The 22-year-old gunman who killed six people in a bustling Californian college town late on Friday was British-born and also of Malaysian descent, reports said on Sunday.
Elliot Rodger, who also injured 13 people, was born in London to an English father. Mr Peter Rodger, 49, is an assistant director of the 2012 Hollywood blockbuster The Hunger Games.
The UK's Daily Mail newspaper lists his mother as Malaysian-born mother, Li Chin, now 53. She is believed to have been a nurse, and has a daughter with Elliot's father. The family moved to the US when Elliot was five.
Quoting a family friend, The Mail reported that Peter Rodger and Li Chin divorced soon after moving to the US and he later married Soumaya Akaaboune, a French actress of Moroccan-French descent who appeared in Hollywood blockbuster Green Zone.
On the surface, Elliot had everything a young man in his prime could wish for: loving, wealthy parents, a luxury family home in California, the chance to mix with Hollywood A-listers, and a sleek BMW at the age of just 22.
But beneath the enviable lifestyle, the young Rodger suffered from loneliness and sexual frustration which he lamented in a video just prior to the shooting.
In the chilling YouTube video titled "Retribution," he rants for nearly seven minutes against women he says ignored and rejected him. He also speaks of a "day of retribution" for his life of "loneliness, rejection and unfulfilled desires."
"You girls have never been attracted to me. I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it. It's an injustice, a crime, because... I don't know what you don't see in me. I'm the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman," he says.
Rodger goes on: "I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blonde s*** I see inside there. All those girls that I've desired so much, they have all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man."
The gunman also wrote a 140-page manifesto 'My Twisted World' outlining his homicidal plans. He published the unsettling document before beginning his bloody rampage.
"I had the striking and devastating fear that someone had somehow discovered what I was planning to do, and reported me for it," he wrote.
Mr Alan Shifman, the family attorney, said the young Rodger had been diagnosed as being a "highly functional Asperger's Syndrome child" and was being treated by "multiple" professionals.
The gunman's aunt, Jenni Rodger, who now lives in France, was quoted by the UK's Sunday Times as describing the young Rodger as "a loner" and "was very dark and very depressed. He never used to laugh. I never heard of him ever having a friend."
Rodger had fatally stabbed three males at his apartment before going on the shooting rampage that killed two women outside a sorority house. He also then shot a man at a deli in Isla Vista, California.
Rodger had been armed with three weapons and police believe he had been intent on even greater carnage before taking his own life.
