Shooter opens fire at YouTube in San Bruno, injures 3, kills self

Officers guide bystanders away across the street from a reported shooting at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., Tuesday, April 3, 2018. Officers guide bystanders away across the street from a reported shooting at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., Tuesday, April 3, 2018. Photo: Joel Angel Juarez / Special To The Chronicle Photo: Joel Angel Juarez / Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 59 Caption Close Shooter opens fire at YouTube in San Bruno, injures 3, kills self 1 / 59 Back to Gallery

An apparently disgruntled video maker shot and wounded three people before fatally turning the gun on herself Tuesday at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, setting off a chaotic scramble as workers dived for cover, hid behind locked doors and ran from the building.

San Bruno police officers and San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies rushed to the office park two minutes after the first reports of gunfire came in at 12:46 p.m. and found dozens of workers streaming from the exits.

Near the front door of the building at 901 Cherry Ave., they came across one victim with a gunshot wound, and in an ensuing search of the premises found the shooter with an apparent self-inflicted fatal gunshot wound. Two other gunshot victims were found at nearby businesses where they apparently had taken refuge, police said.

Law enforcement sources identified the shooter as Nasim Najafi Aghdam, 39, of Menifee (Riverside County), and a Chronicle review of her social media accounts found that she was a prolific YouTube user with several accounts that she complained had been heavily censored by the company.

Late in the afternoon, Aghdam’s vehicle was towed from the scene. Her accounts on YouTube, Facebook and Instragram, meanwhile, were removed.

On a website consisting of a collage of photos and video posts, many of them about her vegan beliefs, Aghdam rails against YouTube for restricting views on her videos and for what she said was skimping on revenue driven by the traffic to her YouTube page.

“There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!” Aghdam wrote. “Youtube filtered my channels to keep them from getting views!”

It’s unclear how Aghdam gained access to YouTube headquarters. Her body was found inside the building following the shooting, police said.

Her three gunshot victims were rushed to San Francisco General Hospital. A 27-year-old woman was later listed in fair condition, a 32-year-old woman in serious condition and a 36-year-old man in critical condition, hospital officials said. A fourth person was treated for a sprained or broken ankle.

The violence unfolded in a matter of seconds, and several YouTube employees took to social media to report hearing gunfire and hiding or running for their lives. Some simply let people know they were “safe.” Hundreds of workers were evacuated by police, who made everyone hold their hands up as they filed out onto the street.

“It was very chaotic, as you can imagine,” said San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini.

Workers who were in the building described a terrifying scene as people rushed away from Aghdam, who was wearing body armor and firing a handgun, witnesses and police said.

Jesse Pineda of San Bruno said he was getting a hamburger at Carl’s Jr. across the street from the YouTube offices when he heard three shots in rapid succession. A young woman emerged from the office, shot in the left leg.

He helped drag her into the restaurant before hearing more shots. He then ran back toward YouTube and looked through the doorway, where he saw a woman on the ground.

“She was dead, I’m sure of it,” Pineda said. “Those 10 shots were rapid fire — it was no mercy. There were four more shots after that. I wish I had had a gun but I didn’t. I had to be smart and get out of there. I had to be fast.”

Eyewitnesses said the entire episode took about 30 seconds. Some had assumed the shooter, whose face was covered, was a man.

“I was in the courtyard and we heard the gunshots, then saw him,” Salahodeen Abdul-Kafi, a YouTube product manager, wrote on Facebook. “He had a shooting mask on, full body armor and was calmly walking and firing a handgun. We jumped to the floor then ran as fast as we could.”

via Twitter via Twitter Photo: Twitter/@sundarpichai Photo: Twitter/@sundarpichai Image 1 of / 42 Caption Close Shooting at Youtube HQ in San Bruno 1 / 42 Back to Gallery

Abdul-Kafi said he was OK, “but I don’t know about a lot of coworkers.”

As word filtered out to the crowd waiting behind the police lines that the shooter was dead, many shook their heads sadly and walked away.

At about 3:15 p.m., dozens of strike teams and officers from several local law enforcement agencies packed up their weapons and body armor and trudged back to their patrol cars. At least two armored vehicles remained at the scene late Tuesday afternoon as search teams went room by room, floor by floor looking for evidence and making sure the threat was over. Barberini said investigators would be processing the crime scene late into the night.

Dr. Andre Campbell, a trauma surgeon at San Francisco General Hospital, said none of the victims had yet undergone surgery. He said all of them were awake, talking and aware of what had happened to them.

“Once again, we are confronted with a specter of a mass casualty situation,” Campbell said. “This is unfortunate, and it continues. You’d think after we’ve seen Las Vegas, Parkland, the Pulse nightclub shooting, that we would see an end to this, but we have not. This is a terrible day in the United States when once again we have a multiple casualty situation.”

The incident prompted elected officials to respond with sorrow and condolences. On Twitter, President Trump said, “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.”

Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube, tweeted, “Praying for my friends @YouTube!”

YouTube spokesman Chris Dale said the shooting was especially hard given how “tight knit” the workers are in the company.

“It feels like the entire community of YouTube and all of the employees were victims of this crime,” Dale said. “Our prayers are with (the victims) and their families.”

Officials at Google, which owns YouTube, confirmed in a statement that four employees had been hurt “in this horrific act of violence.”

“We’re doing everything we can to support them and their families,” a Google spokesman wrote. “We will continue to provide support to help everyone in our Google family heal from this unimaginable tragedy.”

Aghdam used YouTube to post videos that covered a mix of topics, from vegan cooking to workouts to parodies of music videos.

A message on her YouTube pages late Tuesday said that the profiles were taken down due to “multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy against spam, deceptive practices, and misleading content or other Term of Service violations.”

The company Tuesday night declined to answer questions about Aghdam and her deleted accounts, and referred questions to an earlier statement on the shooting issued by Google CEO Sundar Pinchai.

On an Instagram post dated March 18, Aghdam claimed YouTube was using its tools to “censor and suppress people who speak the truth and are not good for the financial, political gains of the system and big businesses.”

Aghdam was also an animal-rights activist, featured in a 2009 story in the San Diego Union-Tribune about a protest by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals against the use of pigs in military trauma training. She dressed in a wig and jeans with large drops of painted “blood” on them, holding a plastic sword at the demonstration outside the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base.

“For me, animal rights equal human rights,” Aghdam told the Union-Tribune at the time.

Outside the YouTube headquarters Tuesday, employees huddled together and waited for authorities to take witness statements as helicopters circled overhead.

One group of employees — who declined to provide their names, citing a YouTube media policy — said they were sitting at their desks working around 1 p.m. when they heard, “pop-pop-pop.”

The noises sounded like they came from the courtyard, the employees said. But they initially dismissed the sound as that of people moving equipment. Then, people started running “like something serious was happening.”

One employee said he saw two shattered glass doors. The group hid inside an office for about 20 minutes until police came and cleared them out.

Just south of YouTube, a Carl’s Jr. employee, Michael Finney, 21, spoke of helping the wounded woman who came to the restaurant. He said he was working at about 1:30 p.m. when a young woman stumbled in with a gunshot wound to her left leg. She had been shot in the parking lot, he said.

“She was pretty calm,” Finney said. “I got a bungee cord and tied it around her leg to stop the bleeding. I asked her why someone would shoot her and she said she didn’t know.”

Fed Krysko, 21, of San Bruno said he was visiting a friend at Carl’s Jr. when employees began coming out of YouTube with their hands up.

“This is insane,” Krysko said. “I’ve lived here seven years and there’s never been anything like this before. This is what you see happening all over the country, but not in San Bruno.”

Todd Sherman, who identified himself as a YouTube product manager on his Twitter page, said he was sitting in a meeting and then heard that people were running. “First thought was earthquake,” he said.

“We headed towards the exit and then saw more people and someone said that there was a person with a gun,” Sherman wrote on Twitter. “I looked down and saw blood drips on the floor and stairs. Peeked around for threats and then we headed downstairs and out the front.”

Sherman wrote that he and his co-workers spread out in different directions after the incident.

“We’re such a quiet town — this is bizarre,” said Terry Jones, a 23-year resident of San Bruno, who was among the crowd that lingered after the shooting. “We’ve got some lunatics, sure, but it’s unusual to have something go so big.

“I guess that pipeline explosion was the last time,” he said, referring to the rupture of a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. natural gas pipeline in a San Bruno neighborhood, which killed eight people in September 2010.

He shook his head sadly, saying, “At least it wasn’t little kids getting shot.”

Chronicle staff writers Lizzie Johnson, Hamed Aleaziz, Jenna Lyons, Dominic Fracassa, J.K. Dineen, Erin Allday, Joaquin Palomino, Cynthia Dizikes and Sophie Haigney contributed to this report.