On the night of Friday, May 23, 2014, Isla Vista, a crowded unincorporated town beside the University of California campus at Santa Barbara, lost six people in a few hours. Three young men died in a residence during the day. In the evening, over about eight minutes, three more people died and fourteen were injured at points across the town's grid of narrow blocks. The man the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office held responsible, Elliot Rodger, 22, died by suicide before deputies could reach him. He was never arrested, never charged and never tried.
Because there was no trial, the case rests on the investigation that followed. Nine months later the Sheriff's Office issued a long investigative summary, dated February 18, 2015, that named the dead, described how the investigation was built and listed the offenses it attributed to him: six counts of murder, three of them carrying a special circumstance, and twenty counts of attempted murder, among other crimes. It concluded that he had acted alone. It closed the case without sending it to the District Attorney, for the plain reason that there was no one left to prosecute. A second public report, from the District Attorney's office in September 2015, dealt only with the conduct of the deputies who confronted him that night.
Elliot Oliver Robertson Rodger was born in London on July 24, 1991, and moved to California at the age of five. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles County and moved through a series of public and private schools there. In his first year of high school he attended a private Catholic school, where his grades were poor and where, he later told a therapist, he had been bullied; he finished at a continuation high school, where his grades improved and where he received weekly therapy.
Investigators traced his difficulties back to early childhood. From about the age of seven he was described as withdrawn, speaking very little and sitting by himself. His school records, which the FBI obtained by federal grand jury subpoena, showed he had been eligible for special education. The Sheriff's Office found that he had been in treatment for mental-health problems since childhood and was still in treatment in 2014.
The same report found no history of violence. Before May 23, 2014, he had no criminal record, and investigators learned of no earlier violent incident in his life.
After high school he took classes at Pierce College and Moorpark College while still living in Los Angeles. On June 4, 2011, he moved to Isla Vista, about 85 miles to the north, and enrolled at Santa Barbara City College. The move was meant to give him independence and a fresh start. It did neither. He made no friends there, and investigators found no sign that he socialized with anyone at his college. He lived in a series of shared rentals with housemates he had not known before, and at the end he had a room of his own in a shared residence in Isla Vista.
What made the case unusual, in the Sheriff's view, was how much the man had written down. Detectives recovered two handwritten journals covering April 2010 to May 23, 2014, and a 137-page autobiographical document that he had begun as a life story. Together with his internet history and a series of videos, these allowed investigators to reconstruct his thinking in a way rarely possible after such a crime.
The picture they assembled was of a young man consumed by loneliness and by anger at women and at couples, whom he blamed for his isolation. The journals showed that anger hardening over 2012 and 2013 into a plan for revenge. By mid-2013, his journal showed, he had settled on Isla Vista or his college as the place where he would act.
None of this was visible to the authorities at the time. The Sheriff's Office later said that the mental-health professionals who treated him had seen nothing that would have predicted what he did.
The Sheriff's Office and the university police jointly staffed the Isla Vista Foot Patrol, and in the year before the killings its officers dealt with Rodger several times, always on matters that seemed minor.
On February 6, 2013, he reported damage to his car. Officers who looked at it found paint transfers but no dents. On July 21, 2013, he reported that he had been hurt at a party in Isla Vista the night before. He told the deputy taking the report that he had been the victim. His own later writing showed that he had started the confrontation and had concocted an altered story for the police; the case was suspended pending leads.
On January 15, 2014, he called the sheriff's emergency line to accuse a housemate of taking three candles from his room. Deputies tried to settle the dispute and failed. Rodger signed a citizen's arrest form for petty theft, the housemate was booked into the county jail, and a Superior Court judge later dismissed the case for insufficient evidence.
The contact that would draw the most attention came on the night of April 30, 2014. A staff member running the crisis line for Santa Barbara County Mental Health asked deputies to check on Rodger at his residence. The request began with a family member who had seen videos he had posted on YouTube, found him depressed in them and had not heard from him in four days; the concern reached the crisis line through a life-skills coach who worked with him.
A call of that kind normally drew two officers. Six went: four deputies and a dispatcher in training who were walking together, joined by a university police officer, and among them were deputies who knew Rodger from the dispute over the candles. They found him alone, shy, timid and polite. Asked about the videos, which none of them had seen, he said he was having trouble fitting in socially in Isla Vista and that the videos were simply a way of expressing himself.
Nothing in the conversation, the deputies concluded, gave them reason to believe he was a danger to himself or to anyone else. One of them briefed the family member by phone and put Rodger on the line; no further action was requested. The deputies gave him information about local services, told him he could call the Sheriff's Office if he needed help and left. They did not watch the videos, enter the residence or run any check of what he owned. The Sheriff's Office said in late May 2014 that they had acted professionally and in line with state law and department policy. Its final report, nine months later, reached the same view of the visit.
The Sheriff's Office divided the crimes into two events separated by a gap of about three hours.
The first took place during the day in Rodger's residence in Isla Vista. Three young men died there, each at a different time, as they came into the residence: Weihan Wang, of Fremont, who went by David; Cheng Yuan Hong, of San Jose, who went by James; and George Chen, also of San Jose. Two of them shared the residence with him; the third was visiting. Their deaths went undiscovered for hours.
In the evening, minutes before the second event, Rodger posted a video to YouTube and emailed his long autobiographical document to 34 addresses, among them people he knew, professors and the professionals who had treated him. One recipient, the life-skills coach, raised the alarm later that evening, and it was through that warning that police in Santa Barbara first learned his name that night.
The second event began with the first emergency call of the evening. Officers of the Isla Vista Foot Patrol were already in the area and needed no dispatch. Over the next eight minutes three people died and fourteen were injured. Katherine Cooper, of Chino Hills, known as Katie, and Veronika Weiss, of Westlake Village, died together near the start of the evening. Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, of Los Osos, died minutes later. A young woman who was also targeted that evening was not hurt.
Deputies confronted him, and soon afterward, with fourteen people injured and three more dead across the town, he died by suicide in Isla Vista.
Sheriff's detectives were on scene later that evening, and soon they had a name. A Santa Barbara police detective had already spoken with a family member who had been alerted to the document and the video and was driving north from Los Angeles. From that conversation the lead sheriff's detective learned the address, the YouTube account and the content of the video, and the identity of the dead man was confirmed from his license.
The video and the document made the detectives fear for the people who shared the residence. Deputies reached it early on May 24, and that was when the deaths of the three men were confirmed.
Over the following days every scene was processed, and every survivor, witness and officer was interviewed. Warrants were served at residences in Los Angeles and for his five email accounts, his YouTube and Facebook accounts and his phone. The Sheriff's High Tech Crimes Unit examined his phone and computer. The FBI gathered his financial, academic and mental-health records; and the California Department of Justice's forensic laboratory examined the physical evidence. The investigation produced nearly 250 investigative documents. From reports, surveillance footage, photographs, phone videos, warrant returns and dispatch recordings, detectives rebuilt his movements that evening and through the days and weeks before it. Within a week the Sheriff's Office was describing the case as one of the most complex in its history, and it stopped releasing details while the work went on; the death investigations of the six victims and of Rodger himself ran in parallel, with their findings held back until they were complete. Other agencies joined in: university, city and county police, the Highway Patrol, state parks, fire and ambulance crews and the county's emergency office.
A central question was whether anyone had helped him. In the confusion of that night, officers at first believed there might be a second suspect, a belief that was quickly dispelled. Detectives then went through his phone, his email, his social-media accounts and the internet forums where he had complained at length about women. None of the people there, the Sheriff's Office found, had conspired with him or helped him in any way.
The investigative summary was dated February 18, 2015, and released the following day. It set out the Sheriff's Office's conclusions in plain terms. Rodger had acted alone and was solely responsible for his criminal actions that day. He had committed six counts of murder under Penal Code §187; three counts of murder with the special circumstance in §190.2(a)(15); twenty counts of attempted murder under §664/187, a figure that counted the fourteen injured and those who were targeted and missed; and further counts under §26100 and §25850.
The report could not answer the question of why. His first victims, it noted, were the men in his residence; he then tried to reach a group of women he had singled out, and when that failed, he chose people at random. The report found his intent to kill plain from the circumstantial evidence, including his writing, his video and the scale of what he had prepared. It also found that he had suffered from significant mental illness, while warning that most people with mental illness are not violent and that nothing should discourage them from seeking treatment.
The report ended by closing the investigation. There was no reason to refer the matter to the District Attorney for prosecution, it said, since the perpetrator was dead. Any new information would be reviewed, but with the report's release the investigation was over.
Rodger's autopsy was performed on May 29, 2014. The pathologist and coroner's detectives concluded that his death was self-inflicted, and the coroner certified the manner of death as suicide.
That made the deputies' conduct a matter for formal review. A Sheriff's review board and the Sheriff found their actions appropriate and within agency policy. The District Attorney's office reviewed the same events independently. Its public report, dated September 4, 2015, and released on September 8, found that the sergeant, detective and two deputies who had used deadly force had acted lawfully in self-defense, in defense of others and in an attempt to arrest a dangerous felon. It also found that none of them had caused his death. No bystander was hurt by the deputies' actions.
Isla Vista is not a city. It is unincorporated territory of Santa Barbara County, about half a square mile with some 23,000 residents at the 2010 census, and policing there falls to the Sheriff's Office, working with the university police through the Isla Vista Foot Patrol. In Santa Barbara County the Sheriff is also the Coroner, and the two offices act as one agency. The same organization therefore ran the criminal investigation, conducted the death investigations of all seven people who died and made the legal findings on cause and manner of death.
The welfare check of April 30 turned on a single statute. California Welfare and Institutions Code §5150(a) allows a peace officer, upon probable cause, to take a person into custody for up to 72 hours for assessment and crisis intervention when, as a result of a mental-health disorder, that person is a danger to others or to himself or herself, or is gravely disabled. The deputies concluded that Rodger did not meet that standard and that they had no cause to take any further investigative step, including entering his residence. The Sheriff's Office noted in its report that the same risk factors are what the law requires both for an involuntary hold and for a lawful entry and inspection of a residence.
No court ever heard the evidence. Every attribution of guilt in the case comes from the Sheriff's investigation and the coroner's findings, and Rodger had no opportunity to answer any of it.
His motive remains, in the Sheriff's own words, a question that may never be answered conclusively. The report drew on his writing, his journals and extensive interviews, but it described rather than resolved the reasons for what he did.
The welfare check of April 30 has drawn more questions than any other part of the case. The deputies did not watch the videos and did not check what he owned; the Sheriff's Office found that, absent signs of danger, they had no legal grounds to do more, and its review cleared them. Whether a different approach could have changed the outcome remains unresolved.
July 24, 1991: Elliot Oliver Robertson Rodger is born in London; at five he moves to California.
June 4, 2011: He moves to Isla Vista and enrolls at Santa Barbara City College.
February 6, 2013: He reports damage to his car to the Isla Vista Foot Patrol.
July 21, 2013: He reports being hurt at a party in Isla Vista the night before; the case is suspended pending leads.
January 15, 2014: He places a housemate under citizen's arrest over three candles; the case is later dismissed for insufficient evidence.
April 30, 2014: Deputies make a welfare check at his residence and find no grounds to hold him under §5150.
May 23, 2014: Three men die in his Isla Vista residence during the day; that evening three more people die and fourteen are injured across Isla Vista. He dies by suicide.
May 24, 2014: Deputies enter the residence early in the morning; the victims are identified over the next two days.
May 29, 2014: Autopsy; the Sheriff's Office says the deputies at the welfare check acted in line with state law and policy.
February 18, 2015: The Sheriff's investigative summary is completed; it is released the next day and closes the case.
September 4, 2015: The District Attorney's report finds the deputies who used deadly force acted lawfully; it is released on September 8.