YouTube shooter Nasim Najafi Aghdam ‘angry at site’s policies’

The woman who allegedly shot three people before killing herself at YouTube’s headquarters on Tuesday was “upset with the policies and practices of YouTube”, according to San Bruno police chief Ed Barberini.

The suspect, identified as Nasim Najafi Aghdam, was reportedly angry with the video-sharing platform, telling family that the company was censoring her videos and had stopped paying her for her content, The Guardian reports.

According to the Bay Area News Group, the suspect’s father had reported her missing on 21 March and had warned police that she might have been going to the company’s headquarters, 500 miles from her home in San Diego.

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Mountain View police department confirmed that an officer had spoken to Aghdam at 2am on the day of the shooting, after finding her asleep in her car.

“An hour later, Aghdam's father called the officer back to say his daughter was likely in the area because of her dispute with YouTube,” reports ABC News, but the officer “heard nothing that raised his concern” and San Bruno police were not told of the encounter.

4 April

Female suspect dead after YouTube shooting

A suspected female shooter has died and three others were injured in a mass shooting at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California.

NBC reports that four senior police officers have identified the shooter as 39-year-old Nasim Najafi Aghdam, who used a 9mm pistol to shoot two men and a woman, before turning the weapon on herself.

Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital has confirmed that three victims are being treated for gunshot wounds: a 36-year-old man in a critical condition, a 32-year-old woman in a serious condition and a 27-year-old woman, who is in a “fair” condition.

Authorities initially believed the attack was a domestic dispute, but San Bruno police later said there was “no evidence that the shooter knew the victims of this shooting or that individuals were specifically targeted”. They added the motive was unclear.

Aghdam’s father, Ismail, told The Mercury News that his daughter was “angry” with YouTube because it had stopped paying her for the videos she posted on the platform.

Her online profile shows Aghdam was a vegan activist who ran a website called NasimeSabz.com – “Green Breeze” in Persian – where she posted “about Persian culture and veganism, as well as long passages critical of YouTube”, says The Guardian.

In one, she accused “new closed-minded” YouTube workers of “reducing her view count, suppressing her and discouraging her from creating content on the video platform”, says CBS.