Mother Jones
Elliot Rodger had pondered mass murder for years before last month’s killing spree near Santa Barbara, which left seven dead and another 13 wounded. But it was a violent clash with people who snubbed him at a party 10 months earlier that convinced him to plow ahead with the plan. A police report obtained by Mother Jones through a public-records request sheds fresh light on this incident and raises new questions about how the local police handled clues that surfaced prior to Rodger’s deadly rampage, which ended with him committing suicide.
In July 2013, Rodger, a lonely 21-year-old virgin, attended a party in Isla Vista, a seaside town that’s home to University of California, Santa Barbara. In his 141-page manifesto, Rodger recalled the outing as a “last ditch effort” to lose his virginity before turning 22. (“I was giving the female gender one last chance to provide me with the pleasures I deserved from them.”) But the girls at the party ignored him. Rodger grew livid and climbed up onto a 10-foot ledge where he pretended to pick off party goers with an imaginary gun. He then tried to push several women off the edge, but a group of men intervened and shoved him off instead.
Rodger, who broke his ankle in the fall, initially tried to flee. He later staggered back toward the party to look for his Gucci sunglasses, but he was so drunk that he got lost and ended up in another fight in front of the house next door. “They called me names like ‘faggot’ and ‘pussy’, typical things those types of scumbags would say,” he wrote in his manifesto. “A whole group of the obnoxious brutes came up and dragged me onto their driveway, pushing and hitting me.”
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READ: The Police Report From the Incident That Spurred Elliot Rodger to Mount His Killing Spree
