Will and Josh had both had unstable lives from the start. Born to Donna several weeks premature, Will suffered a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of one month, leaving him slightly brain damaged. Though able to function normally, he was slower than average, with an IQ of 91. His dad, a factory worker, had little patience for the boy, said Donna, and even less after she divorced him, when Will was three years old, for fooling around with her friend. “He never wanted anything to do with him,” she recalled. “Will begged him to come over and visit, but he just wrote him off.” Years later, when she took Will to see his father on his deathbed, he wouldn't acknowledge his son. “Will always thought his father hated him,” she said.
Donna's second marriage was equally difficult for Will. When Will got up at night to pee, her husband would berate the boy for waking him. Will began to wet the bed. Donna soon divorced again. Though Will loved the outdoors, he became more shy and reclusive at school. “He was something of a loner,” Donna said. Yet he rarely acted out. The worst thing he ever did was to write the word Fuck on the kitchen floor with a felt-tip marker. When Donna met Wayne and his young son, Joshua, in 2002, while working as a bookkeeper at the club where Wayne golfed, Will was ready for a friend.
So was Josh. Though outgoing and energetic, Josh had had his share of trauma. He was born to a mother, Sandy, who suffered from congestive heart failure. Often sick, she was unable to provide readily for Josh, retreating to her books and her soap operas while her son fended for himself. She died when he was eleven.
As the hospital bigwig and an active officer of the chamber of commerce, his father, Wayne, kept busy and had little time for Josh, who was literally bouncing off the walls. In the first grade, Josh was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and began a lifetime of medication. The drugs made him sluggish but seemed to help to some degree. Josh was warm with friends and family, giving big and frequent hugs. Popular with the girls, he was the only boy invited to his friend's slumber party. “He was like a little puppy dog,” his friend's mother recalled.
Still, Wayne had the impression that Josh was suffering. “After his mother died,” Wayne said, “he was on the run all time.” Josh never let on how he was feeling, as he stayed up late playing video games or listening to his Eminem CDs. “He keeps it all inside,” Wayne said. “Anything bad happens, he laughs it off.”
Late one night when Josh was around eleven, Wayne heard a strange sound coming from his son's room. He walked down the hall and opened the door. The room was painted bold yellow and plastered with posters of sports cars. A Lava Lite sat near a small desk, a student Bible, an enormous boom box. A big black sign read Go Away. Wayne half-expected to find that Josh had pulled the blankets from his bed and was sleeping on the floor, a habit his son had taken to without explanation. Tonight, Josh wasn't there. He was curled up in his closet, crying. He said he wanted his mommy.
When Donna and Wayne married, it seemed as if Will's and Josh's hard times might finally be behind them. The boys hit it off so well that bringing the two families together was easy. They both dug 50 Cent and Tony Hawk and the PlayStation 2. After the wedding, Will and Donna moved to Newport to live in Wayne's house. Buoyed by the prospect of good times, the parents transformed the basement into the kids' ultimate playpen: a giant screen TV, a foosball table, posters and pennants of race cars, their very own microwave. Will slept here on a futon under a blanket with the words Hot Hot Hot written in flames.
Video games were among their favorite distractions. Paul Buckner, Josh's nineteen-year-old stepbrother from Wayne's previous marriage, gave Josh GTA III for his birthday. “When I came downstairs, I'd just see them crashing in their cars,” said Donna. “I didn't know you could kill prostitutes and stuff like that.” The violence she witnessed, though, was enough to give her pause. “You realize this is virtual reality, not reality,” she told the boys. They nodded and returned to their game.
Though they had a great time together, things were more difficult, particularly for Will, when they were apart. Because Will was older, he had to go to a different school than Josh and manage on his own. After classes, Will's guidance counselor, Karen Smith, often saw him outside her window, wandering the parking lot. “He'd be off by himself,” she said. “He was a bit of a loner,” said his driver's education teacher. “He only had a couple of friends. I told him to watch out, because there were other kids here who were taking advantage of him.” Girls would ask Will for money, and wanting to be liked, he'd hand over the cash, never to be repaid.
After school and on weekends, Will fell eagerly under Josh's wing. Although Josh was younger and smaller, he was the town veteran and eagerly assumed the role of Batman to Will's older and taller Robin. And Will, somewhat slow by nature, needed all the help he could get. “Will is a little more down-the-stream relaxed,” said one friend, “and Josh is the hard-core whitewater rafter.”
To prove his loyalty, Josh steered Will into the arms of his ex-girlfriend, Amanda Hetherington—a smart and iconoclastic thirteen-year-old with long dark hair and blue paw prints painted on her fingernails. Amanda wrote moody poetry, listened to Marilyn Manson, and was known as one of Newport's only female skaters. She was a cheerleader but the sort that would be portrayed by Christina Ricci. She hated it. “It's just something to do,” she said.
On weekend nights while watching horror movies, Will and Amanda bonded over their disdain of Newport. “There's nothing to do here but stare at the dots in the ceiling,” Amanda said. Although different, they shared a feeling of being outcasts among the ruling kids of Cocke County. “The rednecks have power over everyone here,” Amanda lamented. She thought it was cute that Will refused to wear a jacket emblazoned with the name of the school's embarrassing mascots, the fighting cocks.
Back at home, it began to seem that Josh was leading Will into more than just a new relationship. He was leading him into trouble. One day, out by the creek behind their house, the two went out shooting with their pellet rifles. Wayne, in one of his father-son bonding excursions, had taken the boys out target shooting with his .22 rifle. They spent the day shooting at cans floating down the water. This time, Josh struggled to aim at his target. When he fired, a pellet flew at a rock, bounced back, and lodged in Will's neck.
Yet it didn't deter them. One day later, about six months before the fatal shootings, Wayne caught the boys sitting in his bedroom, cleaning his .22 rifles that they had taken from his closet. “You do not ever, ever do that,” admonished Wayne, who seldom raised his voice with the boys. He grounded them for a week and dead-bolted his bedroom door whenever he left the house. When he was home, it would remain unlocked.
WHEN YOU'RE A teenager without a driver's license, it doesn't take long to get bored. In Newport, you get bored hanging out in the parking lot at Wal-Mart, waiting for the cops to tell you to beat it. You get bored cheering the Fighting Cocks, watching American Idol, and swilling soda at the tiny movie theater. You even get bored playing GTA III, which is what happened to Will and Josh that night in June.
The summer of 2003 had started on a bad note. Josh failed seventh grade. It turned out that he had not been turning in his homework during the school year. Wayne and Donna went in for a meeting with the teachers and Josh, but he offered no explanation. As Wayne recalled, “He just said he didn't feel like turning it in.” While Amanda, Will, Sarah, and his friends would be moving on, he would be staying behind. Despite the recent breakdown over his mother, Josh was back to his ways of denial. “He just laughed everything off again,” Wayne said.
Will, on the other hand, had every reason to look up. After months of biding his time, he was one month from turning sixteen and getting his driver's license. He and his mother, Donna, had even made plans to get him his own car, a used Mustang that he couldn't wait to get his hands on. With his own wheels, the invisible walls of Newport would finally come down. He could pick up Amanda himself, take her to the skateboard park, maybe even cruise up to Dollywood to soak in the Big Bear Plunge ra
fting ride—but he would never get the chance.
After a few rounds of GTA III that night, Josh felt the boredom set in. “Hey,” he said to Will, “let's go shoot at the sides of trailer rigs for real.” It was doable. Wayne and Donna were home, which meant their bedroom door would be unlocked. They went upstairs. Their parents were watching TV. They asked if they could go ride the four-wheeler. Donna looked outside. The sun was still out. “OK,” she said, “but you gotta be in before dark.”
The four-wheeler didn't go anywhere that night. Will and Josh sneaked the .22 rifles from their parents' bedroom closet and hit the trail across the street. It's a steep incline down to the creek. They passed the rickety pump house, making their way down the path they'd cut with Wayne long before. Up the trail, they could hear the semis speeding down the highway. Pigeons fluttered from behind a faded billboard. The boys took a few shots at the birds but, despite the short distance, missed. The trailer rigs would be easier to hit.
They crossed a rickety wooden fence that separated the path from the hill overlooking I-40. Will faced west down the road. Josh ran a short distance along the hill and faced east. They didn't say anything to each other. They just started firing. Will thought that if he actually hit a rig, the bullets would simply bounce off the side. After more than twenty shots, though, they hadn't hit anything. Yet Will had a few bullets remaining, and he fired them away. Then they heard the rubber squeal.
After they saw the red truck careen over the median, they ran, assuming they had accidentally shot out a tire. Wayne and Donna were still watching TV when they came back home, and the boys quickly put the guns back in the closet. Their minds and hearts were racing. From the house, Will and Josh could hear the police sirens. When they asked whether they could go back outside and hit golf balls, Wayne and Donna didn't think anything of it.
An hour later, Will and Josh were nowhere to be found. Calls to the walkie-talkies they carried went unanswered. Wayne got in the truck and drove up the road. Donna grabbed a flashlight and hit the trail, fearing they had some kind of accident. Desperate, she called 911 and reported the boys missing. The cops called her back. “We have your boys right here,” she was told.
While investigating the scene of the shooting, a cop saw Will and Josh standing up on the hillside. “It's not a place you expect to find kids around,” said the district attorney who would prosecute the case. “The officer began talking to them and getting unusual answers.”
When the boys were released to their parents, they said they had been out shooting pigeons with their pellet guns, and when the pigeons flew over the highway, they might have accidentally shot the cars. But their parents knew enough to realize that a pellet couldn't do that kind of damage. Two days later, during questioning in a polygraph test, Will and Josh broke down and confessed. “They said they'd gotten the idea from playing the game,” the district attorney said. The Buckners were ordered to turn over to the police their guns and their copy of GTA III.
As the sensational news of the video-game killers hit, the national media descended on the small town. Josh would be the youngest person tried for homicide in Newport history. In written statements, the boys expressed remorse. “I will always hate myself for what happened,” Will wrote. “If I could give my life to bring him back, I gladly would. I know what I did was stupid. I didn't think anyone would get hurt. . . . I am so so sorry, and no matter how long the judge gives me, it won't be long enough because I will still hate myself.” Josh wrote, “I am sorry. . . . I hate that it happened. . . . I know what it is like to lose someone because I lost my mother when I was eleven. And it has been hard without her.”
On the day that the boys were being led into the courthouse, Amanda rushed down to get a glimpse. Will saw her long dark hair in the crowd and blew her a kiss as the cameras rolled. She knew they would never want to hurt anyone, but rejected the idea that the game was to blame. “I don't think it would persuade them to do this,” she said. “I mean, my aunt plays that game.”
Amanda has been writing poems for Will. “Hold my hand,” one read, “make me stop crying. By myself I feel like dying. I can be strong if you stay. We can be together, we'll be okay. So here we are, together at last. We'll be okay, forget the past.” Yet she hadn't brought herself to ask Will and Josh why they fired the shots that night. “I don't want to know the reasons,” she said, picking at her food. “It freaks me out.”
THE SUN WAS coming down over the barbed-wire fence surrounding Will and Josh's gloomy new home, a juvenile detention center outside Newport. Behind the two-story chain-link fence that encircles the brick buildings, a stocky guard slowly led a group of prisoners across the pavement. Two rows of tough kids—murderers, sex offenders, drug dealers—walked single-file behind him.
Outside the fence in the parking lot, Wayne and Donna were finishing their last cigarettes before walking inside to see their sons. In Tennessee, kids under the age of sixteen 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. 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. According to state law, they could be detained only until the age of nineteen. With good behavior, however, they could get out much sooner—as soon as one year. Deneau called the sentence a “slap on the wrist.”
Despite many attempts, lawsuits against the makers of violent games seldom get very far, and the Buckner case proved no different. After Thompson filed his suit in a Tennessee state court, the defendants moved it to federal court. The victims' attorneys responded by dismissing the suit altogether. Buoyed by the press and the attention, however, Thompson felt even more resolved in his mission. “The goal is to destroy the video game industry,” he said. The damage had been done. After a dozen unexplained shootings later took place on an interstate highway in Columbus, Ohio, a suburban Wal-Mart pulled Vice City from the shelves—just in case.
For the Buckners, however, it was too late. Donna and Wayne had been coming promptly for each allotted visit—one hour every day except weekends and Fridays. Over on the basketball court behind the fence, we could see Josh braving the cold to squeeze out a few more minutes of hoops. Despite the chill, he was wearing only a green short-sleeved T-shirt and long baggy black shorts. As a couple of taller kids hogged the ball, he lagged behind them, quickly rubbing some heat along his arms with his hands before they turned around. “I worry about him in there,” said Donna. “He's a lot smaller than the other kids.”
Life inside the juvenile center was hard for the boys from the start. Will and Josh were assigned to separate 6-by-8-foot cells. They spent the days taking classes. Lights out by 6:30 p.m. Their parents couldn't get them anything to help them fill the time. When they requested Bibles for the boys, they were told no; kids use pages of the Bibles to roll smokes.
Josh soon stopped taking his ADHD medication because the other kids were stealing it from him. Josh, however, had been known to willfully decline the medication in the past. With his hyperactivity unleashed, he started getting into trouble, talking out of place, and showing up at visitors meetings without wearing his requisite uniform. One day he was caught piercing the tongues of a bunch of other kids with a thumbtack.
Will soon stopped playing follower to Josh's leader. Unlike Josh, Will had few infractions. He began to do well in school and was on the fast track to getting out. Will was transferred to a much less punitive group home facility. Josh soon began shaping up his act and was transferred to a separate group home. With good behavior, the two could eventually take the next step and be released for good. If and when that happens, however, the stepbrothers would not be sharing a house again.
According to Donna, “The judge doesn't want the boys
back together.” When Will walks out the door, she said, she plans to move with him out of state, leaving Wayne and Josh behind. It doesn't seem as though there will be love lost between the boys. “Josh is going to pay for some of the things he's done in here,” Will told his mother without elaboration.
That was not all that had changed in Will's mind, Wayne and Donna learned after they passed through the metal detectors to see him that cold February night. With guards standing watch, Will sat at the table in his uniform, exchanging greetings with his parents. After a bit of small talk, Donna looked him in the eye. “You've had a lot of time to think about what you've done,” she said. “Do you still think it was a video game that made you do this?”
Will sat up and became emphatic. “It wasn't the game that made us think to go out and do this,” he said bitterly. “We wanted to do this. The idea was to act out the game. But the game didn't reprogram our minds.” When asked to elaborate, he just repeated that phrase: “The game didn't reprogram our minds.” He said he wished the lawsuit against the game's makers had never happened in the first place. With Will's time up, the guards came and took him away.
Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto Page 16
