Woman wounds three at YouTube headquarters in California, then kills herself

SAN BRUNO, Calif., (Reuters) - A woman opened fire with a handgun at YouTube’s headquarters near San Francisco on Tuesday, wounding three people before shooting herself dead as employees of the Silicon Valley tech company fled into the surrounding streets, authorities said.

Police did not identify the suspect or say what might have motivated the shooting at YouTube, a video-sharing service owned by Alphabet Inc’s Google which employs nearly 2,000 people at the San Bruno, California offices.

The woman approached an outdoor patio and dining courtyard on the campus around lunchtime and began to fire before entering the building, police said.

The San Jose Mercury News, citing a law enforcement source, said that she was targeting her boyfriend due to a domestic dispute.

A U.S. government security official told Reuters there was no known connection to terrorism.

ABC News, citing unnamed law enforcement sources, said the suspect was 35 to 40 years old, and lived in Southern California, with no apparent connection to YouTube.

A YouTube product manager, Todd Sherman, described on Twitter hearing people running, first thinking it was an earthquake before he was told that a person had a gun.

“At that point every new person I saw was a potential shooter. Someone else said that the person shot out the back doors and then shot themselves,” Sherman said in a tweet.

“I looked down and saw blood drips on the floor and stairs. Peaked around for threats and then we headed downstairs and out the front,” Sherman said.

The shooting was the latest in a string of mass killings carried out in the United States in recent years. Most recently, the massacre of 17 people at a Florida high school has led to calls for tighter restrictions on gun ownership.

In a recording of a 911 call posted online by the Los Angeles Times, a dispatcher can be heard saying: “Shooter. Another party said they spotted someone with a gun. Suspect came from the back patio ... Again we have a report of a subject with a gun. They heard seven or eight shots being fired.”