Police block off an area of the rampage shooting crime scene in Santa Barbara. Image: Santa Barbara Independent.
A series of drive-by shootings in the Isla Vista area near the University of California at Santa Barbara Friday night left seven people dead. The suspect, Elliot Rodger, was shot dead during the melee. He has been identified as the son of "Hunger Games" assistant director Peter Rodger, and is believed to have left a violent video in which he spoke of feeling alienated from and rejected by women, and wanting to seek revenge and punishment.
The video, "Elliot Rodger's retribution," has been taken down by YouTube. There are copies floating around. Do yourself a favor and do not watch it, your life will be better for it.
Still from a video attributed to the suspect in a rampage shooting in the Isla Vista area near Santa Barbara.
Identifying info on the YouTube video links it to a young man who said on his blog that he was 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.
"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," the man in the video 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."
The shooter was armed with a semi-automatic handgun. Authorities are investigating the possibility that other weapons were used. Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said the suspect engaged in two gun battles with deputies before crashing his black BMW into a parked car. Deputies found him dead with a gunshot wound to the head, but it's not clear whether he killed himself or was shot to death by deputies.
From the Santa Barbara Independent:
The names of the victims and the suspect have not been released. Brown, however, confirmed that written and video material left by 22-year-old Elliot Rodger of Calabasas in the hours and days leading up to the shooting is being reviewed as evidence in the massacre. "It appears to be connected," he said.
In a YouTube video titled "Elliot Rodger's Retribution" and posted the day before the shooting, Rodger — a Santa Barbara City College Student and Isla Vista resident, according to his social media accounts — laments his life of "loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires." He blames women for throwing themselves at "obnoxious brutes" but rejecting him, "the supreme gentlemen."
In graphic and unsettling detail, he describes how he plans to launch an assault on the streets of Isla Vista the next day and become a God who "exacts my retribution on all those who deserve it." (The video is posted below. Please be warned: it is extremely disturbing.) Photographs taken by The Santa Barbara Independent of the suspect's crashed vehicle on Del Playa Drive show a license plate number that matches the one on the car featured on Rodger's Facebook page.
Suspected #UCSB shooter was active on a pick-up artist-hating forum called http://t.co/qrXlrc2339 -> http://t.co/50yskuFLiM
— Brian Ries (@moneyries) May 24, 2014
That puahate.com forum is down now, but earlier contained dozens of posts consistent with the hateful, misogynist, narcissistic tone of the video. Accounts followed by the YouTube account from which the video was posted appeared to self-identify with PUA and/or Men's Rights themes. He also appeared to be active in bodybuilding and gun rights forums.
