Finally, at long last, I can show the world my true worth."
Chin Rodgers frantically called her ex-husband, Peter, who was out to dinner. Together, they raced up the 101 Freeway. But it was too late. The radio started barking while they were still on the road — a vicious rampage in Isla Vista, a young man emptying his guns into crowds of pedestrians. By the time they reached the police station there, it was over.
On Sunday evening, a crowd prayed in front of the Alpha Phi sorority house in Isla Vista, where Rodger shot three women, two of whom died. There was a surprising amount of compassion for Rodger — for how he lived, if not how he died.
"The insecurities and rejection he felt is something I believe exists in a lot of hearts in this city," said Yvette Johnson, 22. "There's this unspoken survival of the fittest.... If you don't fit in a box, you're going to feel rejected."
"Some people think that he doesn't deserve love," said Christina Perez, 24. "But we all deserve love."
Times staff writers Rosanna Xia, Rong-Gong Lin II, Randy Lewis and Mark Olsen in Los Angeles and Stephen Ceasar in Isla Vista, Calif., contributed to this report.
May 26, 2014
The silent shock that gripped Veronika Weiss’ parents rippled through the UCSB community.
By Joe Mozingo and Amanda Covarrubias
At 4 a.m. Saturday, six hours after the Isla Vista shooting stopped, Bob and Colleen Weiss sat in their car in front of a pizza place in grim suspense.
Their daughter hadn't returned to her room, and sheriff's deputies couldn't tell them yet whether she was one of the victims.
Veronika Weiss, 19, a UC Santa Barbara freshman, was not the type to stay out this late, and she would certainly call her parents on a terrible night like this. When they didn't hear from her after news of the rampage broke, they drove up from their home in Thousand Oaks.
Now the Weisses opened their daughter's Find my iPhone app on their phone. They looked at the digital map that popped up, with an icon indicating her phone location.
They pulled away and drove to the spot on Embarcadero del Norte: a house cordoned off with crime scene tape.
They did not scream. They did not cry. They sat in silent shock.
That same sense of disbelief tore through this college community and the families of the other young people killed — incomprehension turning to outrage and mourning.
The mound of bouquets outside Alpha Phi sorority, where Weiss and another member of the Tri Delta sorority were killed, grew Sunday as mourners continued to pay their respects. Early in the evening, about 40 members of the Isla Vista Church gathered in small groups to clutch hands and pray.
At I.V. Deli Mart, where Christopher Michaels-Martinez was shot down, people stuffed flowers into the bullet holes that spidered the front window.
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department identified all six victims Sunday. Weiss and her sorority sister Katherine Breann Cooper, 22, of Chino Hills, were shot in the grass in front of the sorority. Michaels-Martinez, 20, of San Luis Obispo, was killed nearby at the deli. Three other victims — Weihan Wang, 20, of Fremont and Cheng Yuan Hong, 20, and George Chen, 19, both of San Jose — were stabbed to death in the suspect's apartment.
All were students at UCSB.
The attacker, Elliot Rodger, 22, died of what authorities suspect was a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a shootout with sheriff's deputies.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown did not offer details about when the stabbings took place. Hong and Chen were Rodger's roommates, and in the 137-page screed he wrote about his life and his plans to exact revenge on humanity, he said he had come to despise them.
In January, Rodger accused Hong, a computer science major who grew up in Taipei, of stealing three candles, valued at $22.
When Hong said he didn't know where the candles were, Rodger performed a citizen's arrest and called 911. Sheriff's deputies found the candles on Hong's bed. He was arrested and charged with a petty theft infraction, according to the district attorney's office.
"I knew that when the Day of Retribution came, I would have to kill my housemates to get them out of the way," Rodger wrote. "If they were pleasant to live with, I would regret having to kill them, but due to their behavior I now had no regrets about such a prospect. In fact, I'd even enjoy stabbing them both to death while they slept."
Rodger wrote that women had rejected him since puberty, and he directed much of his rage at them — particularly the pretty, popular, blond ones he coveted. In describing his plans, he said he would storm the Alpha Phi house because they were the "hottest girls." But when he went there Friday night and knocked aggressively on the front door, they refused to let him in. So he turned and opened fire on three women approaching the home, critically wounding one and killing Weiss and Cooper, who were Tri Delta sisters.
Weiss said he and his wife had planned to visit their daughter Sunday to go shopping on State Street downtown. She was so wise and mature beyond her years, he said, that he would go to her for advice if he was having a problem with her younger brothers or even a minor argument with his wife.
She was a tomboy, a tough, gregarious girl who held her own as the only girl out of 500 players in the Westlake baseball league, he said. She participated in four sports in high school — cross country, baseball, swimming and water polo — while earning straight A's with a particular strength in math.
She was loud and "she made everybody else laugh."
He said he knows that Veronika would have put herself in harm's way to help her friends or even the young man who shot her. "She always reacted to a situation quickly. She always wanted to help. She was very courageous.
"She will be an inspiration to me every day of my life," he said. "There was never a day I wasn't proud of her. Never a single day."
After the attacker shot the sorority sisters, he drove his black BMW to I.V. Deli Mart two blocks away and opened fire. Bullets shattered the windows, and Michaels-Martinez, a sophomore English major, slumped to the floor.
His freshman roommate, Jeff Dolphin, said Michaels-Martinez had helped him through the nerves and struggles of their first year on campus.
"Chris was just an amazing guy," he said. "If I was going through something, he was always there for me. If I needed something, he was there. If I needed a textbook, if I was locked out of the room because I forgot my key, he would stop playing basketball or doing what he was doing to unlock the door so I didn't have to get charged. He was just a great guy."
Chris' father, Richard Martinez, spoke angrily and emotionally to reporters outside the Sheriff's Department on Saturday, railing against the NRA and politicians beholden to it.
"Our family has a message for every parent out there: You don't think it will happen to your child until it does," he said. "His death has left our family lost and broken."
In a phone interview Sunday, Martinez said his son was a hardworking student and avid reader who loved playing soccer, football and basketball.
"Sometimes he was the most skilled player on the field, and even if he wasn't, he was the most determined player on the field," Martinez said.
Michaels-Martinez planned to go to law school and was preparing for a year studying in London.
"He was just a terrific kid in every way," Martinez said. "You couldn't really ask for a better kid, and I'm not just saying that because I'm his father."
Martinez said he wants to meet Rodger's father and work toward preventing future tragedies.
"I lost my son. He lost his son. We have that in common," Martinez said. "We want, if possible, that the deaths of our son and his son should mean something."
Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Julie Cart and Stephen Ceasar in Santa Barbara, and Abby Sewell, Amina Khan and Laura Nelson in Los Angeles.
May 27, 2014
Signs of normality return to Isla Vista after deadly rampage
By Kate Mather, Harriet Ryan and Louis Sahagun
Elliot Rodger, the suspect in a rampage near UC Santa Barbara, outlined his intentions in a 137-page document that he sent Friday night, shortly before the killings, to someone he knew from an online body building forum.
The document was forwarded to KEYT-TV Channel 3 in Santa Barbara, which provided a copy to The Times.
WARNING: The document contains graphic language.
[The plan]
After going through every single fantasy I had about how I would punish my enemies, I started to detail all of my exact plans for how the Day of Retribution will play out.
On the day before the Day of Retribution, I will start the First Phase of my vengeance: Silently killing as many people as I can around Isla Vista by luring them into my apartment through some form of trickery. The first people I would have to kill are my two housemates, to secure the entire apartment for myself as my personal torture and killing chamber.
After that, I will start luring people into my apartment, knock them out with a hammer, and slit their throats. I will torture some of the good looking people before I kill them, assuming that the good looking ones had the best sex lives.
All of that pleasure they had in life, I will punish by bringing them pain and suffering. I have lived a life of pain and suffering, and it was time to bring that pain to people who actually deserve it. I will cut them, flay them, strip all the skin off their flesh, and pour boiling water all over them while they are still alive, as well as any other form of torture I could possibly think of.
When they are dead, I will behead them and keep their heads in a bag, for their heads will play a major role in the final phase. This First Phase will represent my vengeance against all of the men who have had pleasurable sex lives while I’ve had to suffer. Things will be fair once I make them suffer as I did. I will finally even the score.
The Second Phase will take place on the Day of Retribution itself, just before the climactic massacre.
The Second Phase will represent my War on Women. I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex. They have starved me of sex for my entire youth, and gave that pleasure to other men. In doing so, they took many years of my life away.
I cannot kill every single female on earth, but I can deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts. I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: The hottest sorority of UCSB.
After doing a lot of extensive research within the last year, I found out that the sorority with the most beautiful girls is Alpha Phi Sorority. I know exactly where their house is, and I’ve sat outside it in my car to stalk them many times. Alpha Phi sorority is full of hot, beautiful blonde girls; the kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have because they all look down on me.
They are all spoiled, heartless, wicked bitches. They think they are superior to me, and if I ever tried to ask one on a date, they would reject me cruelly. I will sneak into their house at around 9:00 p.m. on the Day of Retribution, just before all of the partying starts, and slaughter every single one of them with my guns and knives.
If I have time, I will set their whole house on fire. Then we shall see who the superior one really is!
The Final Phase of the Day of Retribution will be my ultimate showdown in the streets of Isla Vista.
On the morning before, I will drive down to my father’s house to kill my little brother, denying him of the chance to grow up to surpass me, along with my stepmother … as she will be in the way. My father will be away on one of his business trips, so thankfully I won’t have to deal with him.
If he didn’t go away on that trip, I might even have to postpone the whole plan because of my fear that I might hesitate if I have to kill him. Once I’ve taken care of my brother and stepmother, I will switch over to the Mercedes SUV, and drive it back up to Isla Vista. I will use it as one of my killing machines against my enemies. An SUV will cause a lot more damage than my BMW coupe.
After I have killed all of the sorority girls at the Alpha Phi House, I will quickly get into the SUV before the police arrive, assuming they would arrive within 3 minutes.
I will then make my way to Del Playa, splattering as many of my enemies as I can with the SUV, and shooting anyone I don’t splatter. I can only imagine how sweet it will be to ram the SUV into all of those groups of popular young people who I’ve always witnessed walking right in the middle of the road as if they are better than everyone else. When they are writhing in pain, their bodies broken and dying after I splatter them, they will fully realize their crimes.
Once I reach Del Playa Street, I will dump the bag of severed heads I had saved from my previous victims, proclaiming to everyone how much I’ve made them all suffer. Once they see all of their friend’s heads roll onto the street, everyone will fear me as the powerful god I am. I will then start massacring everyone on Del Playa Street.
I will pull up next to a house party and fire bullets at everyone partying on the front yard. I will specifically target the good looking people, and all of the couples. After I have destroyed a house party, I will continue down Del Playa, destroying everything and everyone. When I see the first police car come to their rescue, I will drive away as fast as I can, shooting and ramming anyone in my path until I find a suitable place to finally end my life.
To end my life, I will quickly swallow all of the Xanax and Vicodin pills I have left, along with an ample amount of hard liquor. Immediately after imbibing this mixture, I will shoot myself in the head with two of my handguns simultaneously. If the gunshots don’t kill me, the deadly drug mixture eventually will. I will not suffer being captured and sent to prison.
I must plan this very efficiently. Nothing can go wrong. It needs to be perfect. This is now my sole purpose on this world. My plans will come to fruition, and I mustn’t let anyone stop me.
On the week leading up to date I set for the Day of Retribution, I uploaded several videos onto Youtube in order to express my views and feelings to the world, though I don’t plan on uploading my ultimate video until minutes before the attack, because on that video I will talk about exactly why I’m doing this. …
After only a week passed since I uploaded those videos on Youtube, I heard a knock on my apartment door. I opened it to see about seven police officers asking for me.
As soon as I saw those cops, the biggest fear I had ever felt in my life overcame me.
I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do, and reported me for it.
If that was the case, the police would have searched my room, found all of my guns and weapons, along with my writings about what I plan to do with them. I would have been thrown in jail, denied of the chance to exact revenge on my enemies. I can’t imagine a hell darker than that. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, but it was so close.
Apparently, someone saw my videos and became instantly suspicious of me. They called some sort of health agency, who called the police to check up on me.
The police told me it was my mother who called them, but my mother told me it was the health agency. My mother had watched the videos and was very disturbed by them. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know the full truth of who called the police on me.
The police interrogated me outside for a few minutes, asking me if I had suicidal thoughts. I tactfully told them that it was all a misunderstanding, and they finally left. If they had demanded to search my room… 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. It was so scary.
It was all because of the videos. I must have expressed too much anger in them.
I immediately took most of them off of Youtube, and planned to reupload them a few days before the Day of Retribution.
This incident made me realize that I needed to be extra careful. I can’t let anyone become suspicious of me. All it takes is for one person to call the police and tell them that they think I’m going to perpetrate a shooting, and the police will be coming to my door again, demanding to search my room.
For the next few days, I felt extremely fearful that they could show up anytime. I kept one of my handguns with a few loaded magazines near me just in case such a thing did happen. If they did show up, I would have to try to quickly shoot them all and escape out the back window. I would then have to perform a hasty mockery of my plans, with the police on my tail. That will ruin everything. Thankfully, all suspicion of me was dropped after I took down the videos from Youtube, and the police never came back.
During the last few weeks of my life, I continued my daily adventures around town, trying to experience as much of the world as I could before I die.
[On purchasing his first gun]
My first act of preparation was the purchase my first handgun. I did this quickly and hastily, at a local gun shop called Goleta Gun and Supply. I had already done some research on handguns, and I decided to purchase the Glock 34 semiautomatic pistol, an efficient and highly accurate weapon. I signed all of the papers and was told that my pickup day was in mid-December.
After I picked up the handgun, I brought it back to my room and felt a new sense of power. I was now armed. Who’s the alpha male now, bitches
[On buying additional weapons]
I had enough extra money saved up to live comfortably and indulgently before I die. I didn’t spend all of it though, for I still needed supplies that were vital to my plans. First, I needed to buy a third handgun, just in case one of them jams. I needed two working handguns at the same time, as that was how I planned to commit suicide; with two simultaneous shots to the head. I also needed to buy magazine clips and ammunition, as well as knives and carrying cases for my equipment.
[On interracial relationships]
How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more. I tried not to believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl at the age of thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is. They would give themselves to this filthy scum, but they reject ME? The injustice!
[On Santa Barbara]
So far, Santa Barbara was not working. I dreaded how horrible it would be to continue suffering my miserable, lonely, celibate life in such a beautiful city where everyone else experienced the pleasures of sex and love. That would be the darkest hell. And that was exactly what was in store for me.
[The sight of an attractive couple ‘caused a scar’]
On one of my very last days as a teenager, as I was sitting at my usual place at the food court outside Domino’s, I saw a sight that shattered my heart to pieces. A tall, blonde, jock-type guy walked into one of the restaurants, and at his side was one of the sexiest girls I had ever seen. She too was tall and blonde. They were both taller than me, and they kissed each other passionately. They made me feel so inferior and worthless and small. I glared at them with intense hatred as I sat by myself in my lonely misery. I could never have a girl like that. The sight was burned into my memory, and it caused a scar that will haunt me forever.
[Women are drawn ‘to the wrong type of male’]
When I dropped my college classes, I crossed a threshold that I knew existed, but never actually believed I would cross. It completely ended all hope I had of living a desirable life in Santa Barbara. I realized that I would be a virgin forever, condemned to suffer rejection and humiliation at the hands of women because they don’t fancy me, because their sexual attractions are flawed.
They are attracted to the wrong type of male. I always mused to myself that I would rather die than suffer such an existence, and I knew that if it came to that, I would exact my revenge upon the world in the most catastrophic way possible. At least then, I could die knowing that I fought back against the injustice that has been dealt to me.
Thinking about for a long time: Ever since my life took a very dark turn at the age of seventeen, I often had fantasies of how malevolently satisfying it would be to punish all of the popular kids and young couples for the crime of having a better life than me. I dreamed of how sweet it would be to torture or kill every single young couple I saw.
[On planning a ‘Day of Retribution’]
Then I came up with a name for this after I saw all of the good looking young couples walking around my college and in the town of Isla Vista. I named it the Day of Retribution.
It would be a day in which I exact my ultimate retribution and revenge on all of the hedonistic scum who enjoyed lives of pleasure that they don’t deserve. If I can’t have it, I will destroy it. I will destroy all women because I can never have them. I will make them all suffer for rejecting me. I will arm myself with deadly weapons and wage a war against all women and the men they are attracted to. And I will slaughter them like the animals they are.
If they won’t accept me among them, then they are my enemies. They showed me no mercy, and in turn I will show them no mercy. The prospect will be so sweet, and justice will ultimately be served. And of course, I would have to die in the act to avoid going to prison.
That is when I realized that this threshold existed, and if I crossed it, I will have to carry out this Day of Retribution.
[On losing a friend]
He blatantly said he didn’t want to be friends anymore. He didn’t even deign to tell me why. After he said the fateful words, he refused to talk to me ever again. That was the last time I ever spoke to him.
It was the ultimate betrayal. I thought he was the one friend I had in the whole world who truly understood me, who truly understood my views and the reasons why I thought the way I did about the world.
My situation was indeed horrible. I couldn’t leave the house without seeing a young couple walking around somewhere. Everywhere I went, I was all by myself, while other young people had friends and girlfriends. I was ashamed to show myself to the world. Even though I wore expensive designer clothes, what was the point if girls still weren’t attracted to me? No one respects a man who is unable to get a woman.
[‘If only one girl had given me a chance’]
I wanted answers. I wanted to know why it had to come to this. If only one pretty girl had shown some form of attraction to me, the Day of Retribution would never happen. I’d never even consider it. The Day of Retribution is mainly my war against women for rejecting me and depriving me of sex and love. If only one girl had given me a chance, tried to get to know me, let me take her out on a date.
[An exchange of insults at a party leads to ‘a truly horrific’ beating]
They only laughed at me and started insulting me back. That was the last straw, I had taken enough insults that night. 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.
It was one of the most foolish and rash things I ever did, and I almost risked everything in doing it, but I was so drunk with rage that I didn’t care. I failed to push any of them from the ledge, and the boys started to push me, which resulted in me being the one to fall onto the street. When I landed, I felt a snap in my ankle, followed by a stinging pain. I slowly got up and found that I couldn’t even walk. I had to stumble, and stumble I did. I tried to get away from there as fast as I could.
As I stumbled a few yards down Del Playa with my shattered leg, I realized that someone had stolen my Gucci sunglasses that my mother had given me. I loved those sunglasses, and had to get them back. I vehemently turned around and staggered back towards the party. At that point, I was so drunk that I forgot where the party was, and ended up walking onto the front yard of the house next to it, demanding to know who took my sunglasses. The people in this house must have been friends with the ones I previously fought with, for they greeted me with vicious hostility. They called me names … typical things those types of scumbags would say.
A whole group of the obnoxious brutes came up and dragged me onto their driveway, pushing and hitting me. I wanted to fight and kill them all. I managed to throw one punch toward the main attacker, but that only caused them to beat me even more. I fell to the ground where they started kicking me and punching me in the face. Eventually, some other people from the street broke up the fight. I managed to have the strength to stand up and stagger away.
It was the first time in my life that I had been truly beaten up physically to the point where my face was bruised up. I had suffered a lot of bullying in my life, but most of it wasn’t physical. I had never been beaten and humiliated that badly. Everyone in Isla Vista saw what happened, and it was truly horrific.
The worst part of this whole ordeal was not getting beaten up, oh no. It was the fact that no one showed any concern. There was only one group who helped me to the end of Del Playa, but after that they abandoned me.
Not one girl offered to help me as I stumbled home with a broken leg, beaten and bloody. If girls had been attracted to me, they would have offered to walk me to my room and take care of me. They would have even offered to sleep with me to make me feel better. But no, not one girl showed an ounce of concern for me. They didn’t care. No one cared about me. I was all alone. ….
Two police did interview me, and I told them that those boys deliberately pushed me off of the ledge after I acted “cocky” towards them. I didn’t mention the girls at all. I expressed to the police of my wishes that they should all be punished for this. The police then went to interview them, and they had their own version of the story. Since there was no actual evidence, the whole case was shortly dismissed.
[‘A car hierarchy’]
To make me feel more confident, my mother provided me with a better car to drive in Santa Barbara, a BMW 3 series Coupe. I had always wanted this, since I cared a lot about my appearance. I had been asking my parents for a more upper-class car ever since I found out that there was a car hierarchy, and that some students at my college drove better cars than others. Now I was one of the students with a better, high-class car.
[How his injury delayed the rampage]
My broken leg was a setback, of course. Even with surgery, I’d have to be in crutches for six weeks, and even after that it would take a while to be able to walk normally again. I figured I won’t be walking normally until October. There was no way I’d be well enough to prepare for the Day of Retribution by November. There was too little time. I made a new plan to set the ultimate and final date for the Day of Retribution to be at the end of the Spring of 2014. This would give me plenty of time to prepare.
[A cold postponed the rampage again]
As April 26th drew ever closer, I prepared myself to the fullest extent. All I had left to do was finish writing this story and film my final video. But then, on Thursday, April 24th, I woke up with a terrible cold. I rarely ever get colds! I’ve always had a strong immune system. It was as if fate itself was trying to stop me from doing it. But what other reason do I have for living? Alas, there was no way I could carry out my plans if I had a cold. Everything had to be perfect. In addition, I found out that father had arrived home two days earlier than he originally said he would, so if I had indeed went forth with my plans, I would have had to kill my father, which I wouldn’t be mentally prepared for.
I hastily decided to postpone it …. I would definitely be fully recovered from my cold by then.
[How he chose this weekend]
There is no postponing it anymore, no backing out. If I don’t do this, then I only have a future filled with more loneliness and rejection ahead of me, devoid of sex, love, and enjoyment. I have to do it. It’s the only thing I can do. May 24th, is the absolute last weekend in the Spring semester in which I can carry out this plan efficiently. After May 24th, the Spring semester at SBCC [Santa Barbara City College] will end, and all of the SBCC students will go back to their hometowns, which means less enemies to kill in Isla Vista. Sure, UCSB would still be in session, but I want to kill both UCSB and SBCC students. The Day of Retribution is my sole purpose on this world, and I am ready.
[On his birth and family background]
On the morning of July 24th, 1991, in a London hospital, I was born. I breathed in the first breath of
life as I entered this world, weighing only 5.4 pounds. My parents must have been filled with happiness
and pride that day. They had just witnessed the birth of their first child, and they named me Elliot Oliver Robertson Rodger.
I was born to young parents. My father, Peter Rodger, was only 26 when he impregnated my mother, Chin, who was 30. Peter is of British descent, hailing from the prestigious Rodger family; a family that was once part of the wealthy upper classes before they lost all of their fortune during the Great Depression.
My father’s father, George Rodger, was a renowned photojournalist who had taken very famous photographs during the Second World War, though he failed to reacquire the family’s lost fortune. My mother is of Chinese descent. She was born in Malaysia, and moved to England at a young age to work as a nurse on several film sets, where she became friends with very important individuals in the film industry.
[On his parents’ divorce]
Very shortly after my seventh birthday, the news came. I believe it was my mother who told me that she and my father were getting a divorce; my mother, who only a few months before told me that sucha thing will never happen. I was absolutely shocked, outraged, and above all, overwhelmed. This was a huge life-changing event.
My father was to stay at the round house, and my mother would move to another smaller house in Topanga. It was arranged that me and my sister will mostly be living with our mother, and we would go to father’s house on the weekends. My father was required to pay child support to my mother so that she can look after us.
My life would change forever after this. The family I grew up with has split in half, and from then on I would grow up in two different households. I remember crying. All the happy times I spent with my mother and father as a family were gone, only to remain in memory. It was a very sad day. Just like the move to the U.S., it would be like starting a whole new life with a new routine. …
Because of my father’s acquisition of a new girlfriend, my little mind got the impression that my father was a man that women found attractive, as he was able to find a new girlfriend in such a short period of time from divorcing my mother. I subconsciously held him in higher regard because of this. It is very interesting how this phenomenon works… that males who can easily find female mates garner more respect from their fellow men, even children. How ironic is it that my father, one of those men who could easily find a girlfriend, has a son who would struggle all his life to find a girlfriend.
[‘Feelings of inferiority’]
The first frustration of the year, which would remain for the rest of my life, was the fact that I was very short for my age. As Fourth Grade started, it fully dawned on me that I was the shortest kid in my class – even the girls were taller than me. In the past, I rarely gave a thought to it, but at this stage I became extremely annoyed at how everyone was taller than me, and how the tallest boys were automatically respected more.
It instilled the first feelings of inferiority in me, and such feelings would only grow more volatile with time…. When I played basketball at school, some boys would join me, and when they did I saw that they were much better at the sport than me. I envied their ability to throw the ball at double the distance than I could. This made me realize that along with being short, I was physically weak compared to other boys my age. Even boys younger than me were stronger. This vexed me to no end.
By nature, I am a very jealous person, and at the age of nine my jealous nature sprung to the surface. During play dates, [a friend] would have other friends over as well, and I would feel very jealous and upset when he paid more attention to them. Feeling left out, I would find a quiet corner and start crying.
…Jealousy and envy… those are two feelings that would dominate my entire life and bring me immense pain. The feelings of jealousy I felt at nine-years-old were frustrating, but they were nothing compared to how I would feel once I hit puberty and have to watch girls choosing other boys over me. Any problem I had at nine-years-old was nirvana compared to what I was doomed to face.
I also started to examine myself and compare myself to these “cool kids”. I realized, with some horror, that I wasn’t “cool” at all. I had a dorky hairstyle, I wore plain and uncool clothing, and I was shy and unpopular.
I was always described as the shy boy in the past, but I never really thought my shyness would affect me in a negative way, until this point. …This revelation about the world, and about myself, really decreased my self-esteem. On top of this was the feeling that I was different because I am of mixed race. I am half White, half Asian, and this made me different from the normal fully-white kids that I was trying to fit in with.
I envied the cool kids, and I wanted to be one of them. I was a bit frustrated at my parents for not shaping me into one of these kids in the past. They never made an effort to dress me in stylish clothing or get me a good-looking haircut. I had to make every effort to rectify this. I had to adapt.
My first act was to ask my parents to allow me to bleach my hair blonde. I always envied and admired blonde-haired people, they always seemed so much more beautiful.
My parents agreed to let me do it, and father took me to a hair salon on Mulholland Drive in Woodland Hills. Choosing that hair salon was a bad decision, for they only bleached the top of my head blonde. When I indignantly questioned why they didn’t make all of my hair blonde, they said that I was too young for a full bleaching. I was furious.
I thought I looked so silly with blonde hair at the top of my head and black hair at the sides and back. I dreaded going to school the next day with this weird new hair.
When I arrived at school the next day, I was intensely nervous. Before class started, I stood in a corner franticly trying to figure out how I would go about revealing this to everyone. … My new hair turned out to be quite a spectacle, and for a few days I got a hint of the attention and admiration I so craved.
[On Asian Americans]
There were about one hundred people at that party, and everyone was socializing with a group of friends except for me. I walked around in my drunken confidence for a few moments, helped myself to the beer they had, and tried to act like a normal party-goer.
I soon became frustrated that no one was paying any attention to me, particularly the girls. I saw girls talking to other guys who looked like obnoxious slobs, but none of them showed any interest in me. As my frustration grew, so did my anger. I came across this Asian guy who was talking to a white girl.
The sight of that filled me with rage. I always felt as if white girls thought less of me because I was half-Asian, but then I see this white girl at the party talking to a full-blooded Asian. I never had that kind of attention from a white girl! And white girls are the only girls I’m attracted to, especially the blondes.
How could an ugly Asian attract the attention of a white girl, while a beautiful Eurasian like myself never had any attention from them? I thought with rage.
I glared at them for a bit, and then decided I had been insulted enough. I angrily walked toward them and bumped the Asian guy aside, trying to act cocky and arrogant to both the boy and the girl. My drunken state got the better of me, and I almost fell over to the floor after a few minutes of this.
They said something along the lines that I was very drunk and that I needed to get some water, so I angrily left them and went out to the front yard, where the main partying happened. Rage fumed inside me as I realized that I just walked away from that confrontation, so I rushed back into the house and spitefully insulted the Asian before walking outside again.
I stood awkwardly in the front yard for a bit, realizing how pathetic I looked all by myself when everyone was partying around me. To calm down, I climbed up onto a wooden ledge that bordered the street and plunged down on one of the chairs there.
Isla Vista was at its wildest state at that time, and I saw lots of guys walking around with hot blonde girls on their arm. It fueled me with rage, as it always had. I should be one of those guys, but no blonde girls gave me that chance.
[On his housemates]
Two new housemates moved into my apartment for the Autumn semester. They were two foreign Asian students who attended UCSB. These were the biggest nerds I had ever seen, and they were both very ugly with annoying voices. …
These two new ones were utterly repulsive, and one of them had a very rebellious demeanor about him. He went out of his way to start arguments with me whenever I raised the issue of the noise he made. …
I knew that when the Day of Retribution came, I would have to kill my housemates to get them out of the way. If they were pleasant to live with, I would regret having to kill them, but due to their behavior I now had no regrets about such a prospect. In fact, I’d even enjoy stabbing them both to death while they slept.
[On being bullied]
After being bullied so much in Eighth and Ninth Grade, I became more shy and timid than I ever was in my life. I felt very small, weak, and above all, worthless. I cried by myself at school every day.
[Conclusion]
I am not part of the human race. Humanity has rejected me. The females of the human species have never wanted to mate with me, so how could I possibly consider myself part of humanity? Humanity has never accepted me among them, and now I know why. I am more than human. I am superior to them all. I am Elliot Rodger… Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent… Divine! I am the closest thing there is to a living god. Humanity is a disgusting, depraved, and evil species. It is my purpose to punish them all. I will purify the world of everything that is wrong with it. On the Day of Retribution, I will truly be a powerful god, punishing everyone I deem to be impure and depraved.
May 30, 2014
Deputies knew of YouTube posts but didn’t view them when visiting attacker weeks before rampage.
By Kate Mather, Richard Winton and Adolfo Flores
Sheriff's deputies who conducted a welfare check on Elliot Rodger less than a month before his deadly rampage in Isla Vista knew of "disturbing" videos Rodger posted online but did not watch them, officials said.
Santa Barbara County sheriff's officials released new details Thursday about the April 30 welfare check, which is part of the investigation into the May 23 attack that left six UC Santa Barbara students dead and 13 other people injured.
Four deputies, a UC Santa Barbara police officer and a dispatcher in training went to Rodger's apartment on the night of April 30 for the welfare check, officials said Thursday.
The visit occurred after a person who identified himself as a friend of Rodger called a county mental health staff member. Based on that call and information from Rodger's mother, sheriff's officials said, the staffer requested the welfare check.
Sheriff's officials did not detail what information the deputies had when they made the visit. But a Rodger family friend told The Times that his mother had contacted his therapist in April, concerned over bizarre videos her son had posted on YouTube. The family friend said the therapist contacted a mental health service, who referred the matter to police.
The Sheriff's Office did not detail the content of the videos, describing them only as "disturbing." It’s unclear whether the videos posted back in April included some of the recordings Rodger posted on YouTube on the day of the rampage. The family friend said the videos Rodger's mother saw in April were less menacing than the now-infamous video he posted May 23 in which he threatens violence.
Typically, only two deputies respond to welfare checks, sheriff's officials said. But the group who went to Rodger's Seville Road apartment included deputies who were "familiar with Rodger" from a January incident, when he accused his roommate of stealing $22 worth of candles.
When the group spoke to the 22-year-old outside his apartment, the department said, he was "shy, timid and polite."
"When questioned by the deputies about reported disturbing videos he had posted online, Rodger told them he was having trouble fitting in socially in Isla Vista and the videos were merely a way of expressing himself," the statement said.
"Based upon the information available to them at the time," the statement continued, "sheriff's deputies concluded that Rodger was not an immediate threat to himself or others, and that they did not have cause to place him on an involuntary mental health hold, or to enter and search his residence. Therefore, they did not view the videos or conduct a weapons check on Rodger."
One of the deputies called Rodger's mother and, after briefing her on the interaction, passed the phone to Rodger, officials said. Rodger "told her he was fine and that he would call her later." Deputies gave Rodger contact information about local services he could use "if he needed help," and left.
The interaction lasted about 10 minutes, officials said.
Sheriff's officials have remained tight-lipped about the rampage, calling it "one of the most complex investigations" in the department's history. But they said Thursday that based on the information reviewed so far, "the deputies who responded handled the call in a professional manner consistent with state law and department policy."
Rodger wrote of the April 30 interaction in a 137-page document in which he outlined what he called his "Day of Retribution," saying he had three semiautomatic weapons hidden in his bedroom at the time and had written up plans for the assault.
"I tactfully told them that it was all a misunderstanding, and they finally left. If they had demanded to search my room ... that would have ended everything," he wrote. "For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over. When they left, the biggest wave of relief swept over me."
Rodger wrote that he immediately took most of the videos off YouTube, but planned to restore them before his attack.
Some law enforcement and mental health experts questioned why officials didn't review the video during the April 30 check.
"If somebody was concerned about them enough to report them it would seem to me to be part of the checkup," said Ann Eldridge, vice president of the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
Although seeing the videos might not have changed the outcome, it would have been part of a thorough investigation, said Rick Wall, a former Los Angeles police captain who oversaw that department's mental health team.
Authorities say that Rodger fatally stabbed three men — Cheng Yuan "James" Hong, 20, George Chen, 19, and Weihan "David" Wang, 20, all students at UC Santa Barbara —- inside his apartment before driving his BMW down the streets of Isla Vista on May 23, , firing out the window and veering his car toward pedestrians. Three other UC Santa Barbara students were killed: Katherine Cooper, 22; Veronika Weiss, 19; and Christopher Michaels-Martinez, 20. Authorities say Rodger took his own life.
To the Judges:
In the words of the local sheriff, the situation was “chaotic, rapidly unfolding and convoluted.”
A gunman had opened fire on the streets near the campus of UC Santa Barbara. Officials were urging people to stay indoors. Little else was known.
In the middle of the night, The Times dispatched reporters to the crime scene more than 90 minutes away. What followed was vivid, comprehensive coverage of a rampage that stunned an idyllic coastal campus.
A Times reporter interviewed an eyewitness: Four were dead, including the gunman. By dawn, three additional bodies had been discovered. As the sun rose, the reporting became rapid-fire: Authorities believed the attack was premeditated. In a YouTube video taped before the carnage, the killer detailed his murderous plans with an eerie calm.
The Times metro staff conveyed the facts with speed and accuracy, publishing more than two dozen updates in the first 24 hours. The paper’s coverage was notable for its nuance, detail and compassion that allowed the public to see the crime from the perspective of victims, the shooter and their families.
Readers received updates via social media, breaking news alerts and a dynamic homepage that laid out the full scope of the tragedy.
Later in the day, a deeper story captured the confusion and horror: “At first, when it began, it was lost to the soundtrack of another Friday night in this bluff-top college town: screeching tires and what sounded like fireworks.
“But then — shattered glass. Sirens. Screams.”
A story the following day described how the mother and father of a missing freshman confirmed their worst fears by following the signal of their daughter’s cellphone.
“They pulled away and drove to the spot on Embarcadero del Norte: a house cordoned off with crime scene tape.
“They did not scream. They did not cry. They sat in silent shock.”
The Times scoured materials left behind by the troubled killer. As many laid blame on law enforcement and the man’s relatives for not preventing the shooting, The Times revealed how his mother repeatedly sought help for him and explained the limits of mental health laws.
The system, The Times wrote, “is imperfect, by design — a teeter-totter that weighs patients’ civil liberties against public safety. [The shooter] existed in the middle, on the fulcrum, simmering and disturbed, just beyond arm’s reach.”
The ultimate question: Could someone have stepped in earlier?
Times reporters talked to the man’s acquaintances, law enforcement officials and mental health professionals to get the most complete picture of this troubled man. Their answer?
Before that night, all that was known about the 22-year-old college student was that he was terribly sad.
The Times’ coverage of the Isla Vista massacre conveyed the news with immediacy and made it understandable. We are proud to nominate this work for the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News.
Sincerely,
Davan Maharaj
Winners
Prize Winner in Breaking News Reporting in 2015:
The Seattle Times Staff
For its digital account of a landslide that killed 43 people and the impressive follow-up reporting that explored whether the calamity could have been avoided.
Breaking News Reporting
Finalists
Nominated as finalists in Breaking News Reporting in 2015:
Staff
For a superbly reported and written account of a lake-effect snowstorm, using human detail to illuminate the story and multimedia elements to help readers through the storm.
The Jury
The Jury
Leona Allen(Chair )
deputy managing editor
Naedine Hazell
special projects and publications editor
Fred Kalmbach
managing editor
Mark Luckie
manager, journalism and media
Winners in Breaking News Reporting
Staff
For its exhaustive and empathetic coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt that enveloped the city, using photography and a range of digital tools to capture the full impact of the tragedy.
Staff
For its comprehensive coverage of the mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., that killed 12 and injured 58, using journalistic tools, from Twitter and Facebook to video and written reports, both to capture a breaking story and provide context.
Staff
For its enterprising coverage of a deadly tornado, using social media as well as traditional reporting to provide real-time updates, help locate missing people and produce in-depth print accounts even after power disruption forced the paper to publish at another plant 50 miles away.
No award
No award
2015 Prize Winners
Anthony Doerr
An imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.
Julia Wolfe
A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
Stephen Adly Guirgis
A nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death.
David I. Kertzer
An engrossing dual biography that uses recently opened Vatican archives to shed light on two men who exercised nearly absolute power over their realms.