YouTube headquarters did its best to fit into its strip-mall suburban home. Two vine-covered outdoor staircases jutted out from the office’s front, curved outward like wings. A company logo was etched into the south staircase, colored to match the building’s eggshell white. The office sat on a corner facing Cherry Avenue, a four-lane road that passed under a freeway near a Carl’s Jr. and a parking garage. Sandwiched between this garage and YouTube’s entryway corridor was a small courtyard, filled with chairs and bright red sun umbrellas, where YouTube held its Friday meetings.
On Tuesday, April 3, 2018, employees streamed off shuttle buses in the morning, as usual, taking the mossy stairs up to the second floor, which housed their desks and the big red slide. Around noon they spilled out onto the courtyard for lunch. Kurt Wilms sat inside at his second-floor desk. Wilms had been at YouTube for seven years, decades in tech time, cycling through its various projects. He now worked on its “living room” division, crafting YouTube’s experience on video game consoles, smart TVs, and other devices. His was the YouTube of normals: of cooking instructions, sports highlights, SNL skits, and chess game commentary (his favorite), far from the beheadings and suicide forests and Spider-Man-Elsas. Wilms was a happy-go-lucky dude. He said “learnings,” a gerund the tech industry deployed to give gravitas and gusto to “lesson,” which Wilms used in sentences like “A good learning for me: I’m going to try to stay chill.”
During his career at YouTube, his co-workers treated their space like an open, inviting college campus, as Google and other companies did. Staff brought in friends and family to see the micro-kitchens and rooms named after viral videos. This didn’t change after Wojcicki’s arrival, when YouTube swelled in numbers to more than a thousand people in its San Bruno office. Wilms, who once knew everybody, suddenly asked himself, Who are all these people? This was a good sign, though; it meant growth.
On that sunny April Tuesday, some construction clanged outside. A little before 1:00 p.m., a noise interrupted Wilms while he typed an email.
Pop.
“What was that?” a co-worker next to him asked.
“Oh,” Wilms replied, turning back to his screen. “It’s construction.”
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Wilms swiveled to his co-worker. No, that was the distinctive sound of gunfire, a sound very close by. Wilms stood and shouted the first thing to come to him: “Run!”
Nasim Najafi Aghdam was a thirty-eight-year-old YouTuber living near San Diego. Young Iranians might have recognized her as Nasime Sabz or Green Nasim. She was a minor social media star in Iran and its diaspora, a strange internet personality who had made videos for Persian satellite TV and many, many for YouTube.
Born in Iran near the Turkish border, Aghdam created her videos in Turkish, Persian, and English, often discussing her family’s persecution for its minority Baha’i faith. In 1996 they moved to California, and Aghdam soon became deeply passionate about animal rights. At twenty-nine she went to Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps facility in Southern California, where PETA activists were protesting the use of pigs in training exercises. Protesters stood outside the entrance with signs that read stop torturing animals. Aghdam, thin with jet-black hair and sharp features, showed up with a plastic sword, wearing black gloves and jeans painted with dark red droplets resembling blood. She had painted two red droplets on her chin. “For me, animal rights equal human rights,” she told a reporter there. Jena Hunt, a PETA staffer who organized the protest, later said she had to ask Aghdam to leave. “The poor thing seemed very mentally ill,” Hunt recalled.
Aghdam turned online to advocate and find solace. She lifted weights and identified herself as “the first Persian female vegan bodybuilder.” She started a website and a nonprofit called Peace Thunder. Animal rights groups had trouble delivering their message, she told a wellness publication in 2014, “because many media or even internet websites only care about their own financial profit.” The publication printed a photo of Aghdam flexing her biceps in a bedazzled neon-green tank top bearing a butterfly.
She took to YouTube to spread her message. She made videos in her parents’ house in Menifee, a town at Los Angeles’s outer edge, shooting before a dark blue wall opposite a small bed and a mannequin dressed in sequins. She ran at least four YouTube channels, uploading frequent, strange clips that melted into the site’s vast tapestry—workout routines, bizarre musical parodies, and graphic videos documenting cruelty against animals. One did well in Iranian internet circles: Aghdam danced in it, wearing a flamboyant purple dress and a breastplate with a plunging Elvira neckline. As she swayed, she removed the breastplate, and a caption appeared on-screen, “Don’t trust your eyes.” She was occasionally subjected to ridicule for her odd antics and deadpan delivery. Viewers asked about her mental fitness. In videos Aghdam started to complain about life in America, that people taking on the system and big companies were “censored.” That it felt as bad as Iran. “There they kill you by axe,” she told the camera. “Here they kill you with cotton,” an Iranian expression for a death at the hands of something seen as innocent.
Starting around 2017, she began to complain about YouTube. “I’m filtered on YouTube,” she said in one video. “And I’m not the only one.” On her website she documented this corporate crackdown, which she viewed as retaliation for her outspoken challenge to the meat industry. She posted three screenshots of her YouTube dashboard, showing watch time, views, and subscribers on her videos and how they kept falling. One post listed 307,658 minutes of watch time and 366,591 views. “Your estimated revenue,” the YouTube dashboard read, “$0.10.” This she circled in red pixels. “There is no equal growth opportunity on YouTube,” her website blared in bright, frantic text. “Your channel will grow if they want to!!!!!”
Aghdam had meanwhile moved to live with her grandmother near San Diego. On January 2, 2018, she purchased a 9 mm Smith & Wesson from the Gun Range, a San Diego retailer. She picked it up two weeks later, the same day YouTube announced its big ad policy change. She drove north.
On Monday, April 2, Aghdam entered 901 Cherry Avenue during the lunch hour. She approached YouTube’s front desk and asked a receptionist about job opportunities. She left within ten minutes.
That night, police found her in a white sedan parked on the street thirty miles south in Mountain View, where Google had its headquarters. Aghdam opened her driver’s door wearing a light hooded sweatshirt, hood pulled over her head. A roll of toilet paper sat in the passenger seat.
“Are you taking any medication at all?” a female officer asked her.
“No,” Aghdam answered.
“You don’t want to hurt yourself, do you?” the officer tried. Aghdam thumbed her phone. She looked up and shook her head no. “And,” the officer continued, “you don’t want to hurt anybody else?” Aghdam looked down at her phone and gave a fainter nod. The officers left and notified Aghdam’s family.
Her brother later told reporters that once police called and he googled his sister’s location, alarm bells went off. “She was always complaining that YouTube ruined her life,” he recalled. He said he called police back to warn them that “she might do something.” Mountain View police would deny this.
That morning Aghdam went to a local shooting range. She returned to YouTube’s office shortly after noon, parking in the adjacent garage. An employee stopped her at an entrance and asked for ID. Aghdam pulled a pistol from her purse, sending the employee fleeing to call 911. Aghdam continued to the courtyard.
Dianna Arnspiger, a YouTube project manager, saw this dark-haired stranger spraying bullets with a gun. On instinct Arnspiger shouted, “Shooter!” A pedestrian nearby would tell TV cameras, “Oh, man. It didn’t stop. It was no mercy. No mercy.” Inside the office, a YouTube manager inside peered down a staircase to see drops of blood on the floor.
Kurt Wilms had bolted to a door by his desk and raced down the stairs, his eyes folding in tunnel vision. Suddenly he stopped: he looked down to see the entryway lobby, usually buzzing with activity during lunch, totally empty. He turned around to discover several of his colleagues had followed him in panic. They all ran back up the stairs, through the door, and into a conference room, where they flipped a table against the entry as a barricade and waited. Wilms took deep breaths, fully expecting the shooter or shooters to charge in.
Police found Wilms and his huddled colleagues before any shooter did. Employees were escorted out with their hands up. Others had taken refuge in a nearby shopping center or sprinted over a fence toward the freeway. Three YouTube employees were wounded in the gunfire and sent to a San Francisco hospital in fair, serious, and critical conditions. (They would all survive.) Aghdam had fired twenty shots, including one killing herself.
Susan Wojcicki, who was in a meeting on the second floor as the shooting began, walked out of the office in a borrowed black overcoat, trailed by her staff and reporters who had raced to the scene. “We will come together and heal as a family,” she wrote on Twitter soon after. Police had arrived within three minutes of the first 911 call, followed by TV cameras, helicopters, and FBI officials. “It was very chaotic, as you can imagine,” Ed Barberini, San Bruno’s police chief, said at a hastily assembled press conference in a nearby parking lot.
All sorts of speculation flew around in the hours before Aghdam’s identity and story became public. Once it did, critics used her tragedy as an abject lesson for YouTube about its capricious, unreliable machines. But Aghdam’s tale was fundamentally an American one, a saga of inadequate mental health care and easy access to firearms. Three months before Aghdam bought her pistol in San Diego, the seller had advertised a “12 Guns of Christmas” sale. The store clerk who sold her the weapon reported that this transaction did not stand out as unusual.