Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Derek Hawkins.
Her brother, Shahran Aghdam, told the Mercury News Tuesday that the family came to California from Iran in 1996 and that his sister had recently moved in with her grandmother in San Diego. Though police identified Nasim Aghdam as a 39-year-old, her brother told the Mercury News that Wednesday would have been her 38th birthday.
They said Aghdam opened fire with a handgun in a courtyard outside the company’s headquarters. Police found Aghdam dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound while searching the headquarters.
The injured
Police said four people were transported to the hospital, three of them suffering from gunshot wounds.
A Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital spokesman said:
- A 36-year-old was in critical condition.
- Two women were also being treated for injuries, one of them in critical condition, the other in fair condition, a hospital official told The Post.
Nasim Aghdam
A woman matching Aghdam’s name and appearance maintained several YouTube channels and a personal website where she published videos about a range of topics, including veganism, animal cruelty and fitness. She also frequently ranted against YouTube, claiming the company discriminated against her and filtered her videos to prevent them from getting views.
“There is no free speech in real world & you will be suppressed for telling the truth that is not supported by the system,” read one post on her site. “There is no equal growth opportunity on YOUTUBE or any other video sharing site, your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!!”
She made similar claims in videos, saying the company was cheating video makers out of money. “Growing on YouTube is not in your hands,” she said. “It all depends on who is controlling your channel.”
The channels, published in English, Farsi and Turkish, each had several thousand subscribers, and some uploads had hundreds of thousands of views. All of them were offline by late Tuesday, with statements saying the channels had been terminated “due to multiple or severe violations” of YouTube’s policies.
Events leading up to the shooting
Aghdam’s father, Ismail Aghdam, told the Mercury News on Tuesday that his daughter had complained to her family in recent weeks that YouTube was censoring her videos and cutting back her revenue from advertising.
YouTube users can earn money through advertisements, but the company often “demonetizes" videos that contain content it deems controversial, including profanity, violence or sexually suggestive material. A YouTube representative didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Sometime before the shooting, Aghdam’s family reported that she had been missing since Saturday, and her father warned police she might be going to YouTube because she “hated” the company, according to the Mercury News.
Before dawn Tuesday morning, police in Mountain View, Calif., found a woman of the same name sleeping in her car in a parking lot, a Mountain View Police Department spokesman told The Washington Post in a statement.
“Our officers made contact with the woman after the license plate of her vehicle matched that of a missing person out of Southern California,” the statement read. “The woman confirmed her identity to us and answered subsequent questions. At the conclusion of our discussion, her family was notified that she had been located.”
Google, YouTube’s parent company, is headquartered in Mountain View, which is roughly 30 miles southeast of San Bruno. Aghdam’s car was not near the Google campus, according to police.
Her father told the Mercury News that he didn’t know how Aghdam got ahold of a gun. “Maybe she bought one” recently, he told the newspaper. She didn’t appear to have any criminal record, and family members told local media she wasn’t a violent person
Veganism and animal rights appear to have been longtime concerns for Aghdam. She often posted about vegan cooking and linked to graphic videos showing animals being slaughtered or abused.
In May 2011, she set up a nonprofit in California called Peace Thunder whose goal was to “educate people about animal cruelty, environmental pollution and how to make healthy choices and save the world and animals from extinction,” according to state public records. She dissolved the organization later that year, records show.
San Bruno police said they were investigating a motive for the shooting. “At this time there is no evidence that the shooter knew the victims of this shooting or that individuals were specifically targeted,” police said in a statement.
