Former high school track coach says alleged Thousand Oaks shooter sexually assaulted her

A former track coach said she was sexually assaulted by the alleged Thousand Oaks gunman when he was a senior at nearby Newbury High School.

Dominique Colell, who coached track at the California school when Ian Long was a student there, told a local CBS affiliate that he attacked her during track practice when she picked up a cellphone to figure out out who it belonged to.

“Ian came up and started screaming at me that it was his phone,” said Colell. “He just started grabbing me. He groped my stomach. He groped my butt. I pushed him off me and said after that: ‘You’re off the team.’"

Colell said she instantly recognized the name of the man when she turned on the news Tuesday and learned he was the 28-year-old suspect in the massacre at a Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks the night before, leaving 12 dead and several others injured, before turning the gun on himself.

“I turned on the news and I was watching it, and when they said his name, my jaw just dropped,” Colell told CBS.

Law enforcement are still looking for a motive, but the allegations are the latest in a string of incidents that paint a picture of a troubled, violent person. The shooter, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, reportedly suffered from PTSD. But not much more is known about him.

Colell said that coaches at the school had encouraged her not to report the incident, so as not to jeopardize Long’s future in the Marine Corps. In response to a query from VICE News, Newbury High School communications coordinator Kimberley Gold shared links to the school board's policy on sexual harassment, and to the website with online forms for submitting complaints.

Police had also responded to a number of reports of disturbances at the gunman’s mother’s house, where he was living at the time of the shooting. A neighbor told CNN that his mother “lived in fear” of what her son might do. Another said she'd called the police about six months ago after hearing loud banging and shouting.

There’s a statistical correlation between mass shooters and domestic violence or violence against women. One study estimated that about 50 percent of mass shooters also have a record of being violent against partners or family members, most often women.

In the wake of such publicly violent acts, like opening fire on college students in a bar, details about the perpetrator's past tend to trickle out slowly, and more often than not, reveal a pattern of violence against women.

For example, the man who opened fire on a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, just a few weeks ago, killing two women, had a record of groping women and making misogynistic comments online.

After a gunman in Maryland carried out a mass shooting in the Capital Gazette newsroom earlier this year, we later learned that the suspect also had a history of stalking and harassing his former female classmates.

Cover: CBS Los Angeles