A former nursing student accused of going on a shooting rampage at a vocational school in Oakland in 2012 is not mentally fit to stand trial, a Bay Area judge ruled Thursday.

One L. Goh, 47, is charged with seven counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder for the massacre at Oikos University in April 2012. The former student is accused of killing six students and a school employee with a gun he’d purchased legally a few months earlier.

Psychiatric evaluations have since determined that Goh suffers from long-term paranoid schizophrenia. Instead of being put on trial, he will be held at a mental institution, authorities said.

NEWSLETTER: Get essential California headlines delivered daily >>


At his arraignment three years ago, authorities revealed that Goh had gone to the small campus in industrial East Oakland looking for a female administrator who was not there.

When he could not find her, officials said he took a 24-year-old school secretary hostage before lining up students in a classroom and shooting.

Goh had been a nursing student at the university “until November of [2011], at which time he made the decision to leave the school,” Alameda County Dist. Atty. Nancy O’Malley said in 2012. “There is some information that the defendant wanted some money back for tuition he had paid. ... He did leave the school voluntarily. He was not expelled, and he was not asked to leave.”

Contrary to earlier descriptions from police, she said, “the information that we have received from some of the individuals who knew him at the school was that he was a loner and what some might call a loser, but he didn’t exhibit any behaviors that would have alerted anyone” that he was capable of such a shooting rampage.


Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan on Tuesday had said that Goh was upset that he had been expelled, had felt bullied and teased by fellow students and exhibited “behavior problems, anger management” problems and returned to campus looking for a particular administrator so he could settle a score.

Reporters Maria L. La Ganga and Victoria Kim contributed to this report.

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna.