Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old Woodland Hills native, identified himself on the Internet as a man with a plan to kill female college students at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) because he was lonely.
Rodger has been identified by the UCSB newspaper (the Daily Nexus) and the Santa Barbara Independent as the man who killed six people in a shooting spree and gun battle Friday night. He was found dead in his car, possibly by suicide, during a six-minute shooting spree in Isla Vista, a predominately- student neighborhood next to the UCSB campus.
“Being lonely in a beautiful place like Santa Barbara is truly a horrible experience,” said the first paragraph in a blog called “Elliot Rodger’s Official Blog.”
“As I’ve said many times, a beautiful environment can be the darkest hell if you have to experience it all alone, especially while having to watch other men walking around with their girlfriends,” he continued. “I wish girls were attracted to me, I don’t know why they aren’t.”
In a YouTube video apparently posted by Rodger on Friday, he calmly sat in the driver’s seat of a car and detailed plans to “slaughter” “the hottest sorority girls” at UCSB.
Rodger said on his blog he was born in Britain and raised in Calabasas and Woodland Hills, and was living in Isla Vista, 95 miles west of Los Angeles.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said investigators had the gunman’s name, but were not releasing it. Rodger’s name surfaced in the Santa Barbara newspapers several hours after the shooting, attributed to eyewitnesses.
Six people were killed, plus the suspected gunman, and seven others wounded, Brown said, when shooting broke out just before 9:30 p.m. on May 23. One of the injured persons was in surgery and listed in critical condition, but was expected to survive, the Sheriff said.
Deputies have not said if the gunman was killed in the gunfight or took his life.
In the video, shot at sunset, Rodger looked into a camera on his dashboard, and pronounced his plans in a dramatic, deliberate tone.
“I’ll take to the streets of Isla Vista, and slay every single person I see there, all those popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasure while I’ve had to rot in loneliness, they all looked down at me as I tried to join them, they all treated me like a mouse, but now, I will be a God compared to you.”
Rodger’s father, Peter Rodgers, is a Los Angeles resident and works in the film industry and as a photographer, according to his web site. The family had originally lived in Britain, and London newspapers report they have been told the young man was receiving treatment for mental health issues.
Quoting an unnamed family attorney, The Express said the mother had called police when she discovered her son had posted a “disturbing” YouTube video in the past.
