Real Cases of Video Game–Influenced Violence*
DANIEL PETRIK KILLED MOTHER, SHOT FATHER BECAUSE THEY TOOK HALO 3 VIDEO GAME, PROSECUTORS SAY1
Wellington, Ohio, is a classic American small town; quaint and picturesque, it’s located about 50 minutes southwest of Cleveland. With just under 5,000 residents, Wellington is a vestige of a rapidly disappearing America: a small town where everyone knows everyone else.
But back in 2007, sleepy Wellington made national news. It became Ground Zero in the violent-video-game debate thanks to Dan Petric, a 16-year-old Wellington boy who had inexplicably shot both of his parents, killing his mother while his father survived a gunshot wound to his face.
What made national headlines was the motive: police indicated that Dan had shot his parents because they had taken away his Halo 3,† a violent video game to which he had become compulsively addicted. What made the case especially compelling was that Dan Petric, by all accounts and as clichéd as it may sound, was a normal kid raised by loving, caring parents.
Here are the details of the crime as presented during Dan’s trial:
According to his sister Heidi’s testimony, Dan had never played the game Halo until he got into a snowboarding accident and developed a staph infection, which caused him to miss school for almost a year. During that time, he discovered Xbox and Halo while playing at a friend’s house, eventually becoming so compulsively addicted that he would often play up to 18 hours a day without taking a break.
Dan’s father, Marc, a minister with the New Life Assembly of God, testified that he became so concerned about his son’s video game habits, especially in light of the violent nature of the game, that he forbade him from purchasing it. He went on to testify that his son snuck out of the house one evening and bought the game anyway. When Dan returned home, his parents caught him with the game, took it away from him, and put it in a lockbox they kept in a closet—the same lockbox where his father also kept a 9mm handgun.
About a week after his game was taken away, Dan used his father’s key to unlock the lock box and take his game out—along with the handgun. Daniel then went up behind his parents as they were relaxing on their couch in the living room and said, “Would you close your eyes, I have a surprise for you.” Dan proceeded to shoot both of his parents; his father said that “his head went numb and he saw blood pouring down from his skull” as Dan’s mother died from shots to the head, arms and chest.
A few minutes after the shooting, Dan’s sister and her husband, Heidi and Andrew Archer, came over to watch the Cleveland Indians baseball game; Dan tried to shoo them away at the front door by telling them that their parents had been arguing, but his sister and husband heard groaning and pushed their way past Dan to find the bloody scene in the living room.
Dan’s sister called the police, but before they could get there, Dan ran out of the house and fled in the family van. He was caught by Wellington police a short time later—with his beloved Halo 3 riding shotgun on the front seat.
During the trial, Dan’s attorney argued that he wasn’t in the right state of mind to understand the finality of shooting his parents—that he’d been playing the game for so long that he didn’t comprehend the fact that death was real and permanent. Because of his age, Dan was not eligible for the death penalty but could have received life without parole.
Instead, Judge James Burge found him guilty of murder but gave him a lesser sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 23 years, saying that Dan had been so obsessed with the game that he may have believed that, as with the characters in the game, death wasn’t real.
Dan had showed little emotion throughout the trial; indeed, he maintained a detached, almost bored expression—except when his mother’s autopsy photos were flashed on a large screen. That was when he bowed his head and stared at his hands for about 20 minutes while the photos were discussed.
Since the trial, Dan’s father has forgiven him, saying that his son apologized:
“Dad, I’m so sorry for what I did to Mom, to you and to the family . . . I’m so glad you’re alive.”
“You’re my son,” Marc Petric responded. “You’re my boy.”
Five years later, in a 2013 jailhouse interview with ABC News, when asked if he had realized during the shootings that he was killing his parents, a more reflective and game-free 22-year-old Dan Petric responded: “I’m used to playing these video games and at the end of every round, everything just resets . . . everyone is still there.”
When asked if he blames the video games, he answers, “No, I’ve always taken responsibility . . . I know that it’s nobody’s fault but my own. But did it [the game] play a part? Yes. It did. It was the catalyst behind the mindset that caused the murder.”
nathon brooks, teen who allegedly shot parents over video games, charged with attempted murder2
Fourteen-year-old Nathon Brooks loved playing basketball. Known throughout his small town of Moses Lake, Washington, as an avid baller, he was considered an all-American kid. But on Friday March 8, 2013, just before 10:00 p.m., Nathon quietly crept into his parents’ bedroom as they slept and aimed a .22 caliber pistol at the back of his father’s head.
According to the police report filed by Moses Lake police sergeant Mike Williams, the Washington State teen then “ . . . shot his dad first, [and] then he shot his mom, [and] then shot again at his dad when [his father] rolled out of bed. Nathon said that when he was firing at his mom, she tried to get up, so he fired at her twice more and she stopped moving.”
Why would a clean-cut kid like Nathon try to kill his parents? The police report indicated that Nathon was upset that he’d recently been grounded for two weeks from using electronic devices—including playing video games. Nathon told police that he’d been obsessed with video games; as Sgt. Williams wrote in his report: “I asked him how much he played video games, and he told me ‘24/7,’ up until he got his electronics taken away.”
Police believe the boy pried open a gun safe to retrieve his father’s pistol and then went to his room and listened to music for an hour and a half as he tried to decide whether or not he should shoot his parents: “He said he was rethinking it, but said ultimately the voice telling him to do it was louder than the one telling him not to,” Sgt. Williams wrote. “He said he just heard over and over in his head that he would be able to do whatever he wanted if he killed his parents.”
After about 90 minutes, his radio batteries went dead; as he plugged the radio into a wall charger, he decided that he would go into his parents’ bedroom and kill them. He then slowly and quietly entered their darkened room and began firing.
When the gun was empty, Nathon went back downstairs to reload; he became scared when he heard his father, Jonathon—who, unbeknownst to Nathon, had survived the shooting—yelling and saying he was getting his .40 caliber pistol. That prompted Nathon to drop the bullets he was carrying and run out the back door, where he threw the reloaded gun into the family’s swimming pool.
Bloodied and wounded, his father was able to dial 911 and, not realizing that his son had been the shooter, told the operator that an intruder had shot both him and his wife.
When officers arrived on the scene, they were greeted by young Nathon at the front door; the investigation report noted that the two officers recognized Nathon because he played basketball on teams with the officers’ sons. Police discovered that both parents were still alive. Jonathan Brooks had been shot at least once in the head, and his wife had been shot at least twice, once in the left side of the face and once in the hand.
Nathon’s story about an intruder came undone when police reviewed a surveillance video from inside the house, which clearly showed Nathon walking through the living room while carrying a gun. The jig was up, and Nathon soon confessed. The entire community was shocked. Nathon’s neighbors indicated that he seemed like a normal kid: “He played basketball and threw hoops out here a lot,” said Arnold Valdez. “I never seen any trouble with him at all.”
Nathon faced up to 30 years in prison for attempted murder; in February 2015 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison after the court refused to sentence him as a juvenile offender.
“grand theft auto” cop killer found guilty3
In 2003 15-year-old Devin Moore was brought into an Alabama police station to be booked for grand theft auto after he had been found sleeping in a stolen car. Devin, who had no prior criminal history, had initially cooperated with Officer Arnold Strickland. But once inside the police station, he suddenly snapped when Officer Strickland told him that he might have to spend a few years in jail if he were found guilty of grand theft auto. He lunged at the officer, grabbed Strickland’s .40 caliber Glock and shot him twice, once fatally in the head. Hearing the commotion, Officer James Crump, who had been in another part of the station house, started running toward the gunfire. He was met by Devin in the hallway and was shot three times, also once fatally in the head.
Devin kept walking down the hallway, toward the door of the emergency dispatcher. There, he fired five shots into dispatcher Ace Mealer, killing him as well. Devin then grabbed a set of car keys and sped away in a police cruiser.
Three officers were dead. It all took less than a minute.
Devin was captured several hours later in Mississippi, where he told the arresting officers: “Life is a video game. Everybody’s got to die sometime.” During his trial for capital murder, his attorney argued that PTSD from severe childhood physical abuse and the repeated playing of Grand Theft Auto‡ caused him to dissociate from reality when stressed. His attorney discovered that Devin had played Grand Theft Auto for hundreds of hours and, shockingly, that there is a vivid depiction in the game of a player doing exactly what Devin did: escaping a police station by shooting officers and fleeing in a squad car. But the judge didn’t allow expert witnesses to testify regarding the video game defense, and the attorney was thus unable to present an insanity plea. Devin was found guilty and sentenced to death by lethal injection.
In February 2005 attorney Jack Thompson, a longtime media crusader, filed a civil lawsuit against Sony, Walmart and GameStop on behalf of the three police victims’ families, alleging under Alabama’s manufacturers’ liability and wrongful death statutes that Grand Theft Auto had resulted in “copycat violence” that caused the deaths of the three officers.
According to Thompson in a 2005 60 Minutes story about the case: “What we’re saying is that Devin Moore was, in effect, trained to do what he did. He was given a murder simulator.” Thompson went on to explain: “The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye, in that police station. And that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in a police car, just as the game itself trained them to do.”
Child psychologist Dr. David Walsh agreed: “When a young man with a developing brain, already angry, spends hours and hours rehearsing violent acts, and then, he’s put in this situation of emotional stress, there’s a likelihood that he will literally go to that familiar pattern that’s been wired repeatedly, perhaps thousands and thousands of times.”
Steve Strickland, a Methodist minister and the brother of slain officer Arnold Strickland, was convinced that violent video games and the cop-killing scenes in Grand Theft Auto had played a role in his brother’s death: “Why does it have to come to a point where somebody’s life has to be taken before they realize that these games have repercussions to them? Why does it have to be to where my brother’s not here anymore?”
On July 29, 2009, the court granted summary judgment to Sony/Take Two; Devin Moore is still on death row.
* * *
Admittedly, some of the cases of video game violence described above can be tough to read—and to believe—but they are merely a sampling of the dozen or so cases of gaming-influenced murder or matricide/patricide that have occurred in the United States. But can that be possible? Can gamers become such addicts that they actually kill people in order to get their virtual fixes, just like strung-out heroin addicts might? Apparently so.
In addition to the violent rage of a drug-deprived addict and the research that we’ve already read about, which indicates that video games can make kids more aggressive, there is another factor to consider in the gaming-violence dynamic: the repetitive simulation of violent acts is actually “training” kids to shoot and kill.
Lt. Col. David Grossman, a former West Point psychology professor and author of Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill (1999), uses the term “murder simulator” to describe first-person-shooter games that he believes train children in the use of weapons and, even more importantly, emotionally desensitizes them to murder. Grossman, a former special forces officer who specializes in “killology”—the psychology of killing—places the blame for this shooter-training and violence-generating effect directly with video game manufacturers.
Unfortunately, the government moves at a glacial pace when it comes to keeping up with the scientific consensus about an issue—just ask the climate-change crowd.
Thus it wasn’t until 2013, after the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre, that Senate Commerce Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) introduced a bill to have the National Academy of Sciences study the link between violent video games and violent acts by children. Also in 2013, President Barack Obama asked Congress to set aside $10 million for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the ties between violent images in the media—specifically mentioning “the effects violent video games have on young minds” and violent crime.
Yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, there’s already a plethora of studies supporting that link—over two decades’ worth of research.
We have just looked at cases in which addicted gamers acted like violent, crazed drug addicts when their games are taken away. In other instances, it appears that the penetrating screen imagery’s blurred reality—as we have discussed with regard to Game Transfer Phenomenon—can lead to delusional or psychotic violent behavior. In still other instances, addictive gaming has seemed to amplify the gamers’ sense of isolation and depression.
a troubled gaming addict takes his life4
In 2002, 21-year-old Wisconsin native Shawn Woolley committed suicide on Thanksgiving after having become addicted to the virtual reality game EverQuest; his body was found in a rocking chair in front of his computer, still facing the screen of the online game that had become his obsession.
Police found his body in a filthy apartment with dozens of empty pizza boxes, dirty clothes and chicken bones haphazardly thrown on the floor. Based on the few scribbled names and EverQuest terms found in his suicide note, his mother, Liz Woolley believes that his suicide was fueled by a rejection or betrayal in the game: “That damn game. Shawn was worse than any junkie I’ve ever seen. After he started playing the game, he just didn’t enjoy life anymore.”
Shawn’s younger brother, Tony, says that Shawn changed once he discovered the game; they no longer hung out together, going bowling and riding go-karts as they used to. Obsessed, he’d lock himself in his room for endless hours. Hopelessly addicted, he stole his mother’s credit card and used it to pay for the game. Desperate, his mother tried taking his keyboard to work with her.
Eventually he moved out and quit his job as the game became his entire life. His mother found his body Thanksgiving morning after pounding on his door and windows for two days; she had to cut through his chain lock to get into his apartment that terrible morning.
“If you’re an alcoholic or addicted to drugs, there’s places you can go for help,” she told a local reporter, tears running down her face. “But there was no one there for him—no one who knew how to help.” That’s why Liz Woolley started an organization called Online Gamers Anonymous and a Web site to help people like Shawn.
“I can’t just sit here,” she says. “I cannot let him die in vain.”
police: 8-year-old shoots, kills elderly caregiver after playing video game5
An eight-year-old boy living in a trailer park in the unfortunately named town of Slaughter, Louisiana, shot his 87-year-old grandmother in the back of the head as she watched television.
She died instantly.
Investigators believe that the shooting was intentional, pointing to the child’s having played the hyperviolent video game Grand Theft Auto IV just before the time of the shooting.
According to the local sheriff’s department: “Investigators have learned that the juvenile suspect was playing a video game on the Play Station III Grand Theft Auto IV, a realistic game that has been associated with encouraging violence and awards points to players for killing people, just minutes before the homicide occurred.”
The boy won’t face charges; under Louisiana law, a child younger than ten is exempt from criminal responsibility. He now resides with his parents.
the girls who tried to kill for slender man6
Slender who? That was the reaction of most of the adults who read about the “Slender Man stabbings,” which made national headlines in 2014.
In the shocking case, 12-year-olds Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier were charged with first-degree attempted murder in Wisconsin after they had lured a classmate into the woods and stabbed her 19 times, almost killing the girl. As Morgan and Anissa told police, they believed that by murdering someone, they could be elevated to the realm where virtual phantasm Slender Man lives and become his “proxies”; they had first learned about Slender Man on the horror Web site Creepypasta.com.
Most adults had heard of neither Slender Man nor Creepypasta.com. Thus many were shocked to learn that a large percentage of kids and teens know all about the site and the legend behind Slender Man. When I asked a random sampling of the teenagers I work with, the majority nodded their heads and went on to give me their own takes on the site and the eerie, tall fellow without a face.
While not a video game per se, Slender Man was a very psychologically penetrating virtual image that the girls discovered after they were given iPads in school. Video-influenced violence is often thought to be the purview of boys. And, to be sure, violent first-person-shooter games are predominantly played by boys (although girls do play as well).
In this case, we have a different sort of obsession that led to violence—not the desensitizing and aggressive amping-up of shooter games. Instead, the Wisconsin girls became seduced by a virtual urban legend, so much so that they almost killed their friend in order to be with him. It was a teen heartthrob scenario, with virtual reality and a dash of reality-blurring psychosis thrown in.
Indeed, Morgan told detectives that Slender Man communicated to her telepathically and “appeared in my dreams”—classic Game Transfer Phenomenon. But Morgan and Anissa were not the only ones; there are several “Slenderblogs” as well as a number of support sites that help other young people to purge the virtual Slender Man from their infected dreams.
Morgan and Anissa had seemed like any other 12-year-old girls before their creepy obsession. According to one of Anissa’s classmates, “It’s really scary because she seemed so normal. We were like, in a group project together and, you know, she seemed completely normal. She was really nice . . .” And Anissa’s brother William said: “If you looked at my younger sister you’d see a happy normal 12-year-old. She loved Creepy Pasta and Slender Man . . . but I don’t see why it changed from dream to reality.”
Both girls were found competent to stand trial in November 2014 and are charged with attempted murder. If convicted, they face up to 65 years in state prison. At the time this book went to press, the question of whether they should be tried as adults was still pending on appeal.
A further sampling of gaming-induced psychotic behavior from around the world:
Finally, in the next chapter, I will examine one very well-known and disturbing case that I am now convinced is an example of homicidal video game psychosis.
Notes
* The headlines in this chapter are actual headlines from various newspapers or magazines with the sources cited in the notes at the end of this book. The accounts written in this chapter have been written by the author using those various news stories as a primary source.
† Halo is one of the most popular first-person-shooter violent video games; it is based on a military/science fiction theme. The Halo franchise has, as of 2014, sold over 60 million units and grossed over $3.4 billion for Microsoft.
‡ The Grand Theft Auto video franchise is the granddaddy of violent video games. Players are aspiring gangsters in grimy inner cities who have to commit a series of violent crimes in order to advance. There are vivid depictions of shootings and of beatings of prostitutes with baseball bats; Grand Theft Auto V even has a “rape mod” that allows players to simulate raping female victims.