Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Two kids, 13 and 15, killed an innocent highway motorist. Was a violent computer game responsible -- or their sad lives?
Feb 22, 2005 | The bullets came from nowhere, and there's plenty of nowhere in Newport, Tenn. An hour into the sticks east of Knoxville, this country town of 7,200 is little more than a piss stop on the way to nearby attractions like Dolly Parton's Dollywood theme park or the Life of Christ Experience in 3-D. Like most people who make it to these parts, Aaron Hamel and his cousin Denise "Dee Dee" Deneau were just passing through. Quickly.
It was around 8 p.m. on Wednesday, June 25, 2003, and the sun was still shining on the end of what Hamel called "a perfect day." The two were driving back to Knoxville in his red Toyota truck after hiking in Black Mountain, N.C. Hamel, a 45-year-old registered nurse and nature lover, had recently relocated from Ontario, Canada, dreaming of landing a log cabin in the woods. The day before, he had gotten a call back from a juvenile detention facility where he hoped to work. "I think I could make a difference and help these kids," he told his cousin during their hike.
Driving among the semis on Interstate 40, Hamel admired the rolling hillside. "Oh, Dee Dee," he said, "look at the beautiful flowers..." As Deneau would later recall in an interview with the Knoxville News, Hamel didn't have time to finish the word before the window shattered. Blood and broken glass sprayed Deneau's lap. With blood pouring from Hamel's head, their truck sped out of control over the median into oncoming traffic and smashed into a guardrail.
Coming up behind them in a white Mazda west on I-40, a tourist from Roanoke, Va., 19-year-old Kim Bede, and her boyfriend Marc Hickman heard the crash. They assumed someone had blown out a tire. Another bullet proved them wrong. It pierced the passenger side of their car, shattering Bede's hip. Then the shots stopped, and Newport went quiet again.
When the cops arrived, Hamel was dead. Bede was gushing blood, fragments of bullets in her spine. The woods under the faded billboards along the highway were shrouded in darkness. As word spread around the small town, investigators scoured the brush with spotlights and heat-seeking equipment, looking for a trace of what they feared might be a replay of the Beltway snipers. "We don't know if it was road rage, a sniper, or what," Deputy David Jennings told reporters that night.
It didn't take long to find the answer. Lurking anxiously in the bushes was a lanky, quiet 15-year-old named William Buckner, with his short, hyperactive 13-year-old stepbrother, Josh. The two had been stepbrothers only for a brief while, but had instantly bonded after growing up in unstable families. They had no prior record, a clean slate at school, and seemingly no reason to have fired the deadly shots. But, after breaking down in tears and confessing to the crime, the boys volunteered a reason of their own. A video game made them do it.
Will and Josh said they didn't mean to hurt anyone. They went out to shoot at the sides of trucks after playing "Grand Theft Auto III," the bestselling PlayStation 2 shoot'em-up that has become synonymous with the controversy over violent video games. Their assertion spawned a $246 million lawsuit on behalf of the victims against the game's makers -- Sony Computer Entertainment America and Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Software. "What's intriguing about this case is that there was a lack of a motive," says Jack Thompson, the lawyer who launched the suit. "They were acting out the game."
This, of course, isn't the first time a video game has been blamed for fueling a violent act. On Feb. 15, another suit citing "Grand Theft Auto" was filed in Alabama, alleging the game led a teenager to shoot two police officers and a dispatcher in 2003. The Columbine massacre in Colorado was blamed, in part, on the killers' obsession with the first-person shooter "Doom." John Lee Malvo, the Beltway teen killer, is said to have trained on "Halo," the Microsoft Xbox alien shooter. Despite many attempts, however, lawsuits against the makers of violent games seldom get very far, and the Buckner suit proved no different. After the Buckners' victims filed the suit in Tennessee state court, the defendants moved it to federal court. The victims' attorneys responded by dismissing the suit altogether, possibly paving the way for another shot at the state level.
But the fate of the Buckner boys was already sealed. In Tennessee, kids under the age of 16 cannot be tried as adults, and they must be tried before a judge, not a jury -- which meant that a determination in the Buckner case came quickly. In August 2003, after listening to the evidence and evaluating a psychological assessment of the boys, the judge determined that the boys had done something extraordinarily stupid, but without murderous intent.
Will and Josh pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, reckless endangerment and aggravated assault and were sentenced to a nearby juvenile detention center, where they live today. According to state law, they can be detained only until the age of 19. With good behavior, however, they can get out much sooner -- as soon as this summer. Deneau called the sentence a "slap on the wrist." For the first time, the video-game defense seemed to work.
But it didn't tell the whole story. There's no easy answer for this kind of tragedy. And, today, the stepbrothers' friends, family and even the Buckner boys themselves suggest that it was much more than a video game that sent the bullets flying from nowhere that night.
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