A YouTube engineer attempted to escape shooting on his electric skateboard -- and sped right into the crime scene
On Tuesday, a shooter opened fire at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California.
Many employees had no idea there was an active shooter in the vicinity when they evacuated their offices after a fire alarm went off.
Zachary Vorhies, a senior software engineer, jumped on his electric skateboard and found himself at the scene of the shooting.
On Tuesday, a woman opened fire with a handgun at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California, shooting three people — one of whom was critically injured — and killing herself, police said.
Many employees calmly exited their offices when they heard fire alarms go off, not suspecting there was an active shooter in the vicinity. Zachary Vorhies, a senior software engineer at YouTube, said that he and his coworkers grabbed their stuff and left the building when the alarm went off.
Vorhies jumped on his electric skateboard and headed down a hill.
He soon arrived at an internal courtyard where he saw a man lying motionless, bleeding from his stomach.
"He had a red spot on his stomach, and he was lying on his back, not moving," Vorhies, 37, told The New York Times. "I saw the blood soak through the shirt."
And he saw a large man, wearing gray, yelling, "Do you want to shoot me?" and "Come at me."
"I just was like, what's going on?" he told NPR, adding that he didn't realize the bleeding man had been shot.
Shortly thereafter, the door between the courtyard and the street swung open and a police officer armed with an assault rifle barged in.
"At that point, I realized this was not someplace I needed to be," Vorhies said. He grabbed his skateboard and escaped into an adjacent parking structure, which a few hundred of his coworker had evacuated to.
San Bruno police on Tuesday night identified the suspected shooter as 39-year-old Nasim Aghdam of San Diego. Aghdam died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.
The motivations for the shooting are currently being investigated, but she was critical of YouTube in many of her social media posts.
