In Iran, she was known as Green Nasim, a social media star with followings on YouTube, on Instagram and elsewhere.
In the United States, she cast a very different profile, a proponent of vegan diets, animal rights and home exercise who had increasingly become agitated by one of the tech companies that helped give her a platform.
On Tuesday afternoon, Nasim Najafi Aghdam sneaked into YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., and opened fire, shooting three people before taking her own life. The police said Ms. Aghdam’s anger over what she believed to be unfair treatment by YouTube had set her on a 500-mile drive from her home near San Diego to YouTube’s offices on the northern edge of Silicon Valley.
“People like me are not good for big business, like for animal business, medicine business and for many other businesses. That’s why they are discriminating and censoring us,” she said in a video posted online last year criticizing YouTube. “This is what they are doing to vegan activists and many other people who try to promote healthy, humane and smart living.”
Investigators on Wednesday were still retracing Ms. Aghdam’s steps. About 11 hours before the shooting, she was found sleeping in her car by the police in Mountain View., Calif., about 30 miles from San Bruno and home to YouTube’s parent company, Google. After checking records on her license, they discovered that her family had reported her missing several days earlier.
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Ms. Aghdam told the Mountain View officers that she had been having issues with her family, and that she had come to Northern California to find a job. She didn’t appear to the police to be a danger, to herself or others, so they soon let her go.
Ms. Aghdam was in her late 30s. In several of her videos, she said she was born in Iran, in the city of Urmia, where most people also speak Turkish, as she does in some of her videos. Ms. Aghdam had YouTube pages in Persian, Turkish and English. She explained that she and her family were members of the Baha’i faith, which faces persecution in Iran, a country with a Muslim majority.
In the United States, she cast a very different profile, a proponent of vegan diets, animal rights and home exercise who had increasingly become agitated by one of the tech companies that helped give her a platform.
On Tuesday afternoon, Nasim Najafi Aghdam sneaked into YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., and opened fire, shooting three people before taking her own life. The police said Ms. Aghdam’s anger over what she believed to be unfair treatment by YouTube had set her on a 500-mile drive from her home near San Diego to YouTube’s offices on the northern edge of Silicon Valley.
“People like me are not good for big business, like for animal business, medicine business and for many other businesses. That’s why they are discriminating and censoring us,” she said in a video posted online last year criticizing YouTube. “This is what they are doing to vegan activists and many other people who try to promote healthy, humane and smart living.”
Investigators on Wednesday were still retracing Ms. Aghdam’s steps. About 11 hours before the shooting, she was found sleeping in her car by the police in Mountain View., Calif., about 30 miles from San Bruno and home to YouTube’s parent company, Google. After checking records on her license, they discovered that her family had reported her missing several days earlier.
Continue reading the main story
Ms. Aghdam told the Mountain View officers that she had been having issues with her family, and that she had come to Northern California to find a job. She didn’t appear to the police to be a danger, to herself or others, so they soon let her go.
Ms. Aghdam was in her late 30s. In several of her videos, she said she was born in Iran, in the city of Urmia, where most people also speak Turkish, as she does in some of her videos. Ms. Aghdam had YouTube pages in Persian, Turkish and English. She explained that she and her family were members of the Baha’i faith, which faces persecution in Iran, a country with a Muslim majority.
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