It was Friday evening last week when the parents of Elliot Rodger clicked open the 140-page manifesto their son e-mailed to them and learned of his plans to commit mass murder and then suicide. Frightened and alarmed, they called 911 and raced to Isla Vista, California, in separate cars from Los Angeles, desperate to stop him, but it was too late.
By the time they arrived, Rodger had killed six people, police said, and then died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a display of violence that stunned the quiet ocean-side college town.
In truth, Rodger had been planning his “Day of Retribution” — as he called it in that manifesto — for three years, from the summer day that he moved into a small apartment with two roommates. It was the first time Rodger lived away from home and he had been hoping to escape the sexual rejections he raged against through adolescence, but as he simmered at the happy couples walking down the streets, his thoughts turned from starting a new life to exacting revenge.
“I couldn’t believe how wrong everything was turning out,” Rodger, 22, wrote in the manifesto he sent out shortly before stabbing three people to death in his apartment, including his two roommates, whom he described as “repulsive.”
His parents’ frantic trip to Isla Vista was just one missed chance to avert the tragedy. In this case, the emergency call to the police and their arrival came well after the killing rampage was over.
Only weeks earlier, deputies from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office had stopped by Rodger’s apartment late last month at the request of state mental health officials, acting on an expression of concern by his mother. They left after a calm, polite Rodger assured them that there was nothing to worry about. The officers reported that Rodger was shy and had told them he was having difficulties in his social life.
That left them little ground on which to act under California law. As Rodger was never institutionalized because of his emotional problems, he was able to legally purchase the weaponry he used in the shooting.
Sometime after the police visit, Rodger — who had already amassed a stockpile of weapons and ammunition in the apartment — added a note to his manifesto saying: “If they had demanded to search my room that would have ended everything. For a few horrible seconds, I thought it was all over.”
His killing rampage was meticulously laid out, moving from an angry fantasy to a detailed mission over the course of three years. Rodger visited a shooting range in Oxnard for target practice, purchased three semi-automatic handguns at different gun stores (in case two of them jammed) and scheduled and postponed the day of reckoning for the most logistical of reasons. At one point, he wanted to do it on Halloween last year, but pulled back after determining that police were out in extra force on that night.
“May 24th, 2014, was the final date,” he wrote. “There is no postponing it anymore, no backing out. If I don’t do this, then I only have a future filled with more loneliness and rejection ahead of me, devoid of sex, love and enjoyment.”
The sheriff’s office identified the three remaining victims on Sunday evening, all students at University of California, Santa Barbara. The first two were Rodger’s roommates, 20-year-old student Hong Cheng-yuan (洪晟元) and George Chen (陳喬治). Hong, who was also known as James, identified himself on Facebook as having grown up in Taipei and had graduated from Lynbrook High School in San Jose, California. The third victim was Wang Weiham (王偉漢), 20, of Fremont, California.
Two women killed in front of a sorority during Rodger’s subsequent shooting rampage were Katherine Breann Cooper, 22, of Chino Hills, California, and Veronika Elizabeth Weiss, 19, of Westlake Village, also in the state. The sixth fatal attack was against Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, 20, of the state’s Los Osos.
Simon Astaire, who described himself as a longtime friend of Rodger’s divorced parents, described them as devastated.
“It’s like everyone’s unbearable nightmare,” he said on Sunday.
Astaire said Rodger’s mother, Li Chin (李青), opened an e-mail from her son at 9:17pm on Friday, about 10 minutes before the shooting started, after getting an alarmed call from his therapist. Astaire said she read the first four lines of the message and went to Rodger’s YouTube page, where she found a video pledging retribution that he had posted the day before.
Astaire said she called her ex-husband, Peter, who was at dinner with his new wife and two friends in Los Angeles, and then called 911. The two parents began racing up to Isla Vista, about 20km from downtown Santa Barbara, arriving to learn of the rampage, Astaire said.
By many accounts, Rodger had a long history of unusual behavior. Chris Pollard, 22, a neighbor of Rodger’s in Isla Vista, said the 22-year-old had rebuffed him when he tried to encourage Rodger to socialize with other residents in the building.
“He just sat and was non-responsive,” Pollard said. “Anytime anybody tried to get him involved, he just seemed like he didn’t want to be involved. He looked like he became gradually more frustrated or bored and then eventually he would just get up and go inside.”
Pollard recounted seeing Rodger come home once bloodied and beaten up after an encounter at a bar. In his manifesto, Rodger said he had been trying to push women over a ledge at the bar, sparking a fight that led to several men beating him up.
Pollard said it took hours to calm Rodger, as he fumed about the men who had attacked him.
“He started saying: ‘I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill them. I’m going to kill myself,’” Pollard said.
On Friday afternoon, before the violence began, Rodger approached Giovanni’s Pizza, up the street from his apartment. Ally Kubie, 20, who was working behind the counter, said Rodger stood on the patio, barely moving as he stared at her through the glass, a smile fixed on his face.
“I asked: ‘Do you need help?’” Kubie said. “But he just stared at me. It was creepy.”
Speaking on Sunday on Face the Nation on CBS, Sheriff Bill Brown of Santa Barbara County recounted how deputies had visited Rodger last month and found him calm and lucid. Brown said Rodger did not, in the view of his deputies, meet the criteria by which he might have been brought in for observation.
Because of that, they also had no grounds to search Rodger’s apartment, where he had already stockpiled his weapons and ammunition, including a Glock 34 and a Sig Sauer P226.
“And obviously, looking back on this, it’s a very tragic situation and we certainly, you know, wish that we could turn the clock back and maybe change some things,” Brown said.
Rodger related the same anecdote with relief, saying he thought his plan was about to be foiled when he found seven deputies at his door.
“As soon as I saw those cops, the biggest fear I had ever felt in my life overcame me,” he wrote. “I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do and reported me for it.
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
The plan he carried out on Friday was close to what he had written about.
“The first people I would have to kill are my two housemates, to secure the entire apartment for myself as my personal torture and killing chamber,” he wrote.
Police said they believed the third person he stabbed there was a visitor.
He said his next phase would be to head to the Alpha Phi Sorority to kill women there. Once he arrived there, he pounded on the door, but was denied entrance so instead shot three women outside, two of them fatally. From there, he planned to drive the streets “splattering as many enemies as I can with my SUV” and shooting at passers-by.
Additional reporting by Ian Lovett
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