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“Brad Martin, a fourth-year anthropology major said his girlfriend was walking to his house when she was approached by the shooters. ‘She is absolutely hysterical, and so she tells me that these guys pulled up and said hey what’s up. She turned and looked and they had a gun and she wasn’t sure if it was a real gun or a fake gun or what type of gun it was … She said the next second he raised it up to her face … and she turned around and started running. That’s when she heard bang bang bang right behind her as she was running, and she could feel the wind hitting her hair from the power of the gunshot from less than five feet away from the car.'”

“Premeditated mass murder” just outside one of America’s most idyllic, envied campuses.

The statement in my headline comes from an article in The Daily Nexus, the UC Santa Barbara student newspaper.

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Update: There was only one shooter.

[A] YouTube video titled “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution” appeared to be connected to the killing spree.

In the video, a young man sits behind the wheel of a parked car and rants about how he’s been ignored by women at UCSB and that his sexual advances have been rejected. He promises to go to Isla Vista on Friday night to seek revenge against women — especially sorority members — by slaughtering them.

Rodger’s Facebook page indicates he’s from Calabasas, and shows him sitting in a black BMW coupe.

The gunman’s car was a black BMW coupe.

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My searching around online suggests the shooter may have been the son of a Los Angeles-based film director/photographer.

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A somewhat similar act of femicide.

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Confirmation: The shooter is the son of Peter Rodger, “a special unit director on The Hunger Games and director of Oh My God, a documentary the screened during the Cannes Film Festival in 2009.”

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There are of course also similarities to the Virginia Tech massacre: A mentally disturbed young man of college age makes an angry video promising revenge on a world that has disrespected him; he then gets a gun and starts shooting in areas full of college students.

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Incredibly, it gets worse. The shooter stabbed his three roommates to death before he began shooting near UC Santa Barbara.

Margaret Soltan, May 24, 2014 7:42AM
Posted in: headline of the day

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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