Authorities have identified the suspect in Tuesday’s shooting at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, Nasim Aghdam, a 39-year-old San Diego resident. Investigators are still looking for a motive but have ruled out initial reports that she was taking revenge on a former boyfriend. Aghdam was active on YouTube, and she actively blogged against its revenue policies.
Her personal website, which remains online as of Tuesday morning, links to myriad videos with a focus on animal rights, bodybuilding, and vegan activism. She writes that all videos were filmed and edited by her. It also hosted at least one of the clips from her now-deleted YouTube channel, titled “FIRST PERSIAN VEGAN TV COMMERCIAL BY NASIM.” She says her ad was on Iranian TV in 2010. On the home page, she claims that YouTube filtered her channels to “keep them from getting views!” She also calls YouTube a “dictatorship” and shared a quote from Adolf Hitler about how to spread disinformation, as well as a quote from Albert Einstein about people being complicit toward evil people.
“This video got age restricted after new close-minded youtube employees, got control of my farsi youtube channel last year 2016 & began filtering my videos to reduce views & suppress & discaurage me from making videos!” she wrote.
Her Dailymotion video page remains live as of Tuesday morning. It features 44 videos that have a combined 207,400 plays. That includes parodies of America’s Got Talent and Justin Bieber’s “What Do You Mean,” apparently made in 2015, written about the ethics of eating animals. (Aghdam’s version is titled “What Do You Eat?”) She posted videos in English, Turkish, and Farsi.
Aghdam also posted a video about former President Bill Clinton’s vegan diet and Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song.” Of the videos she hosted, the most potentially radical is titled “Behind the Mask: Illegal Break In,” which shows animal rights activists freeing animals from testing facilities.
According to public records obtained by USA Today, Aghdam established an animal-rights charity, Peace Thunder Inc., and had been training to become a pilot. Her father said in an interview that he’d emigrated to the U.S. in 1996.
Her two Instagram accounts have been deleted, as well as her Facebook and four YouTube channels.