Miami, Florida-based attorney and anti-violent videogame activist Jack Thompson has confirmed that killer Kenneth Bartley, Jr. the high school freshman who shot three Campbell County High School administrators, was a player of the Grand Theft Auto series of videogames. Thompson confirmed the information via a telephone conversation with a close family member of Bartley, who killed administrator Ken Bruce in the shooting. Thompson has stated that he “will swear under oath” that the aforementioned statement is true.
The revelation is considered significant by Thompson because initial accounts of the shooting show that the teen did not go to school with the intent to kill, and it appears that an event triggered the teenager into committing homicide, which was programmed into the brain via rehearsal in Grand Theft Auto. Here’s what the press release stated:
…as it appears, based upon initial accounts of the shooting, that the 15-year-old boy did not go to school with the intent to kill. As has happened in other instances, as in the triple homicide in Fayette, Alabama, by an 18-year-old obsessive player of the cop-killing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a highly-charged emotional event can serve as a trigger for such a shooting. These killing games allow an individual, unwittingly, to rehearse for homicide. When pushed by fear, the game’s rehearsal function becomes the young brain’s “default setting.”
The press release also mentioned that last week in Alabama the Philadelphia law firm of Blank Rome, who represents Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games, the publisher/developer of the Grand Theft Auto games, argued that “there have been no murders linked to the Grand Theft Auto games.” Interestingly, Thompson took a shot at Blank Rome in the end of the press release, stating that one could contact Thompson for more information — or contact Blank Rome “for more fiction.”
The release went on to state:
Here then, in Jacksboro, Tennessee, is yet another killing caused by these games that Blank Rome and Take-Two/Rockstar must explain away. Two years ago, two teen boys killed one man and wounded a young woman in the Knoxville, Tennessee area, just miles from the killing and woundings yesterday. Law enforcement officials concluded in that earlier Tennessee killing that “the boys were bored and wanted to see what it was like to shoot at cars like in the Grand Theft Auto III game on which they played.”
We’ll keep you updated, as there could be another lawsuit in the works here.
