On April 3, a woman named Nasim Aghdam entered YouTube’s main campus in San Bruno, California through a parking garage and opened fire, wounding three employees of the video-sharing platform before fatally shooting herself in the chest. Just hours before, Aghdam had been stopped by police in Mountain View.
GIF: Mountain View Police
Footage of the encounter, released by Mountain View Police today, takes place around 1:38AM, when officers correlated the licence plate of the car Aghdam was asleep in to one associated with an “at risk” missing person. Three days prior, her family had reported her missing. “I left my family. I don’t live with them any more,” she tells officers in the footage, “We don’t get along together.”
Aghdam claimed to be in Mountain View trying to find work. She hadn’t told her family she had planned to leave, and had intentionally left the mobile phone she normally used in San Diego, presumably to avoid contact. Officers ask if she has plans to hurt herself or anyone else. Aghdam says she does not.
According to a statement from the Mountain View Police Department, Aghdam “in no way met any reason for us to speak with her further or possibly detain her”, and when police called her family to notify them she’d been located her, “at no point did her father or brother mention anything about potential acts of violence”.
The officers’ interaction with Aghdam begins around minute 13.