The San Bruno Police Department identified the
attacker late Tuesday as Nasim Najafi Aghdam, who was in her late 30s. The
motivation for the shootings was under investigation, the police said, although
her social media postings included criticisms of YouTube.
Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital received
three patients: a man, 36, in critical condition; a woman, 32, in serious
condition; and a woman, 27, in fair condition, a hospital spokesman, Brent
Andrew, said at a news conference. A fourth person had injuries that weren’t
from a gunshot, the police said.
“At this time there is no evidence that the shooter
knew the victims of this shooting or that individuals were specifically
targeted,” the San Bruno Police Department said in a written statement.
Word of the attack in San
Bruno at YouTube, which is owned by Google and is one of the world’s largest
social media companies, quickly spread online through employees’ social media
feeds.
Vadim Lavrusik, a
YouTube employee who formerly worked for The New York Times, tweeted just
before 1 p.m. that there was an “active shooter at YouTube HQ” and that he had
“heard shots and saw people running while at my desk.” He was barricaded in a
room with co-workers, he said, but moments later tweeted that he had been safely
evacuated.
The last known address for Ms. Aghdam was in Menefee,
a city in Southern California about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego.
Ms. Aghdam was active on various social media outlets,
including YouTube, where she had a number of channels in Persian, Turkish and
English. On YouTube, she published an eclectic set of videos, including music
parodies and workouts, on topics like animal cruelty and vegan cooking.
In February 2017, she recorded a video on Facebook
criticizing YouTube for taking measures that decreased the number of views on
her videos.
She said that she had contacted YouTube, but that the
site’s support staff told her that her workout videos contained inappropriate
scenes and needed to be restricted from younger audiences.
“This is what they are doing to weekend activists and
many other people who try to promote healthy, humane and smart living — people
like me are not good for big business like for animal business, medicine
business and for many other businesses. That’s why they are discriminating and
censoring us,” she said in the video on Facebook.
YouTube had pulled down all of her channels as of
Tuesday night.
A 2009 story
by The
San Diego Union-Tribune quoted a woman with the same name as Ms. Aghdam at
an animal rights protest outside Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps base in
Southern California. Two dozen attended the protest organized by People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals against the use of pigs in military trauma
training.
“For me, animal rights
equal human rights,” said Ms. Aghdam, then 29, who attended the protest
carrying a plastic sword and wearing a wig and jeans painted with drops of
blood.
The shootings on Tuesday took place in a courtyard at
YouTube’s offices, the police said. Those offices, like other Google
facilities, maintain light security, with employees using badges to go through
security gates or doors. Usually, the main lobby is attended by a receptionist.
There are no visible metal detectors or armed guards.
San Bruno is about nine miles south of San Francisco,
with a population around 43,000. YouTube is the city’s biggest employer, and
many workers commute here from San Francisco. Though YouTube is owned by
Google, it operates in a separate office, about 20 miles from Google’s main
campus in Mountain View, Calif.
Outside the YouTube
headquarters, armed police officers waded into a crowd of 200 or so employees
who had evacuated to a nearby parking lot Tuesday afternoon. The police asked
for employees who had witnessed something firsthand to come forward, and about
two dozen, some visibly distraught, walked over to the officers.
Many employees said they had initially thought the
episode was a fire drill. Others said they had run when people started shouting
that there was a shooter. Two hours after the attack, YouTube employees,
including Susan Wojcicki, the chief executive, continued to stream slowly down
the hill, away from the office.
Footage broadcast by CNN showed people leaving the
building in single file with their hands raised above their heads. Separate
footage showed a large crowd lining up to be frisked, one by one, by the
police.
Zach Vorhies, 37, a
senior software engineer at YouTube, said in an interview that he had been
sitting at his desk when the fire alarm went off. He grabbed his electric
skateboard and headed for a back exit, he said. As he rode down a gravel hill,
he heard someone shouting and saw a man lying motionless in one of the office’s
outdoor dining areas.
“He had a red spot on his stomach, and he was lying on
his back, not moving,” Mr. Vorhies said. “I saw the blood soak through the
shirt.”
About 25 feet away from the victim, he said, a man was
shouting, “Come at me!” Mr. Vorhies thought the man was the attacker, but he
did not see a gun and said it was possible that the man had actually “been
taunting the shooter.”
A moment later, an armed
police officer entered the patio area, and Mr. Vorhies quickly left, he said.
The dining area can be reached from an adjacent
parking structure without an employee badge, Mr. Vorhies said.
By 2:15 p.m., President Trump had been briefed on the
attack. He tweeted a short time later: “Was just briefed on the shooting at
YouTube’s HQ in San Bruno, California. Our thoughts and prayers are with
everybody involved. Thank you to our phenomenal Law Enforcement Officers and
First Responders that are currently on the scene.”
Cameron Rogers Polan, a
spokeswoman for the San Francisco Division of the F.B.I., said in an email that
the agency was in contact with the San Bruno police. The San Francisco division
of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tweeted that it,
too, was responding to the shooting.
Google said on
Twitter that it was “coordinating with authorities.”
“I know a lot of you are in shock right now,” Google’s
chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said in a statement
posted to Twitter. “Over the coming days, we will continue to provide
support to help everyone in our Google family heal from this unimaginable
tragedy.”
Executives at other Silicon Valley companies took to
Twitter to send their condolences to YouTube employees.
“From everyone at Apple, we send our sympathy and
support to the team at YouTube and Google, especially the victims and their
families,” Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook,
wrote.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, wrote on Twitter:
“I can’t imagine what our friends at YouTube are feeling and dealing with right
now. We‘re here for you and your families and friends.”
Others, including a trauma surgeon at the hospital
where shooting victims were taken, expressed anger at continued gun violence.
“You’d think that after
we’ve seen Las Vegas, Parkland, the Pulse nightclub shooting, that we would see
an end to this, but we have not,” the surgeon, Dr. Andre Campbell, told
reporters Tuesday afternoon.
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