Nasim Aghdam, the female shooter who wounded three people before killing herself at YouTube on Tuesday, did not stand out to employees at the gun store where she legally purchased her 9mm handgun on January 18.
Aghdam, who would have turned 39 this week, went to The Gun Range, a store 22 miles from her grandmother’s home in San Diego, to buy the weapon after YouTube announced changes to its creator policies which would restrict how she made money.
On Friday, one of the store’s employees told how she went back 10 days later after submitting her order to pick up the weapon and that she seemed completely normal.
‘It’s not like she stood out. I wish we could look into someone’s soul,’ Manny Mendoza, the store’s manager, told Mercury News.
Nasim Aghdam visited The Gun Range in San Diego on January 18 to buy her 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun
Manny Mendoza (right) said Aghdam did not stand out and that she seemed ordinary. After making the purchase, she waited the mandatory 10 day period before collecting it again
Aghdam passed a background check which reviewed criminal history, DMV records, outstanding warrants, restraining orders and mental health holds.
January 18 was the day that YouTube announced how it would make it more difficult for ‘bad actors’ to earn a living through the site’s ads.
Until then, creators with more than 10,000 views over the entire lifespan of a video could monetize them.
On January, that changed so that only creators with 1,000 subscribers could earn money on videos which had earned 4,000 hours of watchtime in the last month.
It prompted a sudden rush of creators following one another back to try to keep their earnings flowing.
On the same day, YouTube announced policy changes that make it more difficult for influencers to monetize their videos
On Friday, the gun woman’s parents said they had no idea she had purchased the weapon
Aghdam had several accounts on the site which have since been removed. She posted in both Farsi and English and had amassed thousands of subscribers between them but it is not clear how many she had on each account.
On her website, she had also complained about YouTube putting an age restriction on one of her videos and not allowing her to monetize another despite it meeting the requirements, she said.
YouTube’s policy change was prompted by a string of scandals and examples of people making money from videos even if they were in poor taste.
The most prominent is Logan Paul, an influencer with millions of fans, who controversially posted a video of himself next to a suicide victim in Japan’s suicide forest in December.
On Tuesday, Aghdam used one full gun magazine then loaded another one before shooting herself.