Bodycam footage shows YouTube shooter just hours before rampage

Suspected Youtube shooter Nasim Aghdam quietly shook her head when police officers asked whether she had plans to hurt anyone, according to newly released bodycam footage captured just hours before she shot three people and killed herself.

Aghdam opened fire at Youtube’s San Bruno, Calif., headquarters on April 3, before she was found dead inside the office complex with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The 39-year-old was reported missing a day before the shooting, and her father told police she had “recently become upset about changes on the YouTube platform that had impacted videos she had created on living a vegan lifestyle,” police said in a statement Friday.

YouTube California headquarters shooting suspect Nasim Aghdam

Mountain View police Chief Max Bosel said Aghdam did not appear to be a threat to herself or others and credited the officers who checked up on her for following “proper procedure and protocol.”

Aghdam was reported missing on April 2, and police found her sleeping in a car in Mountain View about 30 miles south of the Youtube headquarters the next day.

In the bodycam footage released on Friday, an officer finds Aghdam sleeping in a Walmart parking lot around 1:30 a.m., before checking her license plate and learning she is a missing person.

The officers then wake her up, and Aghdam can be seen looking at her phone and shaking her head “no” when an officer asks if she has plans to harm herself or hurt anyone else.

Chief Max Bosel said, “They checked on the welfare of a person who, at the time, was reported missing but whose actions, demeanor, and answers did not present any information which would cause us to believe she would be a threat to herself or others.”

Aghdam had legally purchased the 9mm handgun that she used in the shooting in January and visited a gun range the morning of the shooting, police said.

But the Mountain View officers did not ask Aghdam if she had any weapons in her car, even though she could have been arrested if the gun was not secured in the trunk or a locked container.

Police said the officers ran several checks on Aghdam, and used a statewide database that would indicate if a registered gun owner was prohibited from possessing firearms.

After the exchange, an officer called her father, Ismail Aghdam, who said he had “been having trouble getting along” with his daughter but thanked the officers for finding her safely, police said.

About an hour after that call, the father phoned the officer again to tell him that he believed she may have been in the area because she had been upset at YouTube.

Aghdam posted videos under the online name Nasime Sabz, and saw herself as a rising YouTube star who touted a vegan diet and rallied behind animal rights.

But she grew increasingly angry in recent months and decried YouTube’s policies, saying the company was trying to “suppress” content creators.

Police said Aghdam’s father did not indicate that she was a danger to herself or anyone else and did not bring up any concerns about her behavior.

With News Wire Services