Ian David Long, who police say killed at least a dozen people this week in a mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, allegedly groped and behaved aggressively toward his high school track coach.
“He attacked me. He attacked his high school track coach. Who does that?” former Newbury Park High School track coach Dominique Colell told CBS Los Angeles on Thursday.
The former track coach said one specific incident has stuck with her for more than a decade. She said a student on the track team handed her a lost phone and that Long approached her as she attempted to determine its owner.
“Ian came up and started screaming at me that that was his phone,” Colell said. “And I said, ‘Hold on, I’m not giving you this phone. I don’t know whose phone it is.’ He just started grabbing me, he groped my butt, he groped my stomach, he went around me — I pushed him off me. I said, ‘I’m not giving you this cell phone. Get off.’ And I said, ‘You know what, for that, you’re off the team.’”
Colell said the school administration pressured her to let Long back on the team and not press charges so that his future in the Marine Corps wouldn’t be jeopardized.
Long, 28, shot and killed 13 people, including himself, during a “College Country Night” at the Borderline Bar & Grill on Wednesday.
Research shows that the majority of perpetrators of mass shootings have some history of violence against women. Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, was reportedly abusive toward a girlfriend and later threatened to kill the girl’s new boyfriend. Adam Lanza killed his mother before he killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen beat both his wives before opening fire on a nightclub in 2016. Stephen Paddock reportedly berated his girlfriend in public several times before killing 58 and wounding 489 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas last year.
Wednesday’s shooting in Thousand Oaks marks the 307th mass shooting in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive’s records.