California gunman, in manifesto, said police nearly thwarted plot
(Reuters) - A 22-year-old man who killed six people before taking his own life in a rampage through a California college town said in a chilling manifesto that police who knocked on his door last month to check on his welfare nearly foiled his plot.
Elliot Rodger, the son of a Hollywood director, stabbed three people to death in his apartment before gunning down three more victims on Friday night in the town of Isla Vista near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Rodger, who posted a threatening video railing against women online shortly before his rampage, stalked Isla Vista in his car and on foot, firing on bystanders in a killing spree that ended when he killed himself after a shootout with sheriff's deputies, police said.
But less than a month before his attacks, after he had planned the killings and obtained the guns he would use, the community college student opened his door to a knock to find about seven officers looking for him.
"I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do, and reported me for it," Rodger said in a manifesto obtained by California's KEYT-TV, excerpts of which were published by the Los Angeles Times.
"If that was the case, the police would have searched my room, found all of my guns and weapons, along with my writings about what I plan to do with them. I would have been thrown in jail, denied of the chance to exact revenge on my enemies. I can't imagine a hell darker than that. Thankfully, that wasn't the case, but it was so close," he wrote.
He said he learned that videos he posted online had alarmed his mother, and he believed either she or a mental health agency had asked authorities to check up on him.
"The police interrogated me outside for a few minutes, asking me if I had suicidal thoughts. I tactfully told them that it was all a misunderstanding, and they finally left," he said in the manifesto, according to the Times.
"For a few horrible seconds I thought it was all over. When they left, the biggest wave of relief swept over me. It was so scary," he wrote, adding he removed the videos with plans to repost them closer to the date of his planned attack.
In a YouTube video posted shortly before the rampage, a young man believed by police to be Rodger bitterly complained of loneliness and rejection by women and outlined his plan to kill those he believed spurned him.
MENTALLY DISTURBED
Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown has said that Rodger was seen by a variety of healthcare professionals and it was "very, very apparent he was severely mentally disturbed."
Brown said his department had been in contact with Rodger three times prior to the killings, including for a welfare check in which deputies found him to be polite and courteous. He did not appear to meet criteria to be held involuntarily on mental health grounds, and deputies took no further action, Brown said.
"At the time the deputies interacted with him, he was able to convince them that he was OK," Brown told CBS' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
"When you read his autobiography and the manifesto that he wrote, it's very apparent that he was able to convince many people for many years that he didn't have this deep, underlying, obvious mental illness that ultimately manifested itself in this terrible tragedy," he added.
In a plot laid out in writing, Rodger said he planned to first kill his housemates then lure others to his residence to continue his killings, before slaughtering women in a university sorority and continuing his spree in the streets of Isla Vista. Then, he would commit suicide.
He wrote that he also planned to kill his younger brother, "denying him of the chance to grow up to surpass me", as well as his stepmother, who he said would be in the way - killings he did not carry out.
But he did not think he was mentally prepared to kill his father, Peter Rodger, an assistant director on the 2012 film "The Hunger Games," according to the manifesto.
A lawyer for the family, Alan Shifman, said they offered sympathy to those affected by the tragedy. Shifman declined further comment on Sunday, and family members of Rodger could not immediately be reached.
In suburban Los Angeles, authorities carried out search warrants at the homes of both of Rodger's parents. Neither were home at the time.
BYSTANDERS KILLED
On Friday, after stabbing to death three people in his residence, Rodger went to a nearby sorority house and knocked on the door. No one answered, and shortly afterward he shot three women standing outside, killing students Katherine Cooper, 22, and Veronica Weiss, 19, Brown said on Saturday.
At a nearby delicatessen, Rodger shot dead 20-year-old UCSB English major Christopher Michael-Martinez before fleeing in his car. As he drove, he shot at pedestrians, traded fire with police and struck two cyclists before crashing. In addition to those killed, 13 people were wounded, eight of whom were shot.
Officers found Rodger dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. In his car were three legally purchased semiautomatic guns, two Sig Sauers and a Glock, and more than 400 rounds of unspent ammunition, Brown said.
He told CBS that there was no evidence Rodger had ever been institutionalized or committed for an involuntary hold of any kind, situations that could have prohibited him from legally buying guns.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/ ... 5120140525
It seems to me that we need to look at a couple of things here:
First, we need to consider a criteria for premise searches in mental health check situations different from standard criteria. Any practiced sociopath who only has to spend a couple of minutes standing outside talking to the cops without becoming hostile or agitated is going to be able to pull that off.
Second, we also need to look at broadening the definition of a mental condition that would prohibit one from legally buying a fire arm from "been institutionalized or committed for an involuntary hold of any kind." (Especially since we've made involuntary holds such a difficult thing to do.)
As this has unfolded over the past several days, I've seen and read a lot of talk in the media about "red flags being missed" and "signs being ignored"...
The more I learn about this, the more it is apparent to me that in
this case, that
isn't at all what happened. Even after the final video was posted, the parents were desperately trying to prevent the tragedy:
The parents of Santa Barbara shooter Elliot Rodger had read his chilling manifesto and were frantically trying to stop their son carry out his plan when they heard of the massacre on the radio, it emerged Sunday.
The 22-year-old had emailed the 140-page document to a couple of dozen people including his parents and at least one of his therapists just hours before he went on his shooting rampage Friday night, family friend Simon Astaire told CNN.
Lichin Rodger, the suspect's mother, reportedly received the email at 9.17pm and immediately went on to her son's YouTube page where she found the newly uploaded video titled 'Retribution' which describes his plan of 'slaughtering' women at a sorority house at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
According to CNN, Mrs Rodger then alerted her estranged husband, Peter, and after he watched the video she called 911. The former couple then set off from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara to try find their son.
But they were too late, and, according to Mr Astaire, they heard about the shooting en route.
Later that night, their worst fears were confirmed when they were told their son was behind the massacre that left six victims dead and 13 injured.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... house.html
It seems to me that every "sign" and "red flag" from the time this guy was eight years old till the day of the massacre, was seen and acted upon.
It looks to me like we've gone so far in the direction of avoiding stigmatizing the mentally ill, and protecting their rights, that we've structured the system in such a way that it makes what happened here unavoidable. Every party involved in dealing with this guy; the parents, the mental health professionals, the mental health authorities, the police...all acted responsibly and did everything they could within the constraints of the laws.
It's the laws
themselves that failed here; the laws that so narrowly define being unable to legally purchase a firearm based on a mental condition; the laws that make it so difficult to compel people to take medication for mental illness, the laws that make it so difficult to carry out a temporary mental health hold, the laws that make it so difficult to search the premises of a mentally ill person...
All of these combined to enable what happened here; not the failing of any individual or agency.
There are certainly arguments for having these laws structured this way, but so long as we do, events like this will always be part of the cost. Perhaps it's time to take a look across the board at whether or not the legal pendulum hasn't swung too far in this direction.
I'm certainly not suggesting that we go back to the days where anyone diagnosed with any sort of mental illness get's tossed in a mental asylum for years with no legal recourse. But I have to believe we can strike a better balance then the situation we have today, where no matter how many "red flags" or "warning signs" there are,
no effective compulsory action can be taken until the person has either killed or seriously injured someone.
