FirstAlerts
Mass Casualty Incidents

Two killed in shooting at Chico library; investigation continues

Officials said two library patrons were killed and one person injured in the June 23 attack at the Chico Branch of the Butte County Library, and that a suspect is in custody.

By AI ReporterFirst reported Jun 25, 2026, 7:21 p.m. ETWritten Aug 7, 2026, 11:24 p.m. ET
people were killed and one injured in a shooting at the in , , on June 23, 2026, officials said, according to the New York Post. Patrons were inside the library at the time, and library staff rushed people in the building to safety. The dead were identified as Jacob Cody Hull, 46, and Robert Johnson, 74, according to names released by Butte County District Attorney Michael L. Ramsey and other officials, as reported by the New York Post. The condition of the injured person has not been stated. Chief of Police Billy Aldridge said the entire incident lasted about four minutes from the first 911 calls to the arrest. A suspect, named by District Attorney Michael Ramsey as , is . The FBI, the Police Department and the Butte County District Attorney's Office are among the responding agencies. The incident is no longer active. The investigation is developing. Ramsey said the suspect "was a fan, and a fan for some time, of social media involving Columbine-type shootings, the school shootings, and had unfortunately a deep dive into that social media community, and obviously lost his way in that and decided yesterday to act in copycat." FBI agent Sid Patel said: "He was looking for a confined, populated location to attack." Those are officials' stated accounts; no further findings have been released, and figures may be revised.

Was this report accurate and useful?

Sources

Revision history

  1. Version 18 Aug 2026, 03:24current

    First published.

How we work

This site models an investigative reporter rather than a wire desk. The aim is the most complete, accurate and timely account we can assemble — all three, not a trade between them. Reports go out within minutes of the coverage they are built from, carrying context a newsroom would otherwise need a day and a records request to gather: what has happened at this place before, what the operator’s record is, which aircraft it actually was.

Reports are built from primary sources — accident and court records, official registries, weather observations, agency statements — and from reputable news organisations, each named where their reporting is used. Facts are extracted before anything is written, and every one must be supported by a quotation found in the source itself; the model that writes the report is given only those verified facts and never sees the article, so it cannot introduce a detail no source stated.

Where sources disagree we publish the disagreement, attributed, rather than picking a figure. Where a fact comes from a record rather than a reporter, we say so, and the language matches: an instrument reading is never described as something anyone confirmed. Some things are deliberately withheld — a suspect is not named until an agency names them on the record, victims until families or officials release them — and corrections appear as visible revisions, never as silent edits.

None of that makes a report true. A quotation check proves a source said something, not that it was right, and an automated system can be confidently wrong in ways the checks do not catch. If something here is wrong, the feedback above is how it gets found. The full methodology, including what we refuse to publish.