A woman who had voiced complaints online about Youtube opened fire on employees with a handgun wounding three persons in the process at YouTube's headquarters in Northern California before killing herself, police say.
The Police have named the suspect as Nasim Aghdam, 39, and that there is no evidence yet that she knew the victims, a 36-year-old man said to be in a critical condition, and two women aged 32 and 27.
The incident was the latest in a string of mass shootings in the United States in recent years. Most recently, the massacre of 17 people at a Florida high school has led to calls for tighter curbs on gun ownership.
The woman approached an outdoor patio and dining courtyard on the Youtube campus around lunchtime and began to fire before entering the building, police said.
In a recording of a 911 call posted online by the Los Angeles Times, a dispatcher can be heard saying: “Shooter. Another party said they spotted someone with a gun. Suspect came from the back patio ... Again we have a report of a subject with a gun. They heard seven or eight shots being fired.”
Dozens of emergency vehicles quickly converged on the YouTube campus, and police could be seen on televised aerial video systematically frisking several employees leaving the area with their hands raised.
Such "active shooter" incidents are overwhelmingly carried out by men an FBI report found that out of 160 incidents between 2000-2013 only six of the people who opened fire were women.
Reports have revealed that Aghdam was a prolific Youtuber who had ranted online against the company's new policies and accused them of censoring her videos.
Aghdam, who was a self-described animal rights activist and ‘vegan bodybuilder’, had a significant online presence with multiple YouTube channels and social media pages.
In a video that Aghdam posted back in January 2017, she vented about her content being censored.
She also said that her YouTube channel, which had more than 5,000 subscribers, used to get many views but claimed she started getting less when the company ‘filtered’ her videos.
Aghdam’s YouTube channels and social media pages were all removed in the hours after the shooting.
Her father Ismail Aghdam told the Bay Area News Group that he had warned police his daughter hated YouTube and she might be headed to their headquarters.
When they arrived, police found Aghdam dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
The three patients taken to San Francisco General Hospital were all awake, Dr. Andre Campbell, a trauma surgeon at the hospital, told a news conference. All were victims of gunshot wounds, Campbell said, but none of them had undergone surgery.
A fourth person was taken to a local hospital with an ankle injury from fleeing the scene.
“It’s with great sadness that I tell you based on the latest information four people were injured in this horrific act of violence,” Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said in letter to employees posted on Twitter.
“I know a lot of you are in shock right now. Over the coming days, we will continue to provide support to help everyone in our Google family heal from this unimaginable tragedy.”
