Jurors hear Seattle Pacific University shooter's confession to police: 'I felt nothing but hate'

SEATTLE -- Throughout his murder trial, the accused SPU shooter has shown little emotion. But on Thursday, listening to his confession in court, Aaron Ybarra looked visibly bothered as he hunched over his seat.

In his taped confession, Ybarra voluntarily talked about the shooting that killed one student and injured two others on June 5, 2014.

“I was meaning to die but I got caught,” Ybarra said, adding that hate forced him to walk onto the SPU campus and randomly open fire at students.

“I felt nothing but hate, hundred percent hatred toward people,” Ybarra said.



Suffering from OCD and loneliness as a child, Ybarra says, he began to obsess over the Columbine shooter.

“He made hate so exciting,” Ybarra said.

Ybarra says it made him feel powerful when he killed the first student, Paul Lee.

“The first guy I was pissed at because he didn’t take me seriously,” Ybarra said.

Ybarra called the killing “fun,” then he went inside Otto Miller Hall to pick his next victim.

“I didn’t have any remorse of what (I) was about to do,” Ybarra said.

Ybarra told a student sitting a table not to disrespect him. He then turned the gun on student Sarah Williams, who had just walked down the stairs.

That’s when student Jon Meis confronted him with pepper spray and tackled him to the ground, wrestling his shotgun away.

Ybarra called Meis brave for jumping in when his gun jammed.

On Thursday, jurors got a close-up look at the murder weapon along with the trail of unused shotgun shells inside Otto Miller Hall. Ybarra had 75 shotgun shells and prosecutors say he had every intent to use all of them.

A CSI detective also opened packages containing evidence, including the pepper spray used to stop Ybarra, and the knife that the shooter claims he was going to use to kill himself.

In the end, Meis’ quick thinking and his pepper spray stopped the rampage.

Another student, Justin Serra, took the knife away from Ybarra during the takedown.

The defense claims Ybarra is mentally ill, and was forced to kill by the voices in his head.

But the state says Ybarra extensively planned the attack fueled only by hate.

The state says Ybarra did not have a sudden psychotic episode that he couldn’t control. They point to the fact that Ybarra bought the shotgun and ammunition weeks before the shooting. Ybarra toured the campus a couple of times before the event. And they also showed jurors a piece of paper found in the suspect’s truck, which were directions from his house to SPU.