"I didn't realize I was being attacked until I fell to the floor with my arms up to defend myself," Logan Bryson told the court. He thought he was dreaming when he awoke to find Zachary Frank King striking him with a hammer.
Police say King broke-in to Daniel Shokrian's Cedar City, Utah home through an open window in the early morning hours of May 30th and struck both Bryson and a sleeping Shokrian repeatedly with a hammer.
King told police he was upset with Bryson for dating a girl they had both agreed not to date. According to King, the trio had been playing Dungeons & Dragons the day before and Shokrian, as DM, was "acting cocky" and doing things with King's character that he didn't like. King then said he went home, took an OTC sleeping pill, and awoke at some point during the night, furious. That's when he went to his tool shed and found the hammer. According to detectives, King went into Shokrian's room and said, "I hate you," before beating him. He then attacked Bryson, sleeping in another room.
Bryson suffered a concussion. Shokrian is blind and has lost the ability to read and write.
Zachary King pleaded not guilty to one count of aggravated burglary and two counts of attempted aggravated murder. The judge bound him over for trial.
© C Harris Lynn, 2009
A rambling melange of pop-culture.
6 comments:
This has been a strange case to follow for multiple reasons. Thanks for not going over-the-top in your writing. Most articles I've read about what happened were writing by morons trying to throw a pun in every five words.
Thanks Taylor, and thanks for commenting. I always like to encourage new readers (or readers commenting for the first time) to be more active. It does help me, as a blogger, but it's also encouraging on a human level; blogging can get lonely without the occasional remark.
I sat on this story for a little while because the D&D link seemed specious. We gamers went through enough of that shit in the 1980s. However, Zachary King actually, physically resembles several gamers I've known and - and I'm being honest here - many of them probably are/were capable of such atrocities.
Gaming tends to attract disaffected personalities - "losers," "geeks," people who generally don't fit-in with mainstream society - but gaming also attracts iconoclasts (in thinking, beliefs, and just in general) and these are the gamers who get so little attention. With the exception of the occasional local convention announcement or TV commercial, tabletop RPG is still kind of relegated to the "Reject" pile.
Obviously, King is a special case, but tabletop RPG still attracts a lot of... losers. We shouldn't keep accepting them for any reason. The RPG community has been far too accepting of disaffected personalities - for all the right reasons, mind you - and it has never served us well. No one could have known King would commit such a heinous crime, but I'm pretty sure basically everyone had some idea this guy was a turd.
To be honest, he really wasn't. Actually, he was always the exception to that rule of D & D players being shut ins.
I've known him now for almost a decade, and while he may have been an RPGer, it wasn't what his life revolved around. It's still strange to even think about, to be honest, because what he did was so unlike the Zach we all knew.
Obviously, something is wrong with him; that goes without saying. But I know it doesn't have anything to do with D & D, which is why it was a relief to read an article on this that actually looked past that. Anyway, thanks for actually showing some restraint in your writing. I know the Salt Lake Tribune had a lot of fun looking at the "gamer" connection to all of this.
I apologize. I obviously do not know him and did not mean to upset anyone. I agree that it doesn't sound like D&D has anything to do with anything here. It sounds to me like this had been building-up for a while and the relationship with the girl was the catalyst.
Like you said, the D&D thing was largely a non-issue that reporters chose to sensationalize.
I hope everything turns out for the best for everyone involved, and appreciate your commenting. Disaffected personalities and their inclusion in gaming and fantasy-based hobbies has been a running theme here for some time, and that is why I brought it up; I know only what was reported about the case, so I have no personal connection to any of the people involved. I'm sorry for your loss.
Oh, no need to apologize. I know you didn't know, and I know you weren't saying those things in a way meant to upset.
It's interesting simply because before this happened, I never really had any sympathy for people who committed these types of crimes, nor did I have any sympathy for the friends and families of the criminals. So with that being said, I don't blame anyone for making any type of judgment about Zach. It was just nice to finally read an article that wasn't saying the usual "soulless psycho goes on rampage" drivel.
I appreciate your concern, and like I said, no need to apologize. Five months ago, I probably would be thinking the same things that most people are about Zach and this situation. Seeing it from a different point of view now, though, changes my perspective a lot.
I was one of those "cool" nerds, mainly because I was funny. I got into drama and was a very good actor (and very funny) and I was generally non-offensive. Plus I could draw really well and I drew comics, which most people thought was neat. I was a total nerd, no question as to that, and I didn't have a gf or anything pretty much throughout highschool, but I was more of a misfit than outcast.
However, I was constantly forced to accept people with whom I otherwise would not have associated; the general (unspoken) "rule" was, "We're all rejects of one stripe or another, so we can't judge - that would make us just like Them."
Over the years, I have had my stuff stolen - had one of these guys steal literally hundreds of dollars worth of comics from me and break a lease (which ruined my credit) - been attacked, had guns and knives pulled on me (on separate occasions - once because one of these guys threw a cup of ice out a hotel window at a con, and didn't admit to it until long after we were threatened)... but most of all, I developed this damning "acceptance" thing. It was always twice as important for me to accept new people and make them feel comfortable because, like I said, I was a "cool" geek.
Being away from those people for a few years now, my limited contact with others like them (through newsgroups, etc.) - and you know, just age, really - has made me realize that, for the largest part, a lot of those people are outcasts for a reason.
I'm not saying your friend is one of these people, I'm just saying. RPG will never truly be "mainstream" entertainment, and I don't mind it being marginalized - I pride myself on being a "geek" and "nerd"! - but we don't have to blindly accept outcasts just because we're largely considered the same.
I have a bad feeling we're going to hear more about this case on Dateline or the like - and it will be all about D&D and Mazes & Monsters, etc.
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