Mass Murderer Elliot Rodger's Life of Rage and Resentment

 


 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

California Shooting Suspect Elliot Rodger's Life of Rage and Resentment

By M. Alex Johnson
NBC News

In YouTube videos he posted late last week, Elliot Oliver Robertson Rodger looks and sounds like a sweet, gentle soul, but the words he speaks reveal a tormented, twisted view of the world.

Especially of women, whom he is accused of having targeted in a shooting rampage that left six people dead near Santa Barbara, Calif., on Friday night.

Rodger was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head Friday night in his black BMW after a long shooting spree throughout the tony community of Isla Vista, adjacent to Santa Barbara in Southern California.

Seven people, including Rodger, were killed. Eight others were shot and wounded. Four more were injured when the BMW hit them. And yet another person sustained an injury that remained unspecified Saturday night.
 


 
Victim’s Dad Outraged by Shooting, Makes Emotional Plea

[How can one be outraged by a “shooting,” rather than at a shooter? Is this like being outraged at “gun violence”? I sympathize with the man over losing his child, but if he thinks that a magical law would prevent a single person from being shot to death, he's a fool. He'd burn the Constitution, and for nothing.]

Rodger, 22, a student at Santa Barbara City College, grew up amid affluence and privilege as the son of Peter Rodger, an assistant director of "The Hunger Games" and a highly regarded film photographer in Europe, and the stepson of Soumaya Akaaboune, an actress who appeared in "Green Zone" in 2010 with Matt Damon and stars in the French version of the "Real Housewives" television series.

But in the nine videos and in a 106,000-word autobiography/cri-de-coeur written under his name and mailed through the post office to a Santa Barbara TV station, Rodger emerges as a desperately unhappy young man who pined for his birth mother — from whom he was separated by divorce — despised his stepmother and hated the frequent lavish trips to Europe and Morocco (his stepmother's homeland) that his family's wealth afforded.

And most of all, he hated women. They saw him as weak and uninteresting, he believed. They preferred strong, macho types, not a "supreme gentleman" like himself, he says in one of the videos he posted shortly before the rampage Friday. He died a virgin.

 

 
Elliot Rodger's Retribution' [sic] Video Detailed His Plans

Rodger was born in 1991 in London, where his father was then based. His mother was a Malaysian woman of Chinese descent who worked as a nurse on film sets, according to the 141-page manifesto.

NBC News has not independently verified the authenticity of the document, but Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown referred to it several times Saturday as helping to establish that Rodger was "disturbed" and "a madman."

Rodger lived a happy life with his parents and a younger sister in England until he was 5 years old, when the family moved to western Los Angeles so his father could pursue career opportunities in Hollywood, according to the manuscript.

Within two years, his parents divorced, it says. Almost immediately, his father introduced him to Akaaboune, the woman who would become his stepmother. He did not like her.

Then came school age, the start of what the writer describes as horribly unpleasant interactions with girls and — as he apparently saw them — their bully boyfriends.