GOLETA, Calif. -- A California gunman who went on a rampage near a Santa Barbara university stabbed three people to death at his apartment before shooting to death three more while terrorizing a neighborhood, sheriff's officials said Saturday.
Elliot Rodger, 22, the suspected gunman in the rampage near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, apparently killed himself, authorities said.
At a news conference, Sheriff Bill Brown called it a "chaotic, rapidly unfolding convoluted incident" that involved multiple crime scenes.
Police provided new details about the scope of the killings as they described how the killer went from one location to another and opened fire on random people and exchanged gunfire with law enforcement officers before he crashed his BMW. Deputies found three semi-automatic handguns with 400 unspent rounds in his black BMW. All were purchased legally.
Rodger fired for 10 minutes starting about 9:30 p.m. as he made his way through the beach community of Isla Vista, where students were walking, biking and skateboarding, in a deadly rampage that mirrored threats made on a YouTube video posted Friday night, authorities said.
Thirteen people were injured -- eight from gunshot wounds, four from being hit by Rodger's car and one a minor injury the source of which was not clear yet, Brown said.
Earlier Saturday, Alan Shifman -- a lawyer who represents Peter Rodger, one of the assistant directors of The Hunger Games -- issued a statement saying his client believes his son, Elliot Rodger, was the shooter. The family is staunchly against guns, he added.
"The Rodger family offers their deepest compassion and sympathy to the families involved in this terrible tragedy. We are experiencing the most inconceivable pain, and our hearts go out to everybody involved," Shifman said.
Richard Martinez said his son Christopher Martinez, 20, was killed in the shooting. He blamed politicians and gun-rights proponents. "When will this insanity stop? ... Too many have died. We should say to ourselves 'not one more,'" he said.
Alexander Mattera, 23, said his friend Chris Johnson was walking out of a comedy show when he was shot in front of a popular pizza place. He stumbled into a nearby house.
"He walked into these random guys' house bleeding," he said.
Mattera was sitting at a bonfire with friends when at least one gunshot whizzed overhead. The friends ran for cover when they heard the barrage.
"We heard so many gunshots. It was unbelievable. I thought they were firecrackers. There had to have been at least like two guns. There were a lot of shots," he said.
The first calls to police reporting gunshots came in at 9:27 p.m., Brown said. At the same time, sheriff's office deputies already in Isla Vista also heard gunshots and found several victims. As they performed first aid, they were given information regarding the shooter and the vehicle that person was using.
Several minutes later, the gunman engaged in a shootout with sheriff's deputies before fleeing. The shooter was spotted again moments later by another deputy; the gunman and the deputy both fired shots before the gunman fled down the street and then crashed into a parked vehicle.
Deputies approached the vehicle and found the person inside dead from "an apparent gunshot wound to the head," Brown said.
Nikolaus Becker was eating outside the Habit restaurant near the scene when the first shots were fired. At first he thought it was firecrackers, he said. Three to five police officers who were nearby started to casually walk toward the sounds, said Becker, but ran when a second round of shots broke out.
A shaken student told KEYT-TV that she was approached by the driver of a black BMW who flashed a handgun and asked "Hey, what's up?" The student, who didn't provide her full name, said she thought he was carrying an airsoft gun and kept walking. She said seconds later, she felt something buzz by her head and quickly realized they were bullets.
Ian Papa, 20, a student at Santa Barbara City College, said he had been walking to get pizza when he encountered the gunman. He described the car as driving swiftly and wildly through the streets, at one point knocking down two bicyclists and mangling the leg of one of them.
"We saw a BMW driving slowly, and then in seconds it hit the accelerator -- it was going 60-plus," Papa said Saturday morning. "He hit two bikes. One he barely grazed. The other was plowed down. The biker went through the windshield, and the driver took off."
Kathrin Schirazi Rad got a call from her 21-year-old son, Adrian Timothy Petersson, who told her in a shaky voice that he had been knocked off his skateboard by a BMW being chased by police about 9 p.m. Friday. He hurt his shoulder, but he went home after being checked by medical personnel at the scene.
"He was in shock," said Rad, who lives in Sweden. "He saw some plastic bags and said somebody must have died."
UC Santa Barbara senior Kyley Scarlet said she heard the BMW smash to a halt outside a house she was in.
"We ran outside and saw a bicyclist had been hit," she said. "Then the police dragged a body out of the car. It was him," she said.
Scarlet, who is a former sorority president, said two girls from a sorority next door were killed on the lawn of Alpha Phi, where flowers piled up Saturday. The women who were killed were in the Delta Delta Delta sorority. Scarlet said a third sorority member was wounded there as well.
In a statement, the university said it's "shocked and saddened" by the shootings. The university said several students were shot and taken to the hospital.
"This is almost the kind of event that's impossible to prevent and almost impossible to predict," UC President Janet Napolitano told reporters after giving the commencement speech at Laney College in Oakland, Calif.
Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown offered his condolences to the victims' families, saying he was saddened to learn "of this senseless tragedy."
Describing the shootings as "premeditated mass murder," Brown said authorities were analyzing a disturbing YouTube video posted that shows a young man describing plans to shoot women that appears to be connected to the attack.
"It's obviously the work of a madman," Brown said. "There's going to be a lot more information that's going to come out that is going to give indications of how disturbed this individual was."
In the YouTube video, posted Friday, a man who identifies himself as Elliot Rodger sits in a car and looks at the camera, laughing often, and says he is going to take his revenge against humanity.
"For the last eight years of my life, ever since I hit puberty, I have been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me," he says.
"I will punish all of you for it," he says with a laugh, saying he would enter a sorority. "I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blond slut I see inside there."
The seven-minute video was taken down Saturday with a message saying it violated the site's terms of service.
In five other videos, Rodger mused about his life and circumstances, complaining girls wouldn't give him a chance to date them and instead preferred "stupid and obnoxious" guys.
Rodger detailed his plans in an extensive 141-page manifesto released Saturday and said he was nearly discovered by authorities who interviewed him after his family called police.
Shifman said the family called police several weeks ago after being alarmed by YouTube videos "regarding suicide and the killing of people."
Police interviewed Elliot Rodger and found him to be a "perfectly polite, kind and wonderful human," he added. Police did not find a history of guns, but did say Rodger "didn't have a lot of friends," had trouble making friends and didn't have any girlfriends.
The family is not ready to speak publicly yet, the lawyer said, but wants to cooperate fully with police, public agencies and "any other person who feels that they need to help prevent these situations from ever occurring again," Shifman said.
"My client's mission in life will be to try to prevent any such tragedies from ever happening again," he said. "This country, this world, needs to address mental illness and the ramifications from not recognizing these illnesses."
Information for this article was contributed by Raquel Maria Dillon, Julie Watson, Martha Mendoza, Alicia Chang, Gillian Flaccus, Oskar Garcia and Frank Baker of The Associated Press; by Mark Berman and Peter Finn of The Washington Post; by Adolfo Flores, Rosanna Xia and Richard Winton of the Los Angeles Times; and by Ian Lovett, Adam Nagourney and Kimiya Sho of The New York Times.
A Section on 05/25/2014