Sheriff’s office report reveals plan was months in the making in 2014 attack that left six people dead, not including Rodger, and 14 people wounded

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

After stabbing his two housemates and another man to death, Elliot Rodger began the second part of his murderous rampage with a triple vanilla latte from Starbucks.

Then, from behind the wheel of his black BMW coupe, he uploaded his final video to YouTube, titled Retribution.

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A detailed report into Rodger’s attack, in Isla Vista, California, on 23 May 2014, was released on Thursday by the Santa Barbara County sheriff’s office. The report revealed, in heartbreaking detail, the execution of Rodger’s plan, months in the making, to exact revenge on a world he believed had deeply wronged him.

The men he killed at his apartment were Weihan Wang, 20; Cheng Yuan Hong, 20; and George Chen, 19.

Less than two hours after purchasing his latte, at around 9.15pm, Rodger arrived at the Alpha Phi sorority house. Rachel Glikes, who lived there, heard him pounding on the door for several minutes. No one answered, but after the pounding stopped Glikes heard “six to seven gunshots, a female scream, followed by three additional gunshots”.



Vanessa Brist, another resident, heard the gunshots as she was getting dressed, according to the report, but thought at first they were firecrackers. Linda Gordon, the sorority’s “house mother”, gathered some of the other residents in a room to take shelter.

Rodger had returned to his car. Through its open window, he shot Veronika Weiss, Katherine Cooper and Bianca DeKock as they walked past the western wall of the sorority house. Then, making what one witness described as an “aggressive” turn from Embarcadero Del Norte on to Segovia, Rodger drove away.

DeKock survived; Cooper and Weiss did not.

The first 911 call came in to the Santa Barbara County dispatch center at 9.27pm, from a man named Spencer. The sheriff’s office broadcast a “gunshots heard” call less than 30 seconds later. Deputies, several of whom had heard the gunshots before running towards the house, converged on the scene.

Rodger was still driving. He made a three-point turn in a driveway on Pardall Road. As he passed a coffee shop on Pardall, he fired one round into it. It was closed at the time.

A group of friends was standing on the corner outside the IV Deli Mart when they heard a loud noise, which the report says was likely Rodger’s gunshot into the coffee shop. One of them suggested they go inside the deli, so they filed inside.

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Christopher Michaels-Martinez turned to look at Rodger’s car from the doorway of the store – he was struck in the chest as Rodger fired “numerous gunshots into the store”. Michaels-Martinez fell to the floor inside the deli mart, where he died.

Rodger continued to drive, shooting from the car window. Near the junction of Embarcadero Del Norte and Madrid Road, he swerved to hit a man, Jin Fu, who was crossing the road.

The car struck Fu with such force, according to the report, “that his body flipped as he was thrown into the air”. Miraculously, Fu’s only injury was a small bruise on his left calf.

Rodger continued to shoot at people, hitting and wounding several of them, as well as knocking several people over with his car.

At 9.35pm, Rodger crashed heavily into a parked car. Officers rushed to it. In the driver’s seat, they found Rodger, his black Sig Sauer pistol loaded and cocked next to his hip. He was dead, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The whole attack had taken around eight minutes, according to the report, which estimates that 55 9mm rounds were fired. By the end, 14 people had been wounded, either by gunshot or by being struck by Rodger’s car, and six were dead, not including Rodger.

More than 500 more live rounds of ammunition, another pistol and two knives were discovered inside the car by police.

One of the people who was shot, Bailey Maples, recalled that Rodger had a “creepy” laugh – a laugh would become unpleasantly familiar to investigators and the press in the following days, as his online world began to be revealed.

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A Guardian investigation into Rodger’s online life at the time of the attack found, like the sheriff’s report, evidence of hatred and premeditation. Rodger had made a number of threatening YouTube videos, and was a member of an insidious online community on a message-board site called PUAHate.com.

His lengthy autobiography-cum-manifesto, titled My Twisted World, had been emailed to several people, including his father, earlier that day. His father, Peter Rodger, a film executive, told investigators the document “freaked him out”.

In Rodger’s apartment, along with several more knives including a 10in “zombie-killer” fixed-blade and an 18in machete and a print-out of his manifesto, was a diary. The final handwritten entry reads: “This is it. In one hour I will have my revenge on this cruel world. I HATE YOU ALLLL! DIE.”

In his introduction to his report, Sheriff Bill Brown said: “Sadly, terrible crimes like this occur far too frequently.”

Brown wrote that in the aftermath of such tragedies, the question always asked is: “What can be done to save lives by preventing similar crimes in the future?”

“In California, we have some of the strongest gun control laws in the nation, yet in this case the suspect was still able to legally purchase and possess three handguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition,” Brown wrote.

“Many suspects in mass murder incidents suffer from severe mental illness that is untreated or under-treated, yet in this instance the suspect was receiving treatment and had been since childhood.”

“Nevertheless,” he wrote, “more can and must be done to ensure that those who died were not lost in vain.”