Kiddus Chane Yohannes played violent video games and owned some guns.

Those facts, coupled with comments Yohannes allegedly made about killing people, were enough to get him arrested by police in Orem, Utah. As reported by the Deseret News, however, a judge dismissed most of the counts against the 20-year-old Ethiopian man, a student at Utah Valley State College.

Police had charged him with using false identification numbers to purchase the guns, but Judge Gary Stott determined that the facts of the case did not support the charge. A count for possessing a stolen ATM card was held for trial.

Yohannes’ attorney, Richard Gale, commented:

In our zeal to be protected from other people, we can’t start arresting people and charging them with crimes they haven’t committed yet, which we suspect they’re going to commit in the future.

Prosecutor Donna Kelly told the newspaper:

The police began very concerned about [Yohannes] when the roommates were saying … that he was hiding weapons and that he was playing violent games and discussing that he was going to kill people. Those were the things that caused the police to look a little harder into how he obtained the weapons.

Yohannes’ attorney credited the police with trying to do the right thing:

[Yohannes] had a roommate that was scared and told the police. I think (police) had good intentions, they want to make sure that a school shooting doesn’t happen here, but they went about it in the wrong way by trying to look for a criminal charge instead of getting him into counseling. I know people don’t like to hear that, they want law enforcement to stop these kinds of shootings before they happen — (but) we cannot stop people for doing things that we think they’re going to do in the future.

GP: The threats allegedly made by Yohannes aren’t described in the news article, although we can assume they were detailed enough to legitimately concern not only the roommate but the Orem P.D. as well. Coupled with Yohannes’ gun ownership, it’s hard to fault the police for at least looking into the matter.

What is troubling about the case, however, is that Yohannes’ violent video game playing was apparently included as an element of probable cause in the investigation. Guns, threats and video games are what got him arrested. It’s not clear what games Yohannes played, but a follow-up article in the Deseret News reports that:

[Yohannes was] playing video games depicting violence to U.S. soldiers and police officers.

That description suits a number of commercially available games issued by major game publishers, including the Grand Theft Auto series, 25 to Life (which was quite controversial in Utah) and Battlefield 2.

We should note that police in Utah were probably on high alert at the time of Yohannes’ arrest. Yohannes was a student and his arrest took place within two months of Virginia Tech. As GamePolitics readers know, video games were incorrectly suggested as a causal factor in that massacre.

And just a few months earlier, another young immigrant, Sulejman Talovic, killed several people in a shooting rampage at a mall in Salt Lake City. Police investigators found no evidence that Talovic played violent games in that case, although the possibility was suggested and even discussed by Utah legislators while the investigation was underway.

So, going forward, does this mean that playing Halo 3 or Manhunt 2 makes one more likely to face police inquiries? Should one’s choice of games be given consideration by authorities in criminal investigations?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 8:10 am and is filed under Controversial Games, Court Cases, First Amendment, Games & the Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.