Can Video Games Turn Kids Into IRL Killers?

Wellington, Ohio, population 5,000, a 16-year-old walks into his living room and asks his parents to close their eyes because he has a surprise for them. Fayette, Alabama, population also 5,000, and 18-year-old sits in a police booking room at 3 a.m. waiting to be processed for a stolen car. Shanghai, China, 41-year-old man walks out of a police station having just been told that the thing stolen from him wasn't real enough to protect. Three different people, three different locations, three different situations. How could all of these be connected? Video Game! Welcome back to Crime is Fun, my new podcast where I'm taking a theme and giving you digestible cases and stories related to crime. I'm your host Donut and I spent the past decade telling true crime stories on my other channels. Don't commit crimes, that's not what I mean by crime is fun. Crime is just fun to listen to, is it not? As we say in the first responder world, you'll laugh so you don't cry. Today we are going to talk about video games and before you disengage, we aren't talking about them in the video games cause violence since because that conversation is tired and annoying. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a boomer. When I started researching stories for this episode, I was genuinely shocked at how much information is out there about crimes that have involved video games in some way. But I think I've distilled it down to three of the craziest stories that oddly happened around the same time in the early 2000s. And when I say video game crimes, I'm not talking about swatting, we already had an episode on that. These crimes have a lot to do with video games, they have nothing to do with calling the police to kill someone who you're playing video games with. Our first story takes place in Wellington, Ohio, which is the kind of town where nothing happens. This tiny town is 20 miles outside of Cleveland, Ohio and is home to only 5,000 people. Wellington is quiet, surrounded entirely by farmland, and its biggest claim to fame is that it used to be called the cheese capital of the world. No one poops there. How is someone going to leave a comment on my last crime as fun and say, you should stop making jokes that ruins the story. This podcast isn't called crime as boring or crime isn't fun. Anyways, you know small towns, there's a church on every corner, cows everywhere, state parks, and one big high school where everybody goes. Sounds a little bit like my own hometown in Alabama. Which is exactly why when something did happen there, it made national news. On October 20th, 2007, a 16 year old named Daniel Petrick walked into his living room, asked his parents to close their eyes because he had a surprise for them, and gave them a cake that he baked. I'm just kidding, he shot them both in the face. Over Halo 3. I mean, that game is one of the best of all time, but I'm probably not going to shoot my parents in the head because of it. Now before we get into Daniel specifically, I wanted to take a second and talk about what usually happens anytime a gamer does something violent. And if the name Jack Thompson means nothing to you right now, hold on to it. Because the same disbarred Florida attorney who spent years arguing the violent video games were murder simulators, the same guy who sued rock star games, Sony, Walmart, and GameStop over a triple homicide in Alabama later came back around and tried to get Daniel Petrick a new trial in 2021. But this case involved a different game in a different state with a different kid. We'll get to him in a minute. I want to be clear here, I'm not here to tell you that Halo 3 turned Daniel Petrick into a killer. The research on violence in video games is pretty clear and it does not support a direct correlation. Look at me, I grew up playing video games and I'm perfectly stable. What I am here to do is tell you exactly what happened in order and let you make your own call. Because what happened is actually genuinely fascinating in a way that proves even further the gray area of any link with violence and video games. Daniel Petrick was born August 24, 1991. He grew up in Brighton Township right outside Wellington. His dad, Mark, was a Pentecostal minister and new life assembly of God. These were small town church going seemingly all good people. I could imagine this type of household as the one where rules were clear, expectations were high, and a mature rated video game about shooting aliens was not exactly on the approved list of extracurricular activities, but wasn't a fight worth having. By all accounts, Daniel was a pretty normal kid before everything went sideways. He was active, he liked being outdoors. He loved the snowboard in Ohio, but Ohio mountains are mostly just big hills with an ego, but he was out there nonetheless doing things in nature. But then he suffered an injury, the exact nature of the injury varies depending on which source you read. Some say snowboarding, some say skiing, and his sister's court testimony specifically says a jet ski. What everyone agrees on is whatever he did, he got a staff infection, serious enough that his doctors told him the slightest additional physical impact could leave him paralyzed. He went home and stayed home for approximately a year. Think about being a 16 year old teenage boy, especially if you enjoy hiking, contact sports, or even just having a game of pickup basketball with your neighborhood friends. At that age, your entire life is one big physical event. You play sports, you hang out, you go outside, you do stupid shit with your friends, you fall down and you get back up. Your body is your way of experiencing the world, and the world just kind of took that away from you. I would be devastated as 16, that means no more being dragged on an old couch behind a four wheeler. Being pushed into a curve all inside of a Walmart shopping cart, jumping out of a moving car into a bush just to see what would happen. Damn, I really did grow up on jackass, didn't I? Now this kid can't do anything that might result in a fall, a collision, or any kind of impacts. He stuck inside his house in Ohio, in a small town of 5,000 people with nothing to do. So, of course, it makes sense that Daniel would eventually find video games. Maybe the young kids of this generation would turn to an iPad or their cell phones, but the result would be the same, which is to find a game or something to scroll that passes the time away and keeps you feeling connected to something. Daniel found video games and started playing with his buddy Jonathan Johnson, and Jonathan Johnson introduced him to Halo 3, one of the greatest video games of all time. And I'm going to keep saying it. Knowing most of you in my audience, I know of vast majority of you know exactly what Halo is, but I don't want anyone feeling left out, so if you're not familiar, allow me to pay you a little picture. You are master chief, a 7 foot tall genetically engineered killing machine, in a suit of power armor that calls more than most country's defense budgets. You are the last line of defense between humanity and an alien or religious coalition called the Covenant, who wants to literally end all life in the galaxy. You're also fighting the flood, and a bunch of other stuff. It's badass, it was some of the best combat in the world at the time in video games. I mowed lawns for an entire summer when I was 16 just so I could buy an Xbox from a pawn shop, just to play Halo 1, 2, and 3. But it's cinematic, it's incredibly immersive, and it's genuinely one of the most well crafted first person shooter experiences ever made. On September 25th, 2007, Halo 3 was released, and this was a huge culture shift. Online multiplayer games had existed before Halo was around, and Halo 2 was the first true online matchmaking with Xbox Live, but Halo 3 took all those ideas and pumped them full of steroids. We're talking about a huge player based custom games, party modes with friends the whole night. It was truly revolutionary, and I remember having the biggest land parties with all my buddies. We would be carrying these frickin hundred pound CRT TVs, all of our Xboxes to put them in someone's garage, hook them all up and play. This is one of those up until 2 a.m. every night with your friends kind of game. I feel like I can hear the collective head nods you people listening to this right now. My nostalgia kicked in, and I went down the donut hole. I was the freaking best, don't let me Johnny Ziliette, and Halo 3 are finishing the fight. That's quite literally the tagline. Finish the fight. Daniel very quickly got swept up in the wave of these people playing for hours a day, except for Daniel, this became 18 hours every single day. Now I want to go down the donut hole here for a sec, because Daniel Patrick is not the first person, and absolutely will not be the last to do something to range, because of a video game, and I think it's worth establishing that this particular threat of crime has been around longer than you might think. It's why I'm able to give you multiple in-depth stories on this exact topic on the podcast, you happen to be listening to right now. Which by the way, we're on Spotify and a couple of other podcast listening places. Let me tell you about Cameron Coacher, Cameron's from a small town called Kriegsville in Pennsylvania, which is a community situated outside the Bacono Mountains. He's an honor roll kid, he's in the Boy Scouts and the leader in his Bible class at church. On a snow day in March of 1989, a group of kids are hanging out at one of their homes doing what most kids did in '89 on a snow day. Played in a tindo, rose snowbibils outside, and built snowmen. I'm sure you can picture that whole scene. One of these kids is 9-year-old Cameron Coacher, the one I just mentioned. Yes, he was 9. Another 7-year-old Jessica Carr. At some point, the kids are playing spy hunter on the Nintendo. Jessica tells Cameron that she has her own version of the game at home. Now I can get further than you, she allegedly says, "I beat the dragon." Cameron apparently does not take this jab very well. The adults tell the kids to go outside and get off the video game so they all go ride snowmobiles, but Cameron's still upset, goes home instead. He goes upstairs, he goes to the base of a lamp in their home and takes it off to reveal a key that has been hidden in there. It goes to his father's gun cabinet, which is a whole 'nother tangent I can go on about gun safety and storage. Obviously you have great storage. This kid unlocks the cabinet and takes out a Marlin 35 caliber hunting rifle with a scope. He loads it and walks to the second story bedroom window. He removes the screen and looks through the scope at Jessica Carr. Remember, age 7, riding as a passenger on a snowmobile in a filled nearby. And he shoots her in the back, remembered little Lee Harvey Oswald here is 9 years old. I would be a little man on the grassy knoll. Anyways, the bullet pierced her spine and her right lung. She fell off the snowmobile into the snow and died. Cameron Coacher then casually went downstairs, cleaned the rifle, returned it to the cabinet, went back to play Nintendo. The other kids thought there was a sniper in the neighborhood so they asked Cameron to come back to their house quickly and he obliged. When the other kids were upset explaining what had happened, Cameron told them, I quote, "Don't think about it and you won't be sad." Yo, this kid's a fucking psychopath. Oh my gosh. Do you guys know where all the neighborhood cats went? I don't know. Has anyone asked Cameron? Well, After he told the other kids, don't- think about it, you won't be sad he went back to playing Nintendo. Still, 9 years old. So he was initially charged as an adult, which at the time would have made him the youngest person to ever try for murder and an adult court in the United States. But he eventually pled guilty to a lesser charge in juvenile court and served time in a juvenile facility and was released. I don't know man, that was full. We should probably just go ahead and woodchipper it. I'm not telling you that story because it's exactly the same as Daniel Patrick's because it's definitely not. Cameron Coacher was nine, the brain development of a nine year old and a 16 year old are completely different things. Anyways, back to Ohio. Daniel Patrick had been playing Halo at Jonathan Johnson's house for seven or eight hours a day. His father, Mark, found out and told him to cut it back or find somewhere else to live. You know, super wholesome and loving thing for a pastor to say to his own kid. So Daniel moved in with his friend Johnson for a weekend and played for 18 hours a day instead. It's 18 out of 24 hours, which means you have six hours to do basic human maintenance of a bathroom, sleeping and eating or maybe shower. That is a schedule of someone who is completely detached for anything outside of the thing they are doing. His family tried to address it as father handled it pretty typically as a pastor, more rules, more expectations of change of behavior in very little patients. When Halo three came out on September 2007, Daniel wanted a copy, but his parents said no, I wouldn't have told my kid no also. The game was rated M for a mature. It was not appropriate into the discussion and to be fair, that's not mature. It's like laser guns and purple blood from aliens. Anyways, that wasn't the end of discussion for the family, but as Daniel snuck out his bedroom window and balled a copy anyways, his parents called him with it. His dad took the game and locked it in his safe and his bedroom closet. The same safe where he kept his 9mm Taurus handgun. Oh boy, I want to be fair to dad here because he is going to become the most important person in the story later on and he deserves that fairness. He put the game and the gun in the same lock box presumably because the lock box is where you put things you don't want your kid to have. He was very likely thinking this is where I put things Daniel's not allowed to touch, which is a completely reasonable thought to have about your own home. He had no idea what was coming. For about a month, things were tense. Daniel knew where the game was, he knew where the safe was, and his relationship with his father had already been strained. According to what Daniel later told a forensic psychologist during a pre-trial mental health evaluation, he had been thinking about killing his parents for weeks before October 20th, which is pretty fucking stupid since if you get put in jail, you're not going to be able to play any halo, dipshit. So it wasn't a snap decision, it wasn't a moment of the rage that spiraled out of control, there was weeks of thinking about it which makes it premeditated murder. You're definitely not going to be playing halo anytime soon. Shit, he wouldn't have even been out of jailed to play ODST. Yeah, old boy was playing it out which tells you something about where his head actually was during that month of tense quiet in the petrol castle. This is hell of premeditation. October 20th, 2007, Daniel somehow found the key to the safe. He took out the 9mm and he took out Halo 3 obviously. He walked into his living room where his parents were sitting together on a Sunday even in just two parents probably watching something on TV, pretty relaxing night for him. You know, they were sitting the way parents all sit together on a Saturday night when the week is over and nothing bad is happening. Their teenage son comes in, he asks them to close their eyes because he said he had a surprise. Mark Patrick testified that he expected something nice as one likely does in this situation. He said his head then went numb and blood poured down his skull. Daniel had shot his father in the head and he shot his mother Susan multiple times in the head in the arms and in the chest. Susan Patrick aged 43 died on the living room floor of her home in Wellington, Ohio. But Mark was still alive. He was playing dead. After shooting both of his parents, Daniel walked over to his father's body, placed the gun in his still warm hand and as was testified in court said, "Hey dad, here's your gun, take it." He was staging a murder super slide. A little while later, his sister Heidi and her husband Andrew arrived at the house. They had plans to watch the baseball game together with the parents. A completely normal Saturday night thing the families do. Daniel met them at the door and told them not to come in. He said the parents were fighting. But they heard groaning from inside and they pushed through the door. Andrew the husband goes into the house, he goes over to the living room and he obviously sees something in his wrong here. Dad's groaning on the floor, mom's dead by this point. Andrew's able to get the gun, but in the meantime, the son, Daniel, he runs and gets in the family van and drives off. He's got Halo 3 sitting shotgun in the van no pun intended. He at least remembered to grab the game. I don't know what he's going to do with it. Please call him shortly after and detain him. Speaking of real quick, there was a guy arrested last year in the UK and he wasn't worried about his ex-girlfriend who he just beat to death. He was more worried about something else. His guy's name was Robert Richens, he ended up being jailed for life with a minimum turn of 16 years. He's crying, he's upset, not because he just murdered his ex-girlfriend. While he's crying, he says I'm going to miss Grand Theft Auto 6. Alright, back to Ohio. So he's driving around. He just stalled. He killed both of his parents. He at least killed his mom and shot his dad in the head. He's got his precious Halo 3 with him. And while he's making his grand getaway to go play Halo 3, please pull him over and detain him. His trial was December 2008 and Daniel was 17 by then. He waved his right to a jury. It was just him and Lorraine County Common, please judge James Burge. The defense argument was video game addiction. Daniel's sister testified about the staff infection from his early spinal injury, the isolation and the way the gaming had completely taken over his life. His friend Jonathan Johnson testified about the marathon sessions when he lived with him for the short stint and played 18 hours a day. The defense attorney James Cursey built a picture of a kid who had spent so much time inside a virtual world that his grip on reality had genuinely slipped. That the addiction, combined with his age, made him less culpable and less responsible. I mean, it's not a crazy argument on his face. Your prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed until your early to mid-20s. So 16-year-old brain is genuinely different from an adult brain in ways that matter in a courtroom, but the prosecutor Anthony Sillo stood up and pointed out that Daniel Petrick had told a forensic psychologist during a pre-trial mental health evaluation that he had been thinking about killing his parents for weeks before he did. They had planned these staged murder suicide. They had cleaned the scene that he had grabbed the game on the way out the door. I guess he's never heard a gunshot residue or any of the other million things that point to that not being a murder suicide. That's not impulsive behavior. That is not a brain that doesn't understand consequences. This is premeditation and is deliberate and it requires planning. Judge Birch convicted him of aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder and tampering with evidence. Judge Birch was also the one that put forth the idea that Daniel genuinely may not have understood that killing his parents meant that they were gone forever, that he may have on some level expected her to come back the way characters come back when he restarted level. That sounds like absolute BS to me, honestly. He knew what he was doing, he knew he was killing his parents. The judge wasn't making excuses, he still convicted him, but he just used that as a theory about what was happening inside the kid's head. That the line between the game and the real world had blurred so completely that the death itself had stopped feeling permanent. Daniel even alluded to this in a jail house interview in 2013. He said he never blamed the video game for what he did, but he did say that in his mind as a 16-year-old kid when he played Halo 3, at the end of the game, no matter who you killed, the game just reset. When he was asked if he understood that his parents wouldn't come back to life at the time of the murder, he said there's a difference between knowing something and understanding something and understanding that I was taking a human life. Daniel was clear that he had maintained full responsibility for the murder and does not blame Halo, but he said it was a catalyst for his mindset that calls him to eventually commit the murder. Look now I'm no psychologist, I'm a former cop and finds this stuff deeply interesting. The prosecution pushed for the maximum of life without parole, they argued Daniel had shown no real remorse that he had planned the crime and that he deserved a full weight of what the law could give him. And then his dad, Mark Petrick, stood up. Mark, Daniel's dad, the man Daniel shot five times and survived by playing dead on his own living room floor, the man whose wife, Daniel killed, marched up in the sentencing hearing and asked Judge Birch to be lenient with his son. He told the court that Daniel's most frequent thing to say to him was, "Dad, I miss mom, I miss mom." Well, yeah, you fucking shot her five times. He still does not understand why he did something so terrible, Mark said. This was a turn of emotions from the initial few days after the shooting, because when Mark woke up from surgery in the hospital, he said how much he hated his son. And rightfully so. The prosecution, however, was not moved, they still pushed for the maximum. They pointed out that Daniel had already received something pretty extraordinary, which was a father who forgave him. Judge Birch sent his dad on to 23 years to life, no life without parole, not life without parole. A number with an end on it. He's eligible for parole in November of 2030. Microsoft's official response to the entire situation started to finish with six words. We are aware of the situation, and it is a tragic case. Daniel Patrick is currently incarcerated at Grafton Correctional Institute in Grafton, Ohio. He's eligible for parole on November 2nd, 2030, when he will be 39 years old. Oh, what is it with these 5,000 people towns on the next stories from Fayette, Alabama, which has, you guessed, a population of about 5,000 people. Small enough that the police department runs three people on a shift to officers and dispatcher. In this town, running said shift, you've got Arnold Strickland age 55. He's got 20 years on the job. James Crump, age 40, and Leslie Mealer 38. Leslie was the dispatcher who kept the whole show running from behind her desk. It was three people minding their own business doing a job at 3M on June 7th, 2003. They have a kid named Devon De Moore sitting in the booking area waiting to be processed for driving a stolen car. Before 6am, everybody but Devon will be dead. And our dear sweet Devon will be in a police cruiser that he stole and will be heading for Mississippi. But let's back up and start at the beginning. Devon, Darnell Moore, was born May 15th, 1985 in Fayette County, Alabama. He grew up in COVID, which is a small community in Walker County. His home life was admittedly pretty complicated. His defense team would later claim in court that his father was physically abusive and forced his sons in a hard manual labor from an early age, which was testimony supported by his older half brother and corroborated by two others. His father, Kenneth, of course, Of course, denied it and instead told the press that Devon had a troubled history. They had been involved in drugs and car theft as a teenager, that he'd harass female classmates, and that he'd carried a knife to school. The truth of what went on that house is probably somewhere in the middle, we're not going to know it from the outside. What we do know is that by spring of 2003, Devon more had just graduated high school and enlisted in the United States Air Force. He was due to report for duty by the end of the summer. On paper, he was a kid with a plan. Even though he had a few run-ins as a team, his record as a juvenile was wiped clean when he turned 18, a mere three weeks before his crimes free that would alter the trajectory of his entire life. Somewhere in the weeks and months before that, Devon more had been playing a lot of grand theft auto. Grand theft auto in 2003 was the most controversial video game franchise in America, possibly the world. The series had been around since '97, but it was the GTA 3 released in 2001, and GTA Vice City released in 2002 that turned things into a national conversation about violence, children, and media. Man, I remember when Vice City came out, I was in the 8th grade. I was super excited about that chainsaw in that samurai sword, just hacking up all sorts of police. I feel like the early 2000s was our generation's version of the Satanic Panic that happened in the 80s. Back then, everything evil could be traced back to that. It was all Satan and Heavy Metal, and the early 2000s, it was Halo and Grand Theft Auto. GTA 3 and Vice City were open world games, they called sandbox games, meaning there was no single track you had to follow. You could drive around a fictional city, take missions from criminals, steal cars, visit hookers, evade police, get into shootouts, and do essentially whatever you wanted within the game world. Violence was almost the point. Vice City in particular was set in a neon-soaked 1980s Miami dripping with Scarface vibes, full of cocaine deals with gang warfare, and the kind of unapologetic adult content that made parents groups absolutely lose their minds. I loved it, and the soundtrack was amazing. Oh man, to be a fly on the wall of Facebook, mom groups back then if that was a thing. Even still, the game sold millions of copies, like Halo from our first story, it was rated M for mature, meaning it was technically only supposed to be sold to 17 and older. I know this is going to shock you, but Devin Moore was not 17 when he balled it. Nor was I when I balled it. He played it for hundreds of hours, that is not disputed, both sides of the criminal case agreed on that much. What was disputed was what those hundreds of hours meant. Here's the thing about GTA that became very relevant to this particular case. In GTA Vice City there's a specific, completeable game mission where your character escapes from a police station, kills the officers inside, steals a police vehicle, and then flees. Step by step. Kills the cops, takes the car, get out. Which is exactly step by step what Devin Moore did in Fayette, Alabama, on June 7, 2003. Exactly. You ever seen no country-frolled men? Yeah. I feel there is to again reiterate that I'm not here to make the claim that the game made him do it. Obviously, I grew up on Grand Theft Auto, and I've never shot people that you know of. Quite candidly I think that argument is pretty lazy and unsubstantiated by the strong scientific claims. I personally think the majority of it has to do with his home life. But the courts in this situation also agreed it was a lazy argument. The jury deliberated for just over an hour before convicting Devin on three counts of capital murder, and then it got even weirder. Remember the name Jack Thompson that I told you we would come back to from a halo kid case? Did he turn a dude from Florida? Well, he had built his entire career around the notion that violent video games were murder simulators, and the companies that made them work implicit in real world violence. He had been arguing this point for years. He'd gone after two live crew, Howard Stern, Doom, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, and a couple more. He was the guy you put on screen when you needed someone to say that video games were destroying the youth of America. He was passionate, loud, very obnoxious, and according to a significant portion of his colleagues in the field, not particularly interested in concerning himself with facts. Oh, an attorney not concerning themselves with facts. What a wild concept that never happens. Thompson filed a civil suit on behalf of the families of two of Moore's victims. The defendant includes Take 2 Interactive, which is the publisher at the time of Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar Games, the creator of Grand Theft Auto, Sony, Walmart, and GameStop. I mean, what a lineup. Might as well go after the poor little cashier that handed him the game, or the bus driver that drove him to Walmart. And the 95-year-old greeter that told him to have a good day on his way out. The argument was that Moore had been and Thompson's own words trained to do what he did by the game. Bullshit. The selling of violent video game to an underage kid was equal to handing him a murder simulator and saying, "Go nuts, kid." The lawsuit saw 600 million, which is just pretty bonkers. The case ground through the court for years, Thompson, the attorney, was eventually removed from it by the judge, who found his conduct in the proceedings to be unprofessional. Even more exciting was that three years after the civil suit was filed, Thompson was permanently dispart by the Florida Supreme Court for what the court described as a pattern of behavior designed to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly, and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes. He was ordered to pay a fine of $43,000. Oh, I also thought it was a note to bring up the fact that the Florida Supreme Court also said that he was not "aminable" to rehabilitation, which is fancy talk for the man would never change or become a better version of himself. The civil case against Take 2, Rockstar, Sony, Walmart, and GameStop was ultimately dismissed and the court's found that the companies could not be held liable for more's actions. Yeah, the kid knew he was killing people. Legally speaking, the connection between the game and the killing was not sufficient to make Rockstar responsible for what Devon Moore chose to do to those three innocent people for just trying to do their jobs. People are still arguing about this case 20 some odd years later about whether video games make kids violent. Grand Theft Auto gets blamed for approximately everything that has ever gone wrong with American youth, and I'll be the first to tell you that's mostly nonsense. Once again, in 2008, Grand Theft Auto was blamed for some shenanigans, not cheeky and fun shenanigans, tragic and cruel shenanigans. June 26, 2008, New Hyde Park Long Island, New York, late at night a group of teenagers have apparently decided the most productive use of their evening as to cosplay Grand Theft Auto for in real life. And I don't mean they put on a hoodie and Jay walked, I mean they went on a full actual crying spree armed with a baseball bat, a crowbar, and a broomstick. There's not a gun inside because well they didn't have one but I'm sure they would have used it. It started off with three of the mugging a man outside a stop and shop grocery store, they beat him bad enough to knock his teeth out. Then they just walked down the middle of the street in the neighboring town of Garden City blocking traffic, which is a pretty bold choice. At some point they run into some other kids they know from school. They didn't want to rob them because they knew them so instead they recruited two of them into the crew, now it's 6 deep. They surrounded a woman's car, robbed her at bat and crowbar point, and stole her cigarettes. These are really our kids. Hey man, give me some cigarettes. Well then they smashed a passing van with a bat for good measure. The Nassau city police got called rolled up while the crew was mid robbery on number 3 and arrested the whole group. When detectives sat them down the teens told police they were emulating Nico Bellic, who is the main character of Grand Theft Auto 4, which had come out just two months prior. Oh man, Nico had a rocket launcher, y'all are just stupid. Nassau County detective saw it in Anthony Rappelone told reporters, it was determined that they were emulating the character in that Grand Theft Auto game going on a crying spree. 16agers were charged for the Grand Theft Auto grime spree. Three of the main suspects, a 17-year-old, 18-year-old, and 16-year-old, were hit with felony robbery charges and Bell said at $100,000. Two of the younger ones, 14 and 15 years old, got a bigger bond at $150,000. Another random kid that was with him got hit with misdemeanor stolen property charges. Rockstar Games, a company that I've mentioned before makes Grand Theft Auto, released a statement that basically said, look, people who commit crimes should be held accountable for those crimes. It's not a place of entertainment software. And honestly, I mean, they're right, GTA didn't make them rob somebody just like all the other stories we've been talking about, and we're going to talk about. Oh, what about 10 years later, we got another Grand Theft Auto one, but this time, Grand Theft Auto five. Speaking of, it's pretty criminal, the Grand Theft Auto six isn't out yet. As of recording this, Grand Theft Auto was supposed to come out two days ago. They announced last year that on May 26, 2026, it was going to come out. Guess what's not out? We should hold Rockstar accountable. So this one in 2018 isn't really inspired by GTA. This is fully committed to the premise at a biochemical level. June 2nd, 2018, debates from the Jackson County Sheriff's Office are on a routine DUI stop. They pulled over a driver and are waiting on the side of the road for a tow truck to come haul the impounded car away. It's uneventful and, you know, basically a standard Thursday night in Southern Oregon. Anthony Joseph Clark shows up, he's 23 years old from Grant's Pass. He steps out the pass on your side of a nearby pickup truck, walks over to one of the deputies on this DUI stop, and he tells the deputy to his face, out loud and directly, that he's going to steal that car, and then he just does. No one stops him. The deputy grabs Clark's shirt through the window, trying to stop him, but Clark floors the car anyway, nearly dragging the deputy along with him and sped off into the night. What followed was a 40 mile police chase across multiple jurisdictions that had pretty much every GTA mechanic you can think of. He drove through Ashland talent and Phoenix at high speed. He went the wrong direction down several roads and got on Interstate 5 driving north on the shoulder of Southbound lanes. He turned around and drove back towards the exit, crashed through multiple chain link fences and industrial gates. He even ran over a couple of police deployed spike strips, popping all of his tires, but he kept going. Police deployed more spike strips, and he just ran over those two. Eventually he did get pitted by a patrol vehicle ending the chase. But wait, there's more he jumps out and then runs into a trailer park. He was in the process of trying to steal a set of tires. second car from the trailer park when officers called him. So why do I bring up Grand Theft Auto? I mean, this is basically Grand Theft Auto, but when they got him into custody and sat him down, Clark admitted he had been taking LSD earlier in the day and that he was hallucinating throughout the entire chase and believed that he was inside a real life version of Grand Theft Auto. The sheriff's office noted in the report that the hallucinations appear to be still ongoing during the interview itself. I am going to need to submit a FOIA request and get this footage of his interrogation while he's tripping balls on LSD because he led a 40 mile chase he was charged by three separate law enforcement agencies, the Jackson County Sheriff's Office, the Ashland Police Department and the Oregon State Police, yep the state he's got him too. They hemmed him up for a list of offenses that is almost impressive in its length. Driving under the influence of attempting to elude an officer in a vehicle, attempting to elude an officer on foot unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, reckless driving recklessly endangering another person first degree criminal mischief, third degree escape, second degree criminal trespass on the offentering of motor vehicle, and interfering with a police officer, somehow nobody got hurt. I want to be clear about something, this is not a story about video games causing crime. Rockstar Games and Grand Theft Auto did not put LSD in this man's mouth. They also didn't tell him to steal a car, going along police chase, crashed through chain link fences, and then tried to still look at other car from the trailer park. He did that and the drugs, though we're not quite done with Grand Theft Auto because that causes everyone to go out and shoot other people or rob them, obviously. June 25th, 2003, there's a small town in Cock County sitting right at the edge of the great Smoky Mountains. It's a beautiful Wednesday evening, around 7.30 p.m. the sun's out and 45 year old Aaron Hamill is driving west on Interstate 40 heading home from Knoxville. He's a registered nurse who had just moved to the area from Canada, his cousin Denise is riding with him. According to people who knew him, he had literally just gotten a call back about a job at a juvenile detention facility, one where he hoped he could, and I'm quoting here, "Make a difference and help these kids. It's a great day and he's got good news, he's heading home." 19-year-old Kimberly Bied from Monet of Virginia is in a separate car heading the same direction on 40. She's sitting in the passenger seat, listening to some music, just vibing when out of nowhere, she hears what she thinks as a tire blowing out. The second sound, which also sounds like a tire blowing out, proves her wrong. It's a bullet, punching through the passenger side of the car. This time it shatters her hip. Aaron Hamill, the registered nurse we were talking about, wasn't so lucky. He got shot in the head and lost control of his pickup. He crossed into the median, struck a guardrail and slid about 50 feet. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. So now we got one person dead and one person with a bullet that fragmented her spine, and nobody knows where the shots came from. Investigators are on the highway with spotlights and heat-seeking equipment, worried this might be some kind of sniper situation. Something like a replay of the beltway sniper attacks that had just terrorized DC area the previous fall. You guys remember that one? That was crazy. During that DC sniper situation, it was 22 days of terror, I remember. These two guys were driving around just sniping random people like pumping gas or just driving to work. End up killing 10 people. We'll talk about that one day. So these investigators who were on I-40 are like, "Oh my gosh, I hope this isn't another one of those." They said, "We don't know if it was road rage, a sniper, or what." Well, they figured out what it was within 48 hours. You see, lurking in the bushes near the Smoky Mountain Golf Course, right off the interstate were two kids. The night was a lanky 15-year-old named William Buckner and his 13-year-old stepbrother Joshua from Newport. What had happened was, about a week before the shooting, Joshua had taken two 22-calibre rifles from their home and hidden them in the woods along the interstate. The night of the 25th, the two of them went out there after dark, just bored, according to investigators, and started shooting at passing cars. They told police they were aiming at the beds of tractor trailers as they went by, not at people. But on a highway, going 70 miles an hour at night, you're not in control where those rounds are going. The investigators asked them why the hell they would do this, and the kids said that they were doing what they'd seen in Grand Theft Auto 3, shooting at cars in traffic, just like in the game. Because both boys were under 16, they couldn't be charged as adults unless the state went for first or second degree murder, and given that the kids told investigators about not intending to hit anyone, the DA went with reckless homicide. They both pled guilty in juvenile court to reckless homicide, reckless endangerment, and aggravated assault. Judge Ben Strand sent us him to the custody of the Department of Children's Services for an intermediate period. He said they could stay until they aged out a juvenile system at 19. William, who prosecutors believe fired these shots that hit the victims, wrote in his letter of apology to the court, "I will always hate myself for what I did." Joshua wrote, "I did not mean to hurt anyone." "I, personally, am not going to blame this on video games, I'm going to blame it on their shitty parents." At the sentencing, Aaron Hamilton's mother, Rosemary said she was choosing forgiveness. That's what God does, and I want to do that. His cousin Denise, who was in the car when he was killed, said, "I can't forgive the kids that he left a hole in my heart." Kimberly Bed, who had eight bullet fragments in her body and was still receiving medical treatment at the time, said the shooting left her terrified to go outside. "It's kind of put a stop on everything," she said. The families of the victims filed a $246 million lawsuit against Sony, take two interactive rockstar games, and Walmart. And again, just like all the other stories we're talking about, the courts weren't able to hold a game publisher liable for what two kids decide to do with rifles on an interstate. And we have another story about Grand Theft Auto. This one is about an Auburn lacrosse player who tried to live out Grand Theft Auto 5. 2013, nobody died on this one, nobody got seriously hurt, but what we do have is one of the most aggressively stupid things a college kid has ever voluntarily done, and then immediately confessed to. September of 2013, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, it's the weekend of the Auburn LSU football game. That's a big deal in the southeastern conference. Twenty-year-old Auburn Freshman Zachary Burgess from Hoover, Alabama is in town for the game. He's a freshman defense on Auburn's club lacrosse team. He's pretty good at it, too. He played 13 games the previous year with 42 ground balls. Grand Theft Auto 5 had come out exactly one week earlier on September 17th. At 2.30 in the morning, Burgess is leaving a bar called Tiger Land. He's walking through the parking lot and sees a truck sitting there, keys in the ignition running. So a normal person would just keep walking, go home, sleep it off, or play Grand Theft Auto 5. What does Zachary Burgess do in his drunken stupor while he gets in the running truck? Now here's the kicker that separates this from your garden variety drunk cart theft. There's a woman sitting in the passenger seat. The owner of the truck had just stepped out to do something real quick, but his passenger was still there. Well Burgess hops in anyway and guns it. The woman understandably tries to get out, but she can't because of what the arrest report officially describes his Burgess's erratic and dangerous driving. He's actively holding her in the vehicle through the physics of just driving completely insane. Pretty sure that's another felony right there. The parking lot is full of other cars. He just plows through him. One, two, three. He doesn't stop. He hits four, five. The woman eventually manages to escape from the truck. He hits six, seven, eight more cars. He's still going. Nine park cars total. After that, he flees to see the accident and purred the arrest report with no signs of him intending to return the truck to the rightful owner. Do that truck has got to be ground beef at this point. That's a very formal way of saying he just kept ramming things and bouncing off of them like a frickin pinball. Bystanders outside the bar watch this whole thing unfold did what any reasonable group of people who just watched to do kidnap a woman to destroy a parking lot would do. Well they grabbed him, beat the piss out of him and held him down until police got there at 2.24 a.m. They take him in, they sit him down and Burgess and what I can only describe is as a moment of radical honesty told the detectives that he wanted to see what it was really like to play the video game Grand Theft Auto. My God will any of these people take self accountability. You know what? These days it'll probably just get me probation if I rob a bank and say Grand Theft Auto made me do it. I'm quitting YouTube. I'm robbing banks because Grand Theft Auto made me do it. I'm going to talk about sexually explicit acts and men on the street interviews and do a pump and dump crypto scheme. Grand Theft Auto made me do it. Anyways that's the explanation. He just said Grand Theft Auto made him do it. That's the whole thing. There wasn't any, I was drunk. I panicked. I just wanted to go home and play Grand Theft Auto. He just said he wanted to see what it was like in real life. This kid just starting his life out who was a pretty good lacrosse player ended up posting an $80,000 bond and released the next day. He was charged with theft of a motor vehicle, simple kidnapping and nine accounts of hit and run. Somehow he was kicked off of the lacrosse team. I couldn't find a legal outcome on this one which happens a lot with cases that don't go to trial and just kind of resolve themselves. I don't know what happened to this one. What I can tell you is that it definitely wasn't GTA's fault. Let's get out of the Grand Theft Auto territory for a minute and talk about some forkenife. This story is less video games, Call of Crime and more video game addiction plus extremely bad judgment plus an always on camera is the recipe for public catastrophe. December 9th 2018, Orrin Park, New South Wales, Australia. As a 26 year old named Luke Monday, his gamer handler was Mr. Deadmaw. He might have seen this one on YouTube while back. He's in mid-session playing Fortnite and streaming at Live On Twitch. He's not a huge streamer. Pretty small time with a few hundred viewers at most on a normal night. His 21 year old girlfriend who's four months pregnant with their third child, with two toddlers in the house ages 3 and 20 months, wanted to stop playing, come eat, dinner with the family. It's a reasonable request. She asks him and he says he'll be out soon. She asks again and again and he says he'll be out soon. At some point she starts throwing things at him to get his attention, including a kettle. Well, he gets up. off camera, but the stream's still running, and he slaps her in the face and pushes her to the ground. Oh, you can hear the whole thing, too. You can hear the argument, the slap, and you can hear her start crying. And she says out loud, do a switch audience, you hear that? All you people out here, he just hit me in the face. The kids are screaming in the background, and of course, the clip goes viral. Viewers immediately start calling Australia police and officers arrest Monday the same night. Twitch, of course, bans him. But they won't ban people for supporting terrorism against the United States. Look at that. Two weeks later, Twitch reinstated his account, which somehow made this tour even bigger, and then banned him again permanently after the public backlash. Prosecutors ended up giving him a comment, a solid charge with a conviction that can carry up to two years in prison. In 2019, he did plead guilty, the court heard, and agreed the statement of facts. He slapped his pregnant girlfriend in the face and pushed her to the floor. His attorney, in an absolutely incredible moment of PR, malpractice described the incident publicly as "Just a slap." That quote went nearly as viral as the original clip. In November of 2019, though, he was sentenced to a 14-month good behavior bond, no gel time. His partner ended up being charged to for assaulting him by throwing the kettle at him. They both called charges out of this, and in the end, the whole thing played out like a very grim episode of reality television that nobody asked to watch but millions did anyways in those viral clips. The lesson to take away from this story is Fortnite is a terrible video game, and if you play it, you're wrong. Say no to Fork Knife, moving on. In January of this year, a 19-year-old named William Spencer got into an argument with his 25-year-old brother over a Fortnite game. The argument escalated and Spencer stabbed his brother to death. He called 911 on himself afterward and reportedly said he didn't mean to. I accidentally stabbed him several times. He is currently charged with first-degree murder in Oklahoma City and held on a $10 million bond, the case is still working its way through the courts. And then there's Devon Vanderhoof. In February of this year, Vanderhoof was convicted of two counts of willful, deliberate and premeditated attempted murder in California. The story goes that he met a woman through a video game, Fortnite again, good old Fork Knife. Fortnite developed what he apparently believed was a significant relationship over years of online interaction. When the relationship didn't go the way he wanted in real life, he flew from British Columbia Canada to Monterey County, California. He bought handcuffs, knives and duct tape. He posted an Amazon delivery driver to get her to the front door. He then attacked her boyfriend and strangled her until she couldn't breathe. Her boyfriend stabbed Vanderhoof repeatedly with scissors until a neighbor intervened. Luckily, the woman survived and Vanderhoof is facing life in prison and court. This is not really the same case as Devon Moore, but they are part of the same broader undersolved question about what happens when the line between the virtual and the real gets thin enough that people start acting like the rules are interchangeable. And now I need to tell you about a sword, not a real sword, because there was no real sword. That's kind of the whole point. This sword existed inside a video game on a server somewhere in China as a collection of code and data that made a character in a game more powerful than other characters. To grow and ask 41-year-old man from Shanghai, Dan Quixingwei, Chu Chengwei, killed someone over a virtual sword. To understand why this happened, you need to understand what was going on in China in 2004 with online gaming, because it genuinely is one of the most interesting things that happened in the early days of the internet and basically nobody in the Western world paid attention to it. In the early 2000s, China had a massive online gaming industry that operated almost entirely through internet cafes. Not everyone had a computer at home, but internet cafes were everywhere and they were cheap, accessible, and open at all hours. The game that had taken over China in the time period, the game that had something like 11 million active players at its peak was called The Legend of Mir. The game was originally a Korean-made multiplayer online role-playing game that had been adapted for the Chinese market and had essentially become a national phenomenon. Fun fact, the sequel, Legend of Mir 3, had been certified by the Guinness Book of Records for having 750,000 people in the game at the same time. I played a bunch of the MMORPGs, specifically World of Warcraft, and if we're talking about China, I used to give them a lot of money for gold. Maybe you haven't played MMORPGs, meaning massive multiplayer online role-playing game. Basically, you create a character like many video games, you go out into the world, you fight monsters, complete quests, gain experience, and level up. Character gets stronger, you get better equipment, better weapons, and sometimes people grind for years to get specific weapons. And in games like Legend of Mir, those weapons matter enormously. And a lot of these MMOs are playing against other players and the virtual monsters in the game. A powerful weapon means your character can beat both of those categories. Like I just mentioned, I used to pay Chinese gold farmers back in 2005. You could spend real money on virtual items, rare weapons, powerful armor, all of it trading on a secondary market that operated outside the game itself, but used real currency. If Blizzard wants to slap my pp for buying gold now, that's fine. All I'm saying is I'm not very happy with them after they blocked me on Twitter. Also they gave the most powerful wizard in the world, a pink flying wheelchair to make him more inclusive. The most powerful wizard in the world can raise the dead, but he can't fix his own legs. Anyways, the company did this Chinese game, didn't sanction it, but they couldn't stop the black market. Players would meet in forums, negotiate, prices, transfer items inside the game, exchange cash outside. United by 2007, analysts estimate the virtual item trading market in China was worth approximately four billion one a year. Adjust it to USD for inflation, that's almost a million dollars. Four virtual items in an MMORPG game. When this Chinese guy won a red dragon saber in Legend of Mirror 3, the guy knew exactly what he had. The catch here about the game is that it required teamwork in order to get more rare items, so he and his friend had jointly won the weapon. The red dragon saber was among the most powerful weapons in the game. On the secondary market, it was worth approximately 7,2001 to put that into context. The average monthly income in Shanghai at the time happened to be 1,4001. In 2005, that sword was worth a little bit over 800 bucks. This virtual sword, which I can't stress this enough, literally did not exist, was worth 5 months of wages for an average Shanghai worker. So this guy that won at Lent the sword to a 26 year old man named Zhu Kayon, Zhu Tao Yuan, there we go, and by Lent I mean he let him borrow it to use in the game for a while so he could level up and kill some powerful monsters. Now this wasn't unusual players Lent items each other often, it was part of how the community worked. But instead, Zhu sold it. He sold the sword, the sword that did not belong to him, owned the open market and kept the money. While 800 dollars US of it, when the original owner found out he did exactly what a reasonable person whose property has been stolen would do, he went to the police. But as I have said repeatedly, the sword really didn't exist in the real world, so the police told him there was unfortunately nothing they could do. From legal standpoint, this case gets kind of fascinating. The police weren't wrong in China in 2004, there was no law covering the ownership of virtual property. The legal framework just didn't exist. A virtual sword was not recognized as property under Chinese law, which meant that what Zhu did did not technically constitute theft in the eyes of the law. The police looked at the original owner's complaint and told him that the dragon saber wasn't real property, wasn't protected by law, and that they couldn't help him. This thing was so real to this man, it was a part of something he worked incredibly long and hard for, and he was being told that it was not real at all, so he just went home. He dwelled on it for days and then he went to the guy's house who sold it with a very real knife. He stabbed that dude who sold his sword in the chest multiple times. Well, this knife was real and he died. His father later told the press my son was only 26 years old when he died. He was sleeping when this guy broke into our home, he was barely able to put on his pants before he stabbed him. Well then the original sword owner turned him into the police. The police who had told him there was nothing they could do about a stolen virtual sword. They were handling murder a little bit more serious than the sword. You may be pleased to know that China has since updated its laws on virtual items and things like that. The civil code of the People's Republic of China which came into effect in 2021 explicitly lists online virtual property as an object protected by law. 17 years after the sword owner walked into a police station and was told there was nothing they could do, the law caught up. But it was too late for the guy who stole this sword. He was dead. The outcome of the trial was about as blown as you'd expect from a Chinese criminal court dealing with a pre-meditated stabbing death. He was convicted of murder and was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve. Since I'm assuming most of you aren't as brushed up on your Chinese law as I am like phrase "death with a two-year reprieve" it's kind of like a suspended sentence. Your sentence to death but the execution is suspended for two years. If during those two years you commit no further crimes and behave well and custody your sentence is automatically commuted to life imprisonment. It is essentially a legal mechanism that says you deserve to die for this but we're going to give you two years to demonstrate otherwise and if you do we'll let you live. It is the second most severe criminal penalty in the Chinese system. One source noted that his sentence could be potentially reduced further to 15 years with good behavior which is how the Chinese system of progressive commutation works. The dad of the kid that was stabbed to death over a video game was furious at the sentence. He said we won't this murder to die immediately. I searched Shion Low to try and find an update on the prison sentence see if he still serve in time or his dad but was unable to find anything. Daniel Patrick from our first story still sitting in a cell in Ohio waiting for a parole hearing in 2030. Devin Moore who killed the two officers in the dispatchers on death row in Alabama with no execution date set. Chinese sword boy is somewhere in China maybe even out by now. Nobody in the English speaking world seems to know we're caring enough to find out. and that's all for now.