In cases where cannabis caused temporary psychosis in people who otherwise didn’t have a history of mental illness, the violence was generally less graphic. But the crimes were if anything more tragic, because the perpetrators often had no criminal history and the violence seemed inexplicable—sometimes even to them.
Occasionally, they attracted national attention, like the curious case of Joseph Hudek.
On July 6, 2017, Joseph Daniel Hudek IV boarded Delta Airlines flight 129, from Seattle to Beijing. His mother worked for Delta, so he had a pass for seat 1D, in first class. He had flown earlier in the day from his hometown of Tampa. While he waited in Seattle for his connection, he bought several 10-milligram THC edibles, legal in Washington state. He ate at least three before boarding and texted a friend that he hoped to sleep for the twelve-hour flight.
He didn’t.
According to a flight attendant, Hudek appeared sober and normal at takeoff. About an hour later, with Delta 129 cruising over the north Pacific, he stood and went into the first-class bathroom.
Two minutes later, he emerged—and shouted, “I want to get out!” as he lunged at the airplane’s right front cabin door. Two flight attendants jumped him. He fought them off and succeeded in raising the handle halfway. Other first-class passengers saw the melee and scrambled to stop Hudek.
The brawl intensified, and a flight attendant broke a wine bottle over Hudek’s head. But Hudek didn’t go down. “Do you know who I am?” he yelled. Finally, passengers held Hudek down long enough for flight attendants to put plastic zip-tie cuffs on him. He continued to struggle as the pilots diverted the plane back to Seattle.
“The violence was incredible,” one passenger said afterward. “I was afraid he was going to kill the flight attendant.”
Hudek had no criminal history, and no history of psychosis or mental illness, though he had used alcohol and marijuana in college. He had flown almost two hundred times before without incident. His lawyer blamed the edibles for his breakdown. In keeping with other cases, US District Court Judge John Coughenour ruled that Hudek’s cannabis use could not be used as a defense for his behavior. (I drew on court documents for this narrative; Hudek’s lawyer did not return repeated calls or emails for comment.)
In May 2018, Hudek pled guilty to assault and interfering with a flight-crew member. Coughenour sentenced him to two years in prison. “I’m deeply sorry for everything that’s happened,” he said at his sentencing hearing. Still, he faced disdain and incredulity.
“Tampa man: Edible Marijuana Made Me Punch Out Flight Attendants,” the Tampa Bay Times wrote. Inevitably, High Times argued that “a deranged, violent outburst caused by cannabis sounds more like a myth straight out of Reefer Madness than a real possibility.” The Stranger, an alternative newspaper in Seattle, sneered that “the idea that he simply got too high was Hudek’s first defense” before acknowledging edibles could cause severe reactions and suggesting that reformulating them might help.
Still, Hudek was lucky. He didn’t get the cabin door open. He didn’t have a weapon. He didn’t kill anyone.
He could have.
• • •
On March 25, 2018, in South Hill, Washington, a suburban town about thirty-five miles south of Seattle, two cousins and a friend decided to smoke marijuana that they had strengthened with near-pure THC oil extract. The three men went outside and wrestled for a few minutes before going back inside their house to wash up.
Then the cousins argued. And 27-year-old Robert Reynolds snapped, according to charging documents. He picked up a pistol. He told the third man that his cousin, Samuel Boren, was the devil and had come to the house to hurt them. He raised his pistol to Boren. And he pulled the trigger.
Bleeding badly, Boren begged Reynolds to take him to the hospital. Instead Reynolds shot him again and again, until the pistol was empty. Then he asked his friend to sit and hold his hand until he calmed down. Two hours later, he called 911 to report that he had killed his cousin.
“I know I’m a killer, but I don’t feel like a murderer,” he explained to the deputies who arrested him, according to news reports. After all, he told them, the devil had tried to possess Boren’s body.
The Seattle Times, the biggest newspaper in the second-biggest cannabis-legal state, didn’t write a single article about the case.
• • •
On April 4, 2016, in Centennial, Colorado, Kevin Lee Lyons was engaging in his favorite pastime, smoking marijuana. Married, 46, with three children and no criminal record aside from a warrant related to his failure to appear on a civil matter, Lyons had been a contractor. But he’d stopped working months before. Some neighbors called him foul-mouthed and difficult, and his behavior had worsened in the previous two years. His wife Liz attributed the change to a 2014 car accident, though the incident had been so minor that Lyons hadn’t bothered to go to the emergency room until hours later.
Lyons had once had problems with alcohol and cocaine, but for years he had attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He no longer drank or used cocaine. Instead, he spent much of his time smoking marijuana in a shed behind his garage. His cannabis use was becoming an issue in his marriage. By the beginning of April, his behavior had become odd enough that Liz had asked him to sleep in their basement. Still, she told police later that she assumed he was depressed and was not worried he would become violent.
That Monday, Liz decided to let their daughter—who had a sore throat—stay home in the morning and then take her to school around noon. When Liz came back home around 1:00 p.m., Lyons shouted, “Who’s there?” and began to rant. Liz told her husband she wanted to take him to the hospital. (The district attorney’s office for Colorado’s 18th Judicial District, which covers Centennial, provided a redacted investigative file about the case; I drew from it for this narrative. Through his lawyer, Lyons declined to comment; Liz also declined to comment.)
The suggestion infuriated Lyons. He made the sign of the cross and told his wife she was the devil, then disappeared into their basement, where he chanted in a mock–Native American style. When he reappeared, he was holding a .45-caliber pistol. “Get out,” he said. “I’m not kidding.”
Liz left the house and crossed the street. Her neighbor, Laurie Juergens, was outside, gardening, taking advantage of the unseasonably warm early spring day. Still, Liz wasn’t running. She would later tell police that even after she saw the pistol she didn’t think her husband would hurt her. They’d been together twenty years, had three children. She thought she knew him.
Lyons walked outside, lifted the pistol, shot Liz in the back. Pop, pop, pop, pop. Some people heard four shots, others five or six. The suburban neighborhood was so unused to crime that some witnesses didn’t realize what they were hearing. One thought the sound was a nail gun.
Liz lay helplessly on Juergens’s lawn. Lyons shot Juergens, too, hitting her in the face. Juergens stumbled into her house and Lyons briefly vanished.
In the calm moments that followed, Kenneth R. Atkinson, Juergens’s next-door neighbor, ran to rescue Liz. But as he reached her, Lyons reappeared—and shot him.
Severely wounded, Atkinson retreated behind his Chevy Suburban. He gasped for breath while Lyons shouted incoherently. One witness heard Lyons yell, “The Lord is risen.” Another remembered him cursing and saying, “This is Indian country.”
Lyons crossed the street. He ignored his wife. He would later tell deputies that he believed he’d killed her. (She was bleeding so badly that when paramedics arrived they first thought she was dead.) Instead, he walked to the Chevy Suburban where Atkinson was trying to hide. Lyons shot Atkinson several more times point blank, including at least once in the head, killing him.
When police officers and Arapahoe County sheriffs’ deputies arrived, Lyons fired another fusillade and then surrendered without resistance. Just after being cuffed, he told a police officer, “I live here and it’s a nice day. In the Bible it says if you kill seven that you will be rewarded seventy times.”
His bizarre behavior continued after the arrest. As he was being booked into jail, he again chanted in a mock–Native American style. In his postarrest interview, he told officers that “his wife is a two-headed snake and he had to kill it.”
Yet interspersed with psychotic rants, Lyons showed an equally disconcerting friendliness, as if he had no idea what he’d just done. “I love you,” he told a neighbor, as he was led into the back of a cruiser. Then he asked officers who would be picking his children up from school.
Neighbors—and Liz—spent months trying to understand Lyons’s crime. Whatever his anger issues, he had never been violent before. Liz told police she did not know he even owned a pistol.
In the investigative file, Lyons’s cannabis use pops up again and again. When deputies entered his shed, they noted a strong odor of marijuana and many empty marijuana containers. His toxicology screen found only THC and no other drugs or alcohol aside from two antihistamines, including one sometimes prescribed as a mild antianxiety drug.
In January 2017, Liz told investigators that Lyons had used marijuana habitually for twenty years. “Ms. Lyons said that Mr. Lyons smoked marijuana all day, like a chain smoker of cigarettes . . . she couldn’t tell when Mr. Lyons was high or not.”
Yet no one seemed to connect Lyons’s slow breakdown to the drug, not even his wife. She blamed Lyons’s 2014 car accident for his decline. “Ms. Lyons said that in the last year, Mr. Lyons was more isolated and depressed . . . Mr. Lyons was distant and had not drank alcohol in nine or ten months.”
In the months after he was arrested, Lyons was held in the Arapahoe County Jail. His psychosis slowly faded, though it did not entirely disappear. His phone calls were recorded and transcribed, standard practice for inmate calls. In some, he said he was still hearing voices, but in general he appeared far more rational.
Just sixteen days after his arrest, a recorded jail call caught him saying, “I’m very normal, very sane. I know what’s wrong, I know what’s right. I know I have some very serious charges against me.” Later, he said, “Tell my kids that I love them and that I’m truly sorry, it will mean something sometime to them. I will not be here for my whole life, I promise you that.”
Lyons was wrong.
On June 20, 2016, Judge Carlos Samour found Lyons competent to stand trial. With his guilt never in question, the only question prosecutors faced was whether to ask for the death penalty. Liz begged prosecutors not to do so, but they weren’t sure. Atkinson was a doctor, well liked and well respected in the neighborhood. Lyons had executed him as he was wounded and helpless.
Ultimately, though, prosecutors decided not to ask for death. Instead, Lyons pled guilty to first-degree murder. At his sentencing hearing, Laurie Juergens called him “beyond evil” and said he should receive “the harshest penalty this state allows.”
Samour sentenced him to life plus 352 years.
As of summer 2018, he was housed in a prison in Buena Vista, about 120 miles southwest of Denver, a jumping-off point for outdoor adventures like hiking, camping, and whitewater rafting. Lyons will never have a chance for those. Colorado’s inmate locator says he will finish serving his sentence on December 31, 9998—the state’s way of saying that only death will free him.
• • •
Richard Kirk seemed to have an enviable life when he pulled into a Denver dispensary on April 14, 2014, looking for an edible to relieve his back pain. A father of three sons, he arranged his work schedule so he could drop his kids off at school and pick them up afterward. A Mormon, Kirk didn’t use marijuana or drink. He had been employed as a graphic designer at the same company for twelve years. He’d been married for almost sixteen years to Kristine, a beautiful blonde who worked in marketing. He’d been attracted to Kristine as soon as he saw her. He followed her from Dallas to Denver. They married barely a year after they met.
“She was trying to get me hooked on Colorado, but I was already hooked on her,” he told me in the spring of 2018. We were sitting in a cinderblock room at the Bent County Correctional Facility in Las Animas, Colorado, a quiet town on the state’s rugged eastern plains. A table separated us. A prison employee sat just outside, watching. Nonetheless, prison officials had allowed me a face-to-face meeting with Kirk even though I wasn’t a lawyer or a relative. They’d given us several hours to talk. That courtesy made the visit a privilege, a reflection that Kirk was a well-behaved inmate.
Talking about his wife made Kirk tear up. “This June we would have been married twenty years,” he said.
But Kirk’s life in 2014 was not as idyllic as it first seemed.
For years, he had been dependent on opioid painkillers. The prescriptions had started for back pain, but after a while he couldn’t function without them. He regularly finished prescriptions ahead of schedule and cadged pills from friends. A few months before, he had quit. Now he was using again.
Money was another problem. While he and Kristine made close to $150,000 a year combined, Kirk was a spender. Their debt had piled up. Two years before they had gone to a consumer credit service, but their finances were still strained.
So was their marriage. Around 2008, the Kirks had talked about divorce and gone to counseling. More recently, their fighting had picked up. Kristine had been furious after Kirk failed to make a reservation for a hotel where they planned to vacation with friends.
Nonetheless, at 6:00 p.m. on April 14, 2014, Richard Kirk was an ordinary American, a suburban dad and husband with no history of violence or mental illness. April 14 was a Monday; he’d gone to work. Afterward, he hung out with his youngest son. He ordered Domino’s for dinner. Around six, Kristine came home. “I always loved looking at her pull up,” he said. “ ‘Here she is to save the day.’ ” They were out of milk, so Kristine sent him to Whole Foods for more.
On the way home, with his back hurting—and in mild opiate withdrawal—Kirk saw a sign for The Health Center, a South Denver dispensary. Recreational marijuana had become legal in Colorado four months before. Kirk had voted against the amendment approving it. He’d voted in 2000 against the original Colorado medical marijuana law too. He didn’t think marijuana was medicine. “Marijuana’s been smoked for a long time, and it’s a drug, and it’s recreational.”
Kirk made a U-turn and pulled into the dispensary.
Ten minutes later, at 6:40 p.m., he was the proud owner of a piece of Karma Kandy Orange Ginger, a candy edible with 100 milligrams of THC. “I didn’t want to smell like smoke,” he said. In his driveway, he ate a chunk. About a third, by his recollection. “All I wanted to do was nibble,” he said. “I got home, I sat in the driveway, and I just randomly took a bite.”
If Kirk hadn’t been so eager to take his mind off his aching back, he might have remembered that marijuana hadn’t always agreed with him. Living in Dallas in his twenties, he’d been a smoker. “I have had things that I would call paranoia, yes, from smoking marijuana,” he said. “That’s a common thing, you smoke pot, you get paranoid, you think someone’s watching you.” Another warning sign: mental illness ran in Kirk’s family. A brother had schizophrenia.
Kirk said he had never felt psychosis or hallucinated during his previous marijuana use. Still, the paranoia played a part in his decision to quit smoking. Once, in 2007, he’d smoked while camping with friends. Suddenly he decided he needed to be alone and drove off without telling anyone. He returned hours later, insisting he was fine.
After eating the candy that April 2014 night, he came inside for dinner.
For a while the drug didn’t seem to have any effect. Kirk went into the bathroom to eat another piece.
He was afraid. Then he was terrified. Then the world seemed to end, reality shattering into pieces that Kirk couldn’t reassemble. Kirk didn’t want the edible anymore. He wanted it out of his body and mind. He stuck his fingers down his throat to vomit it up, but he was far too late. “I didn’t think it was marijuana, I thought maybe someone had given me acid or something.”
The next minutes are more than a blur but less than a fully formed memory. Even after four years behind bars to think about the night, Kirk couldn’t explain to me what had happened—much less why. He crawled through the window of his son’s room onto the back deck of his house. “I thought, ‘Man this is nothingness out here,’ ” he said. “Where are they?’ ” He went back inside and lay down on the floor. “I thought I was on concrete and people were pounding on me . . . my wife was, like, Richard, ‘What are you doing—what are you doing?’ ”
It is unclear exactly when Kirk’s psychotic episode started, but Kirk probably ate the candy around 7:00 p.m., and the psychoactive effects of edibles can take an hour or more to hit. In any case, by 9:30 p.m., Kirk’s behavior had unnerved Kristine enough that she called 911 for help. She told the dispatcher her husband was hallucinating and talking about the end of the world. He had asked her to shoot him and threatened to shoot her.
The Kirks had a pistol in the house. They’d bought it not long before, for no particularly good reason. They lived in one of Denver’s safest neighborhoods. Kirk told me he’d bought it in part to scare off wildlife when they camped in the mountains. Kristine’s mother and stepfather, who hate Kirk with an understandable passion, told me he’d bought it because his best friend, Patrick Milligan, had recently bought one. “Anything Pat got, Richard had to have,” Kristine’s stepfather, Wayne Kohnke, told me.
Milligan agreed. “We got a handgun, and then they got a handgun,” he said.
Kristine didn’t like the pistol much, but she accepted it. Wayne insisted Kirk keep the gun in a safe and bought him one. It was in the safe that night. So, Kristine was frightened, not terrified, when she called 911—at least at first. The dispatcher didn’t make her call a priority. A police station was barely a mile from the Kirk house, but officers didn’t arrive for almost fifteen minutes.
By then, Kristine Kirk was dead.
Her fear worsened during the call. She ordered her sons to hide in the basement and asked police to “please hurry.” But the dispatcher never told officers of the emergency.
Then her husband unlocked the gun safe.
Maybe the biggest mystery of the night is how Kirk opened the safe, given his condition. He told me it had a finger-button lock with a simple combination, 1-3-2-4, and he thought he had the muscle memory to remember it. His postarrest interview may provide clues too. Kirk alternates between odd references to Jesus and eternity and an equally unsettling caginess. After about twenty minutes, he tells the detective he wants a lawyer, ending the interview.
Kirk took out the pistol. Kristine saw it. She told the dispatcher that her husband had a gun and she had nowhere to hide. As his 7-year-old son watched, Kirk stalked up to his wife. She screamed. He put the pistol to her head and pulled the trigger, killing her instantly. Then he handed the pistol to his son and told the boy to shoot him. When the police arrived, he surrendered quietly.
• • •
Experts on violence like to say its causes are “multifactorial.” Only psychopaths kill for no reason, the simple thrill of murder. Even in psychosis perpetrators usually pick their targets. Kirk didn’t shoot his sons or himself. He killed his wife.
The shooting was, by definition, domestic violence, but Kirk wasn’t a stereotypical abuser, and the murder didn’t come out of a fight. Kirk simply snapped—murdering his wife, scarring his children forever, and destroying his own life.
Why? Even now Kirk has no idea.
“They all just think I’m a monster, and I did become one,” he said. He pled guilty to second-degree murder and received thirty years in prison. His in-laws think the sentence is far too light. “I would have pulled the switch myself,” Wayne said, when I asked about the death penalty.
“No one ever talks about the aftermath,” Kristine’s mother Marti said. “The aftermath is horrendous.” At a time when they expected to be happily retired and traveling, she and Wayne have effectively become parents again. “We’ve got three kids to put through college, we’ve got three boys to raise.” They have cut off contact between Kirk and his sons.
“They hate him,” Wayne said. “They loved their mother dearly, and how would they ever trust anyone after the man that was supposed to protect them killed their mother?”
Wayne and Marti had grown to believe their former son-in-law leaned more toward the willful cruelty of psychopathy than the desperate violence of psychosis. But they too were certain that cannabis was behind the murder. “All he needed was that marijuana—no different than alcohol,” Wayne said. “Giving him the courage.”
Kirk existed at the center of the Venn diagram of three great American maladies—opiate abuse, financial stress, and easy access to firearms. But he’d lived there for years and never been violent, not until he ate a bite of Kandy Karma Orange Ginger.
• • •
Patrick Milligan will never understand why Kirk shot his wife.
The Milligans and the Kirks had known each other for almost twenty years. In the year before Kirk killed Kristine, the two couples and their children spent thirty-one weekends together, Milligan said. The five children from the two families called themselves “the wolfpack” and were nearly inseparable. “We were together constantly.” Their only real disagreements came when Milligan felt that Kirk let his kids misbehave in public.
“He’s not violent, not at all,” Milligan said. “The guy is so nonviolent that he wouldn’t even spank his kids when they desperately needed it.”
Kirk’s love for his sons proved the senselessness of the crime, Milligan told me. “An absolute guarantee that he would never see his kids again—do you think he would do this on purpose?
“I think he’s a very good person . . . who did the unthinkable.”
Unthinkable Senseless Pointless. Those words kept coming up in these cases. But then psychosis is the very definition of senselessness.
• • •
No crime is more senseless than the death of a child from abuse or neglect. And marijuana use is linked to child fatalities with extraordinary and disturbing frequency.
In two separate cases in late 2017, young couples allegedly abused their children—a 3-month-old in Nevada, a 20-month-old in Idaho—to the point that the children had seizures—and then blew marijuana smoke at their children in the hopes of calming the seizures. Both children died, and all four parents have been charged with murder.
In August 2018, in Lewisville, Texas, Blair Ness allegedly threw his one-year-old son Ashton down on a concrete courtyard, then stabbed the boy to death as horrified neighbors tried to stop him. Neighbors told police Ness was yelling about Jesus; officers found his apartment reeking of marijuana. Ness’s girlfriend told police that when she left for work a few hours before, he had been happily feeding the boy. Ness has been charged with capital murder.
In July 2017, in Wyoming, Michigan, Lovily Johnson left her six-month-old son Noah in a car seat for more than a day while she smoked marijuana with friends. By the time she returned, he was dead, his corpse decomposing in its seat. (She was charged with murder. Her first trial ended in a hung jury in September 2018.)
Horror stories aren’t data. But hard data about child deaths does exist. Federal law requires states to examine child fatalities that are suspected to be related to abuse or neglect, and to publish at least basic data on what they find. (“Abuse” means actively malign behavior, such as shaking or beating a baby. “Neglect” falls into several categories, such as an intoxicated parent who has a car accident that kills an infant who wasn’t properly buckled. Either can be criminally prosecuted.)
Some states, such as New York, offer little more than case counts in their public reports. Others provide much more detail about the deaths and the risk factors associated with them. For the last few years, Texas has been among the most forthright. Texas also has more fatalities than any other state, accounting for 10 to 15 percent of all child deaths in the United States, depending on the year. For the 2017 fiscal year, which ended August 31, 2017, the Texas Department of Family Services reported 172 confirmed child deaths due to abuse or neglect.
Buried deep inside the state’s “FY2017 Child Fatality and Near Fatality Annual Report” are statistics on drug use by the people responsible for those deaths. In at least 90 of the 172 cases, the state determined that perpetrators were using drugs or alcohol at the time the children in their care died. (The number was probably higher, but in 26 cases authorities couldn’t be sure.)
Cannabis was by far the most commonly used drug. Fifty-six perpetrators were actively using marijuana at the time of the deaths, compared to 23 using alcohol, 16 using cocaine, and 14 using methamphetamine. (The figures total more than 90, because the perpetrators were using more than one drug in some cases.)
Worse, since Texas first began reporting this data for the 2014 fiscal year, marijuana use has risen sharply as a percentage of cases—while other drugs and alcohol have remained roughly constant.
The number of cases is particularly stunning because Texas is a conservative state with relatively little marijuana use. Federal surveys show that in 2016, about 10 percent of adults in Texas said they had used marijuana in the last year, and 6 percent in the last month—both lower than the national averages.
Based on national statistics, about one-third of those monthly users consume cannabis every day. Put another way, only about 1 out of every 50 Texans is a daily marijuana user. Yet in one-third of all the child deaths from abuse or neglect in Texas in 2017, authorities found that the perpetrator was using cannabis at the time of the child’s death.
The annual reports don’t provide enough detail to determine exactly what role marijuana use played in each child’s death. Some may be causally linked, homicides following cannabis-induced psychosis, as the Ashton Ness case appears to be. Others may look more like the Noah Johnson case, where cannabis use occurred alongside fatal neglect or accidents. In some cases, the drug may have played no role in the child’s death.
Yet the strength of the association cannot be ignored. Marijuana use was more likely to be linked with the death of children than almost any other factor, including domestic violence or mental illness. Once again, researchers who weren’t looking for evidence that cannabis was linked to violence found it anyway.