Seattle Pacific University Shooter Charged With Murder

Part of SPU's picturesque campus.
Image: Rob Ketcherside/Flickr

On Thursday, June 5^th, Aaron Ybarra walked into the lobby of Seattle Pacific University’s Otto Miller Hall and opened fire with a shotgun. One student, 19-year-old Paul Lee, was killed just outside of the hall when Ybarra shot him in the back of the head. Three other students in their 20s were also injured before student security monitor Jon Meis became the hero of the day.

Meis tackled the man as he tried to reload, pepper spraying him and wrestling him to the ground before he could fire off any more shots. Ybarra managed to fire off just a few rounds before it was all over—but he had over 50 shells on him when he was taken into custody by authorities. He planned to kill many more students and slit his own throat afterwards.

Now the gunman, 26-year-old Aaron Ybarra, faces charges that will likely land him with life in prison. Prosecutors filed one count of first-degree murder and two counts of attempted murder in the first degree against Ybarra.

According to defending attorney Ramona Brandes, Ybarra has a long history of mental problems. King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg says Ybarra had stopped taking his medications because he “wanted to feel the hate.”

Two weeks prior to the shooting, he began detailing plans for the attack at Seattle Pacific in a private journal. On the day of the shooting, he wrote, “I just want people to die, and I’m gonna die with them!”

The journal also revealed that Ybarra felt admiration for other school shooters and that he had also considered several other universities as targets before dismissing them for being too far away. He didn’t list a specific reason for targeting Seattle Pacific, which is a private Christian college in the heart of Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood.

The shooting at Seattle Pacific isn’t even the latest in school shootings—on Tuesday, June 10^th, an unidentified shooter attacked Reynolds High School in Portland, killing one student and himself. And late last month at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Elliot Rodger killed himself and six others. Since December 2012’s infamous Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 children and 6 adults, there have been 74 school shootings around the country.

These school shootings, perhaps more than any other factor, are bringing gun violence and regulation into the spotlight over and over again.