YouTube Shooting Ends With Woman Suspect Dead, Three Wounded
A woman opened fire at Northern California campus of Google’s YouTube, wounding three before taking her own life.
(Bloomberg) -- A woman opened fire at the suburban Northern California campus of Google’s YouTube, wounding three and sending panicked employees fleeing from their offices before taking her own life.
San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini said three gunshot victims, and a fourth person hurt running from the attack, were transported Tuesday afternoon to local hospitals. The woman found at the scene appeared to be dead of “a self-inflicted” gunshot wound, he said. While no motive was given for the shooting, two law enforcement sources told the Associated Press that the incident was being investigated as a domestic dispute. Media including NBC’s local affiliate and Kron4, citing anonymous sources, identified the shooter as southern California resident Nasim Aghdam.
Violence on this scale is rare on the modern, sprawling grounds of Silicon Valley’s technology companies, and it may result in a re-evaluation of the security at the open campus atmospheres they tend to favor. Rates of workplace violence have declined since 1994, according to the U.S. Justice Department. Just 4 percent of homicides at work in 2010 occurred in the professional and business-services sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The shooting shattered what had been a quiet, sunny day with many people outside for lunch. Workers at the headquarters of the video-sharing website said they heard gunshots and what sounded like banging and people running outside. Immediately, the Twitter feeds of employees began mentioning an active shooting on campus. Police said they first received emergency phone calls at 12:46 p.m. local time and the incident appeared to have started at a patio on the campus.
Sepand Parhami, a YouTube software engineer, said he was having lunch on an outside patio when he heard shots and saw a woman moving from a garage to the lobby of the complex. He scrambled for the door and went inside as the woman started shooting, he said in an interview after the incident.
Barberini said police arrived on the scene within two minutes of the first 911 calls and encountered people escaping from the buildings. They began a search and found someone with gunshot wounds, before coming across a second person, a female, with what appeared to be a self-inflicted fatal gunshot wound, the police chief said. Police then found two more people with gunshot wounds, he said.
“There are no words to describe the tragedy,” Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, said on Twitter. YouTube CEO “Susan Wojcicki and I are focused on supporting our employees and the YouTube community through this difficult time.”
San Bruno is a city about 11 miles south of downtown San Francisco and has been the home of YouTube, the world’s largest online video site, for more than a decade. It’s considered the northern border of Silicon Valley and is also home to a major Walmart e-commerce office.
Visitors to YouTube’s offices must enter with an employee or guest badge. While there are security personnel, YouTube, like most tech companies in Silicon Valley, lacks metal detectors. Some employees huddled in their offices during the shooting, staying away from windows, until police conducted a floor-by-floor sweep to evacuate them.
Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which has the city’s major trauma center, said late Tuesday afternoon that they treated three patients injured in the incident: a 36-year-old man in critical condition, a 32-year-old woman in serious condition and a 27-year-old woman in fair condition. The patients had multiple injuries, Andre Campbell, a hospital surgeon, told reporters. Campbell declined to specify the type of gunshot wounds suffered by the victims.
A Google spokesman and police declined to say whether the shooting victims were YouTube employees or detail their possible connections to the suspect. Police also declined to provide any further information about the shooter or the victims.
Barberini said the shooter used a handgun, though he declined to specify the make and model of the weapon.
California has some of the country’s strictest gun laws, which gun-control advocates say explains the state’s declining firearm mortality rate. According to the Giffords Law Center, California had the eighth-lowest gun death rate in the country in 2016. The gun control group gave the state an “A” on its annual scorecard, ranking it No. 1 on gun-law strength nationwide.
In addition to handgun limits and a pending assault weapons registry, those seeking to purchase a firearm in California must perform a safe-handling demonstration in front of a certified instructor. The state mandates that gun sales go through a licensed dealer, which requires a background check. The state enforces a 10-day waiting period for the sale or transfer of guns and it’s illegal to carry a loaded firearm in public.
The FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives responded to the scene. U.S. President Donald Trump, in a tweet, said he was briefed on the shooting and offered his “thoughts and prayers” for everyone involved.
Across the nation, the gun control debate has gained increasing attention from voters and legislators in the wake of the February mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Congress recently bolstered the federal background check system for gun purchases as part of a larger spending bill and an additional report clarified that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could study the causes of gun violence. Additional measures have been passed at the state level.
An FBI study of active shooter incidents from 2000 to 2013 found that only six such cases, or 3.8 percent, involved a female shooter. Among the 160 shootings the study focused on, 23 occurred in business environments, and in 22 of those, the shooter worked for or had worked for the company targeted. Two of those shooters were women. In 40 percent of the total incidents studied, the shooter committed suicide.
--With assistance from Ian King Mark Gurman Sarah McBride Olivia Zaleski Margaret Talev and Sarah Frier
To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Bergen in San Francisco at mbergen10@bloomberg.net, Nico Grant in San Francisco at ngrant20@bloomberg.net, Polly Mosendz in New York at pmosendz@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew Pollack, Alistair Barr
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