Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother

Posted inGuns

Ten years after a horrific massacre near Santa Barbara, California, the killer’s mother has made it her mission to help experts prevent the next tragedy.

byMichael I Schiller, Jenny Casas, Jim Briggs, Fernando Arruda, Nikki Frick, Steven Rascón, Zulema Cobb, Brett Myers, Taki Telonidis and Al Letson

May 18, 2024May 17, 2024

Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother - Reveal (11)

In 2014, in the college town of Isla Vista, California, a 22-year-old man murdered six people and injured 14 others before killing himself. The killer didn’t suddenly “snap” one day out of the blue; he planned the attack and spiraled into crisis in the years leading up to it.

The horrific incident left violence prevention experts wondering: What were the missed warning signs?

One person who held some of the answers was the killer’s mother, Chin Rodger. She has long avoided the media, fearing that speaking publicly would only hurt the victims’ families more. But 10 years later, she’s come to see a greater purpose – that sharing what she knows about her son’s behavior before the attack could help others identify similar warning signs and prevent further violence.

By confronting and sharing the painful memories and evidence her son, Elliot, left behind, Rodger has contributed to the field of threat assessment – teams of people who specialize in collecting information on possible threats, connecting the dots and intervening before tragedy strikes. This week on Reveal, Rodger talks publicly for the first time with Mother Jones reporter Mark Follman.

Dig Deeper

Read: “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America,” by Mark Follman

Read: Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother (Mother Jones)

Credits

Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation.

Transcript

Reveal transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. Please be aware that the official record for Reveal’s radio stories is the audio.

Al Letson:	From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. This is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. It’s late in the day, April 2014, when a call comes into the Santa Barbara County mental health crisis hotline. A worried mom hasn’t heard from her son in days, and she’s just found a troubling video he posted online. The dispatcher alerts the sheriff’s office and deputies go out to his apartment for a welfare check. When the young man answers the door, he’s calm and courteous. He says his mom is overreacting and he’s fine.
Chin Rodger:	They found him to be polite. The officer had him call me on his phone, to let me know that he was okay. He passed the phone to one of the officers, who asked me, why did I call the police? “Your son is fine.”
Al Letson:	The deputies determined that he looks and sounds okay. There are no signs he’s in danger, so they leave, but they had no idea he had weapons and ammo stockpiled in his room. Just over three weeks later, he would commit a mass shooting in Isla Vista, California, a college town near Santa Barbara. He killed six people and injured 14 others, before taking his own life.
	It’s been 10 years since this tragedy. And like with any mass shooting, a central question haunts, “What happened? Could anything have been done to prevent it?” In the decades since the Isla Vista attack, violence prevention experts have studied this case and has changed the way they think about mass shootings and the people who commit them, namely how to intervene. There’s a woman who has been contributing to this effort. Her name is Chin Rodger. She’s the mother of the shooter and she’s speaking publicly for the first time.
Chin Rodger:	I just want to share what I have discovered about my son’s circ*mstances that led him to this horrific, indescribable crime, right? I hope that my hindsight will be your foresight.
Al Letson:	Mother Jones journalist, Mark Follman, has been talking with Chin for several years. He starts the story in Southern California.
Mark Follman:	It’s a crisp, bright day in Malibu. I’m arriving at an office, along a busy stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway. Thanks for the ride.
Ride Service Dr…:	Oh, no.
Mark Follman:	Drive safely.
Ride Service Dr…:	Thank you. So, yeah, I’ll just be out here picking people up, getting them where they got to go.
Mark Follman:	All right. I’ve been reporting on gun violence and how to prevent mass shootings for more than a decade. I’ve interviewed hundreds of people from all sides of this problem, survivors, victim’s parents, FBI agents, psychologists. Chin Rodger has a perspective that I had never heard before. Hi. Hi. Hi.
Chin Rodger:	Hi.
Mark Follman:	It’s good to see you again.
Chin Rodger:	Good to see you. Good to see you, but I thought we were-
Mark Follman:	I’ve been to Chin, for more than two years, about what happened with her son, Elliot. We’ve had dozens of conversations as I dug further into this tragedy.
Chin Rodger:	… So, we’re just talking, like we do? So, nothing-
Mark Follman:	Chin made the tough choice to become a student of her son’s case. Today for our meeting, she’s brought some of her personal writings.
Chin Rodger:	… Yes, I did. I found some notes here that say, “My life, as I knew it, ended that day in 2014. I’ll never get over this. What is the meaning now of my life? There is no joy in anything that I do. I cannot escape this pain. This pain, not just the pain of losing my son in this way, but of the suffering that his actions have caused so many. What is the purpose now? What can I do? It has to be something beyond this pain or my life will not make any sense.”
Mark Follman:	In the aftermath of the shooting, she avoided the media frenzy. She feared speaking publicly, but only hurt the victim’s parents more.
Chin Rodger:	My son chose this, to do this, and their children did not. I’m always constantly thinking of the victim’s family, who did not ask for this, what they must be going through. So, that’s why I feel being silent about this is what I’ve chose to be for many, many years.
Mark Follman:	For a while, Chin wouldn’t even turn on a TV, unless it was set to a cooking channel. She couldn’t stomach the news or anything that might remind her of what her son did. But, eventually, she started researching mass shootings online and learning about violence prevention.
Chin Rodger:	As the years go by, I open myself to listening to the news. When there is mass shooting, painfully, I listen to it. I want to know more. And I saw some similarities between the behavior and the circ*mstances.
Mark Follman:	She started to recognize there were patterns of behavior that her son Elliot shared with other mass shooters.
Chin Rodger:	And, in the beginning, it will always be, “Why did this person do it?” it’s the same, but then you find out that there are circ*mstances, there are behavior that came out.
Mark Follman:	Chin realized she had more information about her son that could be valuable to share. That led her to violence prevention experts like Dr. Stephen White, a forensic psychologist.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	She was willing to talk with me about her experience and what she said was, is, “I want to help you, by telling you what I knew about my son, that you don’t know or didn’t know. I want to contribute to the knowledge base, so that these things don’t happen.”
Mark Follman:	Years before meeting Chin, Dr. White had written a deep case study on what led to Elliot’s attack, and he knew how much Elliot’s parents had struggled to try and help the troubled son.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	His parents were good people, they were divorced, they were very concerned about him and tried to help him, and, unfortunately, this still happened. And so, to live with that is a pretty terrible curse. How would you like to be the parent of a mass murderer? Try that one. It’s horrible.
Mark Follman:	Chin grew up in Malaysia. At age 17, she moved to England and would go on to train in healthcare. She sometimes worked as a nurse on movie sets, productions like The Princess Bride and Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Around that time, she met Peter Roger, a photographer and filmmaker. The two married, and in 1991, they had Elliot. Four years later they had a daughter. And then, the family moved to Los Angeles. Elliot was seven when his parents divorced. By that age, he was already having a hard time, struggling with developmental disabilities.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	Let me just say that his personality, this combination of long-term factors, there was probably some contribution from features associated with the autism spectrum, but I want to be very careful to point out that that was not the cause. There’s never one cause. It’s a number of factors that come together in a perfect storm, at a certain time, in a certain context. He did have issues early on with social awkwardness and not being able to speak and being very anxious in social situations. And had a very hard time, as he got into adolescence, talking to girls, meeting girls,
Chin Rodger:	Elliot always have issues with making friends, so all the time his issues has been social, not to talk to anybody, not just girls, at the time. He was bullied extensively.
Mark Follman:	Elliot’s parents tried different schools. They got him special education support, therapy, and help from social workers. After high school, he dabbled in community college, but seemed stuck and unhappy. When he told his parents he wanted to move 70 miles up the coast, to enroll at Santa Barbara City College, they hoped it would expand his horizons. Chin arranged for further support there, hiring life coaches for him, around his age, to work on his social skills.
	Elliot lived in Isla Vista for more than two years. Despite the support, he grew more isolated, angry, and desperate, but he was able to hide this inner torment. No one trying to help him, including his mom, had any sense that he was planning violence.
Newscaster 1:	We begin this hour in Isla Vista, California. The small college town near Santa Barbara continues to grieve this morning, after a killing spree late Friday night. Authorities say 22-year-old Elliot Rodger apparently took his own life after killing six others and injuring 13.
Newscaster 2:	The attack, a form of revenge, by an angry young man, one who was hell-bent on blaming women for his own personal loneliness.
Mark Follman:	Afterward, the media focused on a menacing video Elliot had posted online. He’d also written a long hate-filled screed, he called his life story, complaining about being rejected by girls. Extreme misogyny quickly became the explanation for what he’d done.
Newscaster 3:	He was what’s known as an incel, someone who is involuntarily celibate. Rodger is a hero to many young men like him.
Mark Follman:	News stories highlighted comments he’d posted on incel forums online. YouTubers racked up millions of views, by reposting his rant in their amateur true crime videos. The narrative of Elliot as the, “Incel Killer,” took on a life of its own, inspiring copycat attackers.
Newscaster 2:	The Secret Service released a study this week on the growing terrorism threat of the so-called Incel Movement. Followers of the Incel Movement blame acts of violence on an inability to form relationships with women.
Mark Follman:	The reality is more complicated.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	He didn’t say, “I’m starting a movement called the Incel Movement,” but he was on certain sites, expressing these views. He unknowingly became this anti-hero for this group.
Mark Follman:	After every mass shooting, the public wants to know, “Why?” the question of motive. Everyone wants a simple explanation. But concluding that this attack happened because Elliot said he hated women is too simple. Prevention experts are more focused on how shooters get to the point of attacking. There are patterns of behavior and warning signs they share.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	The more we look at these case studies, the more we can see what’s consistent and also the variety or the differences among different shooters. We know there are certain risk factors or behavioral warning signs that are associated with eventual violence.
Mark Follman:	I’ve been reporting on this topic for a long time, and digging deep into these stories can be delicate for the victims who suffered and the risk of bringing the wrong kind of attention to the shooters, as many of them want. But this case has valuable lessons for prevention. What happened in the months leading up to the tragedy in Isla Vista, a trove of previously unreported case evidence and Chin’s account of her experience, all point to the missed chances to intervene.
Chin Rodger:	It’s very, very difficult to see all of this when you are in it. Now, I can say that, but at the time, no way I would see that as a circ*mstances or it’s a behavior, that is going to lead to mass shooting or even suicide. All these years, even now, I have never, never saw him as suicidal.
Al Letson:	Elliot Rodger didn’t just suddenly snap. He was a troubled person who spiraled into crisis, over a long period of time, and planned what he would do. What were the missed warning signs?
Elliot Rodger:	Right now, I’m going on a little tour through Isla Vista, on a Friday night.
Al Letson:	Never-before-seen evidence brings new understanding to this tragedy. That’s next on Reveal.
Al Letson:	From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. I want to tell you a story about a seventeen-year-old high school kid named Brandon. He made a comment to a classmate while waiting for the school bus. Another student was listening. It scared her, so she told a teacher what Brandon said, “Don’t come to school on Friday. I’m coming back here with my dad’s semi-automatic and I’m shooting up the place.” He also bragged about having the code to his dad’s gun safe. The teacher told the principal and the principal alerted the leader of the school district’s threat assessment team. This team is a group of around a dozen people: psychologists, counselors, administrators, cops. Every week they gather around a conference table at a district office to review cases. When they heard about what Brandon said, the threat assessment team jumped into action. His comments suggested a plan with specific details about when and where.
	A school resource officer was sent to his home to talk to him and his parents. They wanted to see if Brandon had access to firearms and he didn’t. When the team’s psychologist met with him, Brandon told her he’d just been joking around. But she learned he’d been depressed and lonely, possibly suicidal. He was crying out for attention and that’s what the team gave him and his family, a wraparound strategy of counseling. After-school activities and support. The threat stopped, his grades improved, he went on to graduate. But you’ve never heard Brandon’s story because it didn’t end up in tragedy. In the past few years, more and more school systems have started using this approach. 20 states now require threat assessment in public schools. Many private companies and community agencies are using it too. Usually these teams are led by a psychologist like Dr. Cherylynn Lee.
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	There are a multitude of cases where there were individuals who were on the pathway to violence and they were stopped. We don’t talk about them, and so the public doesn’t know that these interventions are being deployed and are working.
Al Letson:	Dr. Lee helped start the first threat assessment team at the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s office. It was formed in the years after the mass shooting in Isla Vista where 22-year-old Elliot Rodger killed six people and wounded and traumatized many others.
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	There was a lot of information available and so had we had a threat assessment team, maybe there would’ve been some more information gathering that we would’ve done. And if we had, would there have been a different outcome?
Al Letson:	Elliot had different counselors, a therapist, life coaches. He was even visited by the sheriff’s deputies a few weeks before his rampage, but there was no threat assessment team back then. No group of people who specialized in collecting and connecting these dots. Experts in the field have long studied and learned from this case. Journalists Mark Follman reports on the way it’s helped them understand the patterns and the psychology of mass shooters, what to look for and how to intervene when someone may be turning dangerous.
Mark Follman:	Most mass shooters give off warning signs in the weeks and months before their attacks. These red flags include disturbing comments, abrupt changes in routine, a focus on grievances. Often there’s evidence of suicidal thinking and a strong interest in guns. Elliot Rodger had a lot of these warning signs, but he was also really good at hiding them.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	One thing that stood out was this secrecy a rather elaborate plan to kill other people and himself that that can remain hidden.
Mark Follman:	That’s Dr. Stephen White, the threat assessment expert who did the deep study of Elliot’s case. Of all the cases he’s examined over the past 40 years, this one stands out. Elliot left behind so much evidence showing how he got to the point of attacking. This includes his online activity, his purchases, the long screed he sent out and more.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	We study those, plus he had a fairly large body of videos, so we look at that data as a way to understand more about why people do this and what to look for as they progress.
Mark Follman:	He recorded a handful of videos on his phone in the final months and kept them mostly hidden until the end. There was also more. His mother, Chin Rodger received a box of Elliot’s things after the sheriff’s investigation. Inside were two handwritten diaries covering the last four years of his life. She shared those with me.
Chin Rodger:	I don’t know whether there is a way to understand it because nobody can understand it, but it has definitely opened my eyes to certain behavior of his.
Mark Follman:	The diaries were a hidden record of Elliot’s descent into rage and despair. Things took a really dark turn about 10 months before the attack.
Chin Rodger:	The most consequential triggering event for him was when he was humiliated, the event of summer 2013.
Mark Follman:	We can reconstruct what happened from his writings and from the sheriff’s investigation. Elliot plans to make a last-ditch effort to lose his virginity before turning 22. On a Saturday night in July, he gets up his nerve with a few shots of vodka and heads for the center of Isla Vista’s party scene, the oceanfront houses along Del Playa Drive.
Chin Rodger:	He got intoxicated stating that that gave him the courage to attend the weekend parties. That was his last hope to find a girlfriend. Hope dies last, and when it does, all that’s left is his feelings are hate and revenge
Mark Follman:	Hope dies last. Around 11:30 PM, he walks into a crowded house party where hip-hop is blasting and kids are playing beer pong. Feeling ignored, he goes back outside and up onto a wooden platform set up along the fence line. These makeshift structures are common in the front yards along Del Playa, a place for kids to hang out and drink while watching the action on the street. When a few others get up on the platform, Elliot starts to insult them.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	And apparently he was rather obnoxious and he did something to provoke other people being aggressive toward him, and he tried to push some people off of this platform.
Mark Follman:	Elliot tries to shove some girls off the roughly eight-foot drop. He fails, a couple of guys intervene, and he ends up landing hard on the pavement himself, cracking his ankle. Then he goes to another party nearby where he gets into another fight.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	And he got into trouble there and was called a bunch of names and got booted out and he says to his neighbor, who was there, “I’m going to kill them all. I’m going to kill myself.” And this was months before, and of course this was learned about afterwards, but that kind of aggression was in a way practice or getting more comfortable, but it was completely ineffective on his part.
Mark Follman:	Eventually, he makes his way home in the wee hours alone. He’s bruised up his left eye’s swollen, his ankle needs surgery, but worst of all for him is the shame.
Chin Rodger:	And in his journal, he actually wrote, I’m just reading from his journal, “Humanity is so cruel. I’m beaten up. My leg broken. Not one girl helped me to my apartment. Not one single person called for help.” Now today I realized I failed to see what a huge triggering point that was for him, public humiliation.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	He had a severe degree of narcissism, but it’s the subgroup referred to as the shy narcissist, the person who has strong feelings of entitlement, but they’re not in your face. Because anytime they assert to try to engage, it immediately triggers these feelings of shame, so they withdraw. But they feel very hostile, very entitled, and blaming everybody else, and that’s the red flags that we’re looking for.
Mark Follman:	Chin told me that when Elliot was recovering back home that August, he seemed to be doing much better. He agreed to see a therapist and looked happy when a childhood friend visited. But secretly in his diary, he raged about the shame of getting beaten up. He called the party incident the final straw. Earlier entries show that he fantasized about violence ever since moving to Santa Barbara. Now he was on the path to making it real.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	You got to plan it. You got to figure out how you’re going to do it, and that preparation can be detected either behaviorally or in writings or what people say. They leak out their intention. 60 to 90% of attackers tell a third party or post something that says, “I’m going to do this.” Now the problem with that statistically is a lot of people say things like that and nothing happens, so you got to sift through the haystack of threatening communications.
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	What we call it in our field is leakage, right information that somebody is intending on committing harm.
Mark Follman:	That’s Dr. Cherylynn Lee again. These signals can be subtle innuendo, blame failed threats. School shooters often claim to be just joking when asked about their odd or disturbing comments. Leakage can also be more overt like when Elliot told his neighbor after the party he wanted to kill people.
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	With this case, it is rich with that sort of material, and had we had access to that material or knew the right questions to ask again, maybe there would’ve been a different outcome. We now know that most people who intend on committing acts of targeted violence, there’s leakage.
Mark Follman:	Elliot’s videos had a lot of this. He never uploaded most of them. Investigators found the videos after the attack. This one was recorded five weeks before.
Elliot Rodger:	Right now I’m going on a little tour through Isla Vista on a Friday night. This is when all the college parties happen. Look in there, there’s a party happening right now.
Mark Follman:	Elliot is driving down De Playa Drive as the night gets busier. His phone is mounted on the dashboard showing his view of the road.
Elliot Rodger:	Every time I drive through this place, I am overcome with rage. While I’ve lived here for more than two years in loneliness, no one’s ever invited me to parties.
Mark Follman:	He slow rolls past a house, lit up with string lights and one next door with a platform overlooking the street.
Elliot Rodger:	Look, that’s the house I got beat up at when I walked in on a party. That was about almost a year ago now.
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	Although this video in and of itself appears fairly benign with other information that we’re able to gather from these other resources, when you have a functioning threat assessment team, it might not seem so benign.
Mark Follman:	Going back to where he was humiliated, shows how it’s still eating at him, fueling his rage and his plan. The location is about a block from where he would end his rampage.
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	There’s no amount of information that’s unnecessary, I think when we’re doing threat assessment because it’s ultimately looking at the totality of the information together.
Mark Follman:	The video also shows planning, behavior, surveillance. According to the sheriff’s investigation, the same day Elliot made this video, he’d been practicing at a shooting range. No one around him knew about these activities, but these are the kinds of warning signs a threat assessment team is more likely to uncover and understand. They know how to build rapport with someone like Elliot and would look into access to guns. About two weeks later, Elliot makes another video. He uploads this one to YouTube and calls it, “Why do girls hate me so much?”
Elliot Rodger:	Hey, Elliot Rodger here. It’s truly a beautiful day, but as I’ve always said, a beautiful environment is the darkest hell if you have to experience it all alone.
Mark Follman:	He’s standing by his parked car on a canyon road gesturing at the scenery.
Elliot Rodger:	I’ve been attending college in Santa Barbara for about two and a half years now. In those two and a half years, I’ve experienced nothing but loneliness and misery, and my problem is girls.
Mark Follman:	There’s nothing overtly threatening in the six-minute video, nothing violent. Around the same time Elliot posts the video, he drops out of communication with Chin, which she tells me was very unlike him.
Chin Rodger:	As I’ve not heard from him for a few days. I Google his name with the words, “Accident, fall, hiking” as he often went for hikes alone. He likes the sunset. I fear that he have fell off a cliff lying, injured down a ravine somewhere.
Mark Follman:	She finds Elliot’s video. She’s never known him to post anything like this before.
Chin Rodger:	I came across a video of him by the roadside, not making any threats, indicating, why don’t you girls like me? I’m polite. I’m a gentleman.
Mark Follman:	She’s worried enough to call his social worker, who becomes concerned Elliot might want to harm himself. He says he’ll call a crisis hotline in Santa Barbara right away. Though Chin didn’t know it at the time, she took exactly the step that violence prevention experts hoped for. She made the difficult choice to alert authorities about her son. That sent the Sheriff’s deputies to Elliot’s apartment. Lieutenant Joe Schmidt was the lead homicide detective on the case.
Lieutenant Joe …:	They contact the suspect at the front door and he presents normal. I said he was fine. He thought his mom was overreacting.
Mark Follman:	Lieutenant Schmidt was not at the welfare check that day, but he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the case,
Lieutenant Joe …:	And at some point the deputies get mom on the phone and they say, “Hey, we’re here with your son. Everything seems to be fine.” They have the suspect talk to his mom, and that was it. There was no indicators, and we do these, check the welfares all the time, and it just seemed like one of those very common college student is new to the area. They’re having a hard time connecting. They’re away from home. It was very consistent with the majority of those calls.
Mark Follman:	The deputies didn’t know that over the past 17 months, Elliot bought three handguns and a stockpile of ammunition at local gun shops and that it was all right there just beyond the apartment door.
	What are your thoughts about why they didn’t ask to go inside?
Lieutenant Joe …:	The goal is to get this person help. Unless there’s an overt issue that shows there’s a crime being manifested or they’re going to hurt themselves, really the priority is them. “What can we do to help you?” There was no indicators that the suspect was homicidal or suicidal.
Mark Follman:	Experts I spoke with about this incident say the officers did what they were supposed to do. There was no legal basis for the deputies to go inside. After the welfare check, Chin felt relieved. Two and a half weeks later, she drives up to Santa Barbara to meet Elliot for their monthly dinner along with Elliot’s younger sister.
Chin Rodger:	That particular day didn’t seem much different from all the other dinners that we have with him, except him eating more.
Mark Follman:	Elliot orders an extra sushi roll, which is unusual for him and Chin’s glad.
Chin Rodger:	He was skinny. I was happy he was eating more. To me, he’s doing better, right? And so you begin to relax.
Mark Follman:	Since the welfare check Elliot had been texting and talking with Chin. He’d told her his spring classes were finishing up well. In truth, he dropped out of school. What Chin was seeing is something threat assessment experts call unexpected brightening, a better mood, a bigger appetite. Elliot was calm because he was finally ready to act. At the time, Chin had no way of knowing these were some of the last in a long trail of warning signs.
Chin Rodger:	I did not see that eating more, even binge-eating as a sign, a behavior change. But really, he’s already made a plan. That’s why he feels free. He feels happy, right? But we don’t see that.
Mark Follman:	Five days later, he drove to the beach parked and started recording again.
Elliot Rodger:	Well, this is my last video. It all has to come to this.
Mark Follman:	He looks directly into the camera and announces what he’d been planning for at least a year. No one would see it until it was too late.
Elliot Rodger:	Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
Mark Follman:	There’s a common myth about mass shooters that they just snap one day that their actions can’t really be explained. That’s untrue, and you can see it in the way this attack played out. It’s March of 2024, and I’m riding through Isla Vista with Lieutenant Joe Schmidt in his unmarked SUV. We’re retracing the day of the massacre. A warning for listeners, this next part is disturbing, but the details are important. Threat assessment experts have studied what Elliot did that day. Those behavioral patterns also help them understand what leads up to these attacks.
Lieutenant Joe …:	This is the suspect’s apartment complex. You can see his apartment from this corner of the building. Would you like to get out here?
Mark Follman:	Yeah, let’s do that. We are standing outside the gated courtyard of the two-story complex where Elliot lived with two roommates, Weihan Wang and Cheng Hong.
Lieutenant Joe …:	So that’s where the suspect murdered his two roommates and then a third victim who was a friend of the roommates.
Mark Follman:	Elliot had complained about their loud video games and even called the police four months before the attack, saying one of them stole candles from him. He used a knife to kill Wang and then Hong as he returned from class. Then he killed George Chen, a friend of theirs who’d come over around dinnertime, stabbing each victim more times than the last.
Lieutenant Joe …:	The suspect was escalating his level of violence with each victim, almost like he was becoming more confident and more empowered to just inflict more damage.
Mark Follman:	Elliot had planned it out carefully. Investigators found evidence suggesting he had rehearsed by stabbing pillows and slashing at the sheets on his bed. Back in the SUV, we head a few blocks over to the commercial center of town where Elliot went at 7:30 that evening.
Lieutenant Joe …:	With all the bodies still in the apartment, he takes a shower, changes clothes and drives to Starbucks, gets a triple vanilla latte.
Mark Follman:	At the Starbucks, he starts texting with his mom. Chin had asked him earlier in the day to call when he was finished with his classes. Now he messages her back and says he’ll call her tomorrow when he’s in his car. She replies, “Why not today?” He tells her he feels like relaxing, that he’s just finished with his semester. “Congrats,” she says. He tells her thanks.
Lieutenant Joe …:	That was the only video surveillance we had of him. We got him purchasing the coffee and he’s very calm when he makes the purchase, calmly walks out, and he goes back to his apartment.
Mark Follman:	In the aftermath, news reports labeled him psychotic, but experts found he was not. Planning and carrying out a mass shooting requires organized thinking, preparation. This was a long-developed plan, and it was just starting. The sheriff’s report shows that just after 9 PM, Elliot uploads his final video to YouTube. He also sends out an email to nearly three dozen people, including his parents, counselors, and the apartment manager. It contains a screed detailing what he calls his life story, 137 pages about his despair, his rage against women, and his plans to kill. Then he drives a few blocks in his black BMW and parks. He’d been surveilling a sorority house.
Lieutenant Joe …:	So the suspect arrives. He’s got a handgun, multiple rounds of ammunition strapped to his waist in a fanny pack, and he also has a gallon of gas. What he didn’t anticipate was the fact that the door is going to be locked.
Mark Follman:	He tries the handle, then starts banging on the door. No one answers. He leaves the gas can at the door and goes back to his car where he spots three young women on the street, Bianca de Kock, Katherine Cooper, and Veronika Weiss.
Lieutenant Joe …:	The suspect pulls up alongside of them. He fires multiple rounds at all three. All three are hit.
Speaker 8:	And we have three down. Looks like I need three ambulances here.
Mark Follman:	The bullets severely injure Bianca and kill her two friends, Katherine and Veronika. Elliot didn’t know them. He wanted to kill any women he could.
Speaker 8:	Shots fired. Shots fired.
Mark Follman:	Next Elliot drives a few blocks to a deli mart and fires at people who flee inside, killing student Christopher Martinez.
Speaker 8:	We got another gunshot.
Mark Follman:	He speeds off toward his next target, Del Playa Drive, ramming people with his car and firing more shots along the way. About eight minutes into the spree as police close in, he does what many mass shooters do before they can be caught. Witnesses hear one last shot. The BMW swerves and smashes into a parked car.
Lieutenant Joe …:	When they find the suspect, he’s got a clear gunshot wound in his head, and then that’s where it all ends.
Speaker 9:	Thousands of UC Santa Barbara students and members of the community remembering the six friends and fellow students killed in a violent rampage that left many others injured.
Speaker 10:	She was my best friend and like a sister to me, like my sister, and I’m going to miss her dearly. She’s always going to be in our hearts.
Speaker 11:	When will this insanity stop? When will enough people say, “Stop this madness. We don’t have to live like this. Too many have died.” We should say to ourselves, “Not one more.”
Mark Follman:	The majority of mass shooters are people who have decided to end their own lives by taking others with them, whether they justify that with hatred of women or other kinds of extremist thought. In the aftermath, the media quickly republished Elliot’s screed, calling it his manifesto. He was depicted online as the leader of a violent incel revolution, a misleading narrative that continues today. Elliot did post comments on fringe incel websites, but a lot of his writing and comments suggest he did not identify as an incel or see himself as their leader. Yet to this day, copycat attackers praise him and media coverage keeps the cycle going. Do you think that it’s accurate to say that incel ideology is what caused Elliot Rodger to do what he did?
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	No, I don’t think incel ideology in and of itself caused him to do what he did. I think maybe that helped him justify the violence or helped him identify the victims.
Mark Follman:	Dr. Lee points to how being in a party town like Isla Vista amplified his suicidal thinking.
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	If his grievance is he can’t connect with people, and he’s constantly isolated, he’s living in that environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Mark Follman:	He was surrounded by what he wanted, but believed he could never have.
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	In upwards of 95% of the cases we’ve worked, the persons are not well connected socially, and they’re often alone and they often have thoughts of killing themselves.
Mark Follman:	That’s what this problem is. The majority of mass shootings are driven by suicide no matter what ideology they’re wrapped in.
Chin Rodger:	I do not think my son, he wanted to be famous. He did not want to be a leader of any group. In the end, he was driven by his perceived long suffering, and I think at that late stage, his perception of others, even his family disappeared. What was left with himself, with his own hopelessness, rage, and revenge.
Al Letson:	When we come back…
Dr. Cherylynn Le…:	The Elliot Rodger case was the impetus for gun violence restraining orders in this state.
Al Letson:	How what happened in Isla Vista has changed violence prevention in California and across the country. You’re listening to Reveal.

Al Letson:	From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. Inside the Santa Barbara sheriff’s training facility, framed photos and plaques, line the front hallway. One photo shows a black BMW wrecked on a street dotted with palm trees, two officers are looking over it. The driver’s door is open, an airbag ballooning out of the side. The photo is a reminder of an event that shook this community. Lieutenant Joe Schmid was the lead homicide detective on the case.
Lieutenant Joe …:	Sometimes there are certain cases we investigate that, maybe, touch our soul a little bit more, and this was definitely one of them.
Al Letson:	In the years, since the violent rampage a decade ago, the sheriff’s office has built a program to try and stop the next tragedy before it happens. That’s what brings Mother Jones journalist, Mark Follman, here today. To learn more about how the case led to change.
Mark Follman:	What would you say were the key lessons learned from the Elliot Rodger case, in terms of violence prevention and threat assessment?
Lieutenant Joe …:	The quicker the intervention, the higher likelihood of lives being saved. I would rather spend the time investigating these things that end up being nothing than not doing it, and then having that one slip away.
Mark Follman:	Before the rampage, Sheriff’s Deputies went to Elliot Rodger’s apartment for the welfare check, but they didn’t run a records check for guns or go inside.
	Let’s say there’s a similar situation today, how would that be handled now?
Lieutenant Joe …:	I’ll have dispatch check them and see if they have weapons issued to them. Matter of fact, when I promoted to Sergeant in 2016, my first day here, was a check the welfare, almost identical circ*mstances. And I thought, well, I know how these have gone down in the past, but because of what I know from 2014. And I even asked him consent to search his apartment, which I did, and found nothing.
Mark Follman:	It wasn’t just law enforcement rethinking how these situations could have been handled differently. In the aftermath, the intense media coverage lasted for weeks. Grieving father Richard Martinez joined other advocates in pressuring California lawmakers to tighten gun laws.
Lieutenant Joe …:	Chris Martinez’s father, so Chris was a victim of the shooting at the Isla Vista Deli. His father was very active in getting this additional tool approved and he lobbied in Sacramento, to get it done.
Mark Follman:	Four months later, in September, 2014, California passed a law designed to keep guns away from people who might be at risk of violence. It created what’s called a Gun Violence Restraining Order, also known as a red flag law. A judge decides if a person is too dangerous to have firearms, based on evidence of erratic behavior, threats, concerns about suicide.
Lieutenant Joe …:	The Gun Violence Restraining Order, that’s an ability for a law enforcement or family to, if they have a concern about somebody being a potential threat, it’s created a mechanism or a tool for law enforcement to seize weapons.
Mark Follman:	California’s red flag law was one of the first in the country. The policy began to spread nationally, especially after the Parkland High School massacre in 2018. Today, there are red flag laws in 22 states and Washington D.C. The policy has strong bipartisan voter support, though it still faces fierce opposition from conservative politicians. Research shows, these laws are effective for preventing suicide and mass shootings. A study of more than 200 red flag cases in California, shows that the law works. None of the people who lost access to guns went on to commit a shooting. The law has been essential to Dr. Cherylynn Lee’s team at the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s office.
Dr. Cherylynn L…:	This has been a key tool in a lot of, if not most of the threat assessments and threat management cases that we’ve worked in. There was an individual a couple of years ago and he sent a text telling all of his friends that he was suicidal.
Mark Follman:	Someone contacted Dr. Lee’s team to alert them and they moved quickly to step in.
Dr. Cherylynn L…:	He had 16 guns, two of which were buried in the backyard. He was sewing armored plating into the driver’s side and passenger side of his vehicle. So this is somebody that wanted to do some damage, and so law enforcement had the ability to intervene before he could commit his carnage. And this is when we found all the guns and so on and so forth, they were all legally owned. We decided to place the individual on a psychiatric hold, because clearly he wasn’t well and needed some help.
Mark Follman:	The red flag law allowed the threat team, to temporarily take away the guns and likely avoided a disaster. Dr. Lee tells me about another case she’s currently handling that involves a middle schooler, who had told a teacher he was feeling suicidal. Without revealing his identity, she shows me some photos from the case file.
	Is this the twelve-year-old?
Dr. Cherylynn L…:	Yeah.
Mark Follman:	Yeah.
Dr. Cherylynn L…:	These are the images that I spoke about.
Mark Follman:	Yeah.
Dr. Cherylynn L…:	So.
Mark Follman:	Ai, ai, ai.
Dr. Cherylynn L…:	The most fascinating thing to me, from a psychologist’s perspective.
Mark Follman:	We’re looking at papers from his school folder, there are drawings of a person pointing a gun, dead bodies and blood. He’d written in big, bold letters, “Murder is on my mind.” These papers are mixed in with homework and a class schedule.
Dr. Cherylynn L…:	PE, Bio English, Spanish school shooting, and then worksheets. That’s ambivalence, in my mind, he’s not fully committed. We have opportunity there.
Mark Follman:	Threat assessment teams don’t just look for warning signs, they also look for what they call, positive inhibitors, things in someone’s life that can be used to support them.
Dr. Cherylynn L…:	Yes, he’s planning a school shooting, but he is also planning on turning in his homework.
Mark Follman:	Two months later, Dr. Lee tells me, the student is doing better. But across the nation, younger and younger kids are making threats and even committing attacks. A six-year-old child shot his first-grade teacher in Virginia in 2023. This disturbing trend underscores why early intervention is so important. I’ve looked at many cases where teams figured out what was driving people into crisis and connected with them successfully, in schools, in workplaces and elsewhere.
	No one can undo all the suffering from the 2014 attack in Isla Vista, not for the victims or their families, and not for the killer’s mother. Like all suicidal mass shooters, Elliot Rodger lacked hope. The importance of having hope echoes in how his mother, Chin, is finding her path forward.
	Question, in terms of what Chin Rodger has done to, do you think it has benefit to the public in terms of raising more awareness about these kinds of behaviors or how parents or friends-
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	Yeah.
Mark Follman:	Should react to someone that’s concerning them?
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	I think it does have value, because, I mean, her story is a terrible one to have to tell, but she can make people think.
Mark Follman:	Dr. Stephen White is the psychologist you heard from earlier, he’s the foremost expert on the Elliot Rodger case. Chin’s experience is beneficial to him and other prevention experts, because of the level of detail that she has shared about her son’s slide into despair and violence.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	I have a lot of respect for her and parents like her, who want to do something, to contribute. “What can I do so it doesn’t happen or happens less often?” and that’s admirable, that’s meaningful.
Mark Follman:	In 2022, Chin was invited to give a keynote speech to more than a thousand people at a National Threat Assessment conference in California.
Dr. Stephen Whi…:	And it was a very powerful talk and very respectfully received. It was hard for her, but she has done something with this, to get some good out of this terrible event
Mark Follman:	In the audience, were psychologists, counselors, police, FBI agents and other practitioners. It was the first time she would stand on a stage and tell her story. It wouldn’t be the last.
Chin Rodger:	Whoa. It doesn’t get any easier. Thank you for your gracious invitation. [inaudible 00:08:43].
Mark Follman:	Since then, she’s continued to speak at Threat Assessment trainings, around the country.
Chin Rodger:	So that when you’re out there talking to parents, when you’re out there talking to a young man on the same pathway, you have more insights on your mission to stop targeted violence. I believe that if a robust Threat Assessment program or team were in place, then the outcome would have been very different. If I, and all the [inaudible 00:09:12].
Mark Follman:	More training conferences are ahead on Chin’s calendar, and she says, the reception she’s gotten at her talks has helped her heal. In the past, when she would meet someone and they asked if she had kids, she wouldn’t even say she had a son. But now, when someone asks her, she finds herself answering differently. She says she has a son and that she lost him in a tragedy.
Chin Rodger:	I think one of the most important thing I want to get through is that if you are an individual with emotional, social issues, contemplating suicide or this pathway, if your parent, individual around that’s supposed, call someone, tell someone, do not be alone in it. I also said, I wish that the nightmare that I’m living, that the victims and the families are living, these nightmares are real, and these nightmares could be your reality any day. So we must work harder and coming together and try and prevent this horrific acts from happening again and again.
Mark Follman:	Decades of Threat Assessment research, point to a fundamental truth. People who end up doing what Elliot Rodger did, feel profoundly alone, and part of them doesn’t want to do it, they need help. And with the growth of this field, nationally, more of them may now get that help, before it’s too late.
Al Letson:	That story was reported by Mark Follman, National Affairs Editor at Mother Jones magazine. He’s also the author of the book, Trigger Points: Inside The Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America. There’s so much more to this investigation, that you can find in Mark’s cover story, on motherjones.com. If you or someone you know, is having thoughts of suicide, help is available. Call or text 988, to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
	Our lead producer for this week’s show is Michael I Schiller. Jenny Casas edited the show. Special thanks to James West, for additional field production, and to Mother Jones editor Jeremy Schulman. This week’s episode was fact-checked by Maggie Duffy, with support from Reveal’s Nikki Frick. Victoria Baranetsky is our general counsel. Our production managers are Steven Rascon and Zulema Cobb. Score and sound design, by the dynamic duo, Jay Breezy, Mr. Jim Briggs and Fernando, my man yo, Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Our theme music is by Kamarado, Lightning. Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Reveal is a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.

Michael I Schiller

mschiller@revealnews.org

Michael I Schiller is a senior reporter and producer for Reveal. His Emmy Award-winning work spans animation, radio and documentary film.

“The Dead Unknown,” a video series he directed about the crisis of America's unidentified dead, earned a national News and Documentary Emmy Award, national Edward R. Murrow Award and national Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award.

His 2015 animated documentary short film “The Box,” about youth solitary confinement, was honored with a video journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Northern California chapter, a San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award and a New Orleans Film Festival special jury prize, and it was nominated for a national News and Documentary Emmy for new approaches.

Schiller was one the producers of the pilot episode of the Peabody Award-winning Reveal radio show and podcast. He continues to regularly produce audio documentaries for the weekly public radio show, which airs on over 450 stations nationwide. Schiller is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.

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Jenny Casas

jcasas@revealnews.org

Jenny Casas is a senior radio editor for Reveal. She was previously a narrative audio producer at The New York Times developing shows for the Opinion Department. She was in the inaugural cohort of AIR's Edit Mode: Story Editor Training. She has reported on the ways that cities systematically fail their people for WNYC, USA Today, City Bureau and St. Louis Public Radio. Casas is from California and is based in Chicago.

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Jim Briggs

jbriggs@revealnews.org

Jim Briggs III is the senior sound designer, engineer and composer for Reveal. He supervises post-production and composes original music for the public radio show and podcast. He also leads Reveal's efforts in composition for data sonification and live performances.

Prior to joining Reveal in 2014, Briggs mixed and recorded for clients such as WNYC Studios, NPR, the CBC and American Public Media. Credits include “Marketplace,” “Selected Shorts,” “Death, Sex & Money,” “The Longest Shortest Time,” NPR’s “Ask Me Another,” “Radiolab,” “Freakonomics Radio” and “Soundcheck.” He also was the sound re-recording mixer and sound editor for several PBS television documentaries, including “American Experience: Walt Whitman,” the 2012 Tea Party documentary "Town Hall" and “The Supreme Court” miniseries. His music credits include albums by R.E.M., Paul Simon and Kelly Clarkson.

Briggs' work with Reveal has been recognized with an Emmy Award (2016) and two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards (2018, 2019). Previously, he was part of the team that won the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma for its work on WNYC’s hourlong documentary special “Living 9/11.” He has taught sound, radio and music production at The New School and Eugene Lang College and has a master's degree in media studies from The New School. Briggs is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.

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Fernando Arruda

farruda@revealnews.org

Fernando Arruda is a sound designer, engineer and composer for Reveal. As a multi-instrumentalist, he contributes to the original music, editing and mixing of the weekly public radio show and podcast. He has held four O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary abilities. His work has been recognized with Peabody, duPont-Columbia, Edward R. Murrow, Gerald Loeb, Third Coast and Association of Music Producers awards, as well as Emmy and Pulitzer nominations. Prior to joining Reveal, Arruda toured as an international DJ and taught music technology at Dubspot and ESRA International Film School. He worked at Antfood, a creative audio studio for media and TV ads, and co-founded a film-scoring boutique called the Manhattan Composers Collective. He worked with clients such as Marvel, MasterClass and Samsung and ad agencies such as Framestore, Trollbäck+Company, BUCK and Vice. Arruda releases experimental music under the alias FJAZZ and has performed with many jazz, classical and pop ensembles, such as SFJAZZ Monday Night Band, Art&Sax quartet, Krychek, Dark Inc. and the New York Arabic Orchestra. His credits in the podcast and radio world include NPR’s “51 Percent,” WNYC’s “Bad Feminist Happy Hour” and its live broadcast of Orson Welles’ “The Hitchhiker,” Wondery’s “Detective Trapp,” MSNBC’s “Why Is This Happening?” and NBC’s “Born to Rule,” to name a few. Arruda also has a wide catalog of composed music for theatrical, orchestral and chamber music formats, some of which has premiered worldwide. He holds a master’s degree in film scoring and composition from NYU Steinhardt. The original music he makes with Jim Briggs for Reveal can be found on Bandcamp.

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Nikki Frick

nfrick@revealnews.org

Nikki Frick is the associate editor for research and copy for Reveal. She previously worked as a copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and held internships at The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and Washingtonpost.com. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was an American Copy Editors Society Aubespin scholar. Frick is based in Milwaukee.

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Steven Rascón

srascon@revealnews.com

Steven Rascón (he/they) is the production manager for Reveal. He is pursuing a master's degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism with a Kaiser Permanente Institute for Health Policy Fellowship. His focus is investigative reporting and audio documentary. He has written for online, magazines and radio. His reporting on underreported fentanyl overdoses in Los Angeles' LGBTQ community aired on KCRW and KQED. Rascón is passionate about telling diverse stories for radio through community engagement. He holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in theater arts and creative writing.

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Zulema Cobb

zcobb@revealnews.org

Zulema Cobb is an operations and audio production associate for The Center for Investigative Reporting. She's originally from Los Angeles County, where she was raised until moving to Oregon. Her interest in the well-being of families and children inspired her to pursue family services at the University of Oregon. Her diverse background includes banking, affordable housing, health care and education, where she helped develop a mentoring program for students. Cobb is passionate about animals and has fostered and rescued numerous dogs and cats. She frequently volunteers at animal shelters and overseas rescue missions. In her spare time, she channels her creative energy into photography, capturing memories for friends and family. Cobb is based in Tennessee, where she lives with her husband, three kids, three dogs and cat.

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Al Letson

aletson@revealnews.org

Al Letson is a playwright, performer, screenwriter, journalist, and the host of Reveal. Soul-stirring, interdisciplinary work has garnered Letson national recognition and devoted fans.

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