by Fred Rosen
During one incident, David was sitting on the couch in the family room when Aunt Valerie came in to confront him about his behavior toward her. David stood up, his bulk towering over the small woman. Dennis and Brenda came in and watched the two standing toe-to-toe, arguing vociferously. The argument lasted the better part of two minutes.
“Do you want a shootout?” David finally screamed.
Bryan was standing by the doorway, quietly observing, a bemused smile on his face. In subsequent confrontations with Valerie, David would punch holes in the wall and throw furniture around. To his parents, he snarled on at least one occasion, “I’m going to kill you both.”
David had already begun rebelling at school. Against the express doctrine of the Witnesses, he had reached out into the sinful world and joined his school’s football team. But in November 1992, he had a violent disagreement with his coach and threatened to kill him. He was suspended from school for ten days.
What to do! Brenda fretted about her child. Dennis had grown more and more withdrawn as the troubles got worse and worse. She had been left to shoulder the responsibility of seeing that her child did no harm to family and others.
The Elders were summoned again to put the fear of God into David, again to no avail. That left Brenda no other choice.
On November 13, 1992, David was committed as an inpatient by his parents to a renewal center at nearby Quakertown, where he was to receive rehabilitation counseling for his alcohol problem. It was during this rehabilitation that David claimed to have been abusing not only alcohol, but other drugs as well. He was discharged a month later on December 14, 1992, and came back into the welcoming bosom of his family.
David was furious! Who the hell was his mother to get rid of him so easily because she didn’t like what he was doing?
David got into a pushing match with his mother: He knocked her to the floor and jumped on her.
“I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna kill you!”
Who broke up the fight is unclear. Maybe it was Dennis, coming out of his shell long enough to protect his wife. He was bigger than his two sons, and he could take care of himself, and if need be, physically stop them from acting out.
Regardless of who stopped the conflict, it was clear to Brenda that David needed to be institutionalized again. On December 23, 1992, David was voluntarily committed to First Hospital at Wyoming Valley. To David, it was an incarceration, though it lasted only a month. He was released on January 26, 1993, with a recommendation that he be put in a residential placement. That same day, he was sent to the Reed Shelter Care program in Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, to await admission to a residential program.
In legal documents, Dennis and Brenda stated that the reason for this longer-term placement was that they felt “unable to control him at this time and fear(ed) for their safety as they cannot provide the structure and supervision he needs.” The state proceeded to adjudicate him a dependent so he could be institutionalized for proper care. He was placed in the Paradise School for Boys.
The Paradise School for Boys is a Catholic institution in Abbottstown, Pennsylvania, that the state uses to place children who have become wards of the state. Their parents have temporarily given up their parental responsibilities because they can no longer control their children and are asking the state to straighten their kids out. In previous generations, the Paradise School would have been called a reform school.
Carol Lynn Crutchley is a psychiatrist at the Paradise School. In February 1993, she was in her office when David Freeman went to see her. The purpose of the interview was a psychiatric evaluation designed to determine the extent of his problems and what kind of treatment the young man needed.
David proceeded to describe to Dr. Crutchley his family relationship. Afterward, Dr. Crutchley filed her report.
“David does not have some connectedness or relationship to his family. He did describe having wanted to kill his parents for several years extending back to either 1990 or 1991.”
In 1990, David was ten years old and still attending prayer meetings.
“He related that he had an older brother who really had not related much with David except when they had on one occasion, of being in agreement about beating up their father. He also related that he had a younger brother he really did not care for. He described him as an ‘ass kiss.’”
Dr. Crutchley detailed what David told her about his rebellion.
“He would smoke outside of the home.” Jehovah’s Witnesses are prohibited from smoking. “He wanted to shave his head. This was not in accordance with the parents’ wishes or the rules of the home. Most of the activity that he did outside the home that would be regarded as antisocial, of course, was not in keeping with his parents’ values.
“Some amount of theft, drinking; he was using marijuana, getting stoned; he was engaged in vandalism, spray painting Nazi symbols.” Alone, David “felt that it was unsafe to do any of these things with others involved because they might turn on him or tell on him. So he kept these activities to himself.”
Dr. Crutchley went on to state:
“There was an element of criminal sophistication in his activities. He knew things that would create a greater liability for apprehension and he could plan accordingly. He also had a good knowledge of how to carry out what he wanted to do without getting caught. That was one of the reasons he did not have an arrest record and history of offenses such that he would have been more likely to been adjudicated delinquent.”
As to when his rebellion began, “David relates that there was a time where he decided to disobey parental rules, about one-and-one-half to two-and-one-half years ago. By the end of 1990, the beginning of 1991, David is aware of being in an ongoing adversarial relationship with his parents. His drug use increased then. He wouldn’t obey parental rules about returning home.”
The alcohol that had been in the house since he was a child had turned out to be a tremendous problem for him. The doctor’s report continued:
“He had been drunk way back. He started quite young. He told me he had been abusing alcohol since he was six years old. So that was an ongoing defiance of parental rules and expectations, but that (alcohol abuse) increased because of parties (he attended) and additional drugs he’d use.”
David not only had problems with alcohol, he had problems with hard drugs, as well.
“He said he used every street drug he could obtain except heroin and inhalants during the two-and-one-half years prior to the time when I saw him. He said he didn’t form any particular affinity for drugs. (Instead, it was) polysubstance abuse.”
In his own words, David Freeman described to Dr. Crutchley how, beginning between the time he was ten and eleven years old, he was making buys of all commonly available street drugs, including uppers, downers, angel dust, mescaline—the usual range of drugs available on street corners in America. Yet, his parents remained either ignorant of his substance abuse, or turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to it, because they could not believe what was happening.
Dr. Crutchley continued:
“The discord with his parents extended back in relationship to their religion. The ongoing thing of setting limits and trying to tell him what to do and what not to do. A primary example of not following parental rules was (his) staying out at parties and doing whatever street drugs he could obtain and continuing his alcohol usage. He also began antisocial activities during that time period of stealing, vandalizing.”
What was gradually emerging was a picture of a boy with a secret life. But worse, much, much worse, was his ability to lie and to hurt himself through substance abuse. On the surface, through his adolescent years, he was charming and gracious; he went to church and obeyed his elders. But inside, he had developed a hate toward the authority figures in his life, specifically his mother, father, and the Watchtower.
That hate imbued itself in every facet of his life. It had caused him to rebel not only in the home, but outside it as well, for example, when he threatened his fo
otball coach. As for his relationship with his brother, that also began to take on another interesting dimension. Dr. Crutchley wrote:
“One unusual thing was the way he described his older brother, because he was a druggie and tends to trust druggies.” But if “any of these (other) druggies tried to turn him in for something, that he would be able to turn the tables on them and incriminate them more than they could incriminate him. That’s why he was trusting the persons that I and others would think risky to trust, meaning the druggies, so it was more like he could gain (the) upper hand, the amount of evidence that he would have available at his disposal, versus the amount they’d have at theirs, which impressed me as showing far more thought and planning and feelings of control than the average resident I see at Paradise School.”
David had made certain to have the goods on his drug dealing and using friends. If they were ever busted, they wouldn’t even think of turning him in as part of a plea bargain because they knew he had additional stuff on them that he wouldn’t hesitate to use.
“In my interview with him and in prior psychological testing, which was intelligence testing,” the standard IQ tests administered to kids in school, “I found that he’s above average in intelligence, or on the high side of the average range.”
David had an estimated intelligence quotient of 110, which was indeed in the high end of the average range.
“I had no doubt that he was in the above-average range, the higher range, a little brighter or more intelligent than most people.”
She went on to describe a scenario they discussed, in which David passed a burning building. Would he go in and rescue anyone? David answered, “No.”
He said that he liked to listen to heavy metal music and favored the music of a group called Storm Troopers of Death. He was particularly anxious to see them at a live concert.
Dr. Crutchley concluded her report in a most ominous manner. She said, “I put down that he had high risk for the future development of antisocial personality disorder. Prognosis was very guarded. David Freeman does not have empathy for others.”
The last was a telling remark. Classic psychopaths do not feel guilt, do not feel what it is like to be someone else, which allows them to inflict pain and suffering without any feeling for the other person. In no uncertain terms, Dr. Crutchley had described the formation of the psychopathic personality of David Freeman …
David Freeman was an accident waiting to happen. But early intervention sometimes works, so there was some hope.
David would remain in the Paradise School for a full year. When he was released in the spring of 1994, he had received at least one good citizenship citation from the school. He had fit in well there, and away from his family environment, he had prospered. Maybe his antisocial tendencies had been derailed. Maybe he wouldn’t act out anymore.
When David was discharged, he went home, back into his family. It never occurred to either Dennis or Brenda that they were laying the seeds for their own destruction. They did not realize that every part of a family system reacts to every other part, that David and Bryan were reacting to something present in the household, just as Dennis and Brenda were reacting to what they had been taught.
Had they sought intervention as a family and stayed with a therapeutic program, things might have turned out differently. But to do so would have been to admit that the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were not enough to get them through their family crisis. To do that would have been to repudiate the religion and risk disfellowship and damnation.
Dr. Crutchley’s report contained references to David Freeman’s white supremacist activities. It did not go into detail on how he formed this apparent affinity for neo-Nazis. Had she been searching for that answer, it might have led her back to Bryan.
Bryan Freeman would later be portrayed by the media as a hulking, incoherent brute, six feet tall and 215 pounds. They only got his physical description right. If David was of above-average intelligence, Bryan was even smarter. He had an IQ of 120 and did so well in school, he consistently made the honor roll. He was quiet, friendly, and respectful of his friends, but at home, he was totally different.
At least five times the Salisbury Township Police were called to the Freeman home to break up inter family fights. Bryan was in the middle of many of them, yet despite evidence of physical confrontations between parents and son, no charges were brought. Bryan’s record stayed clean.
These two sides of his personality made him seem like a Jekyll-and-Hyde. Brenda felt that Bryan’s abuse of alcohol, like his brother’s, made matters worse. She sent him to alcohol treatment centers a few times, hoping Bryan would respond and their lives would be better.
Bryan spent long nights alone, staring up at the ceiling, feeling unloved and unwanted, wondering what he had done that was so wrong to end up confined against his will. Alienated from his parents and their beliefs, which had further served to alienate him from his peers, his future looked bleak. Nowhere did he belong.
And then Seth Monroe came into his life.
Seth was a fellow inmate at one of the rehab centers to where Brenda and Dennis had banished Bryan.
Seth had tattoos of skulls and crossbones on his arms and legs, and swastikas. When Bryan asked him what they were about, Seth told him, “I’m a skinhead, and if you know what’s good for you and the white race, you’ll become one, too.”
In the remaining time they served together, Seth told Bryan what it meant to be a skinhead and all about the skinhead movement in America.
TEN
The skinhead phenomenon originated in England, where gangs of menacing-looking youths, with shaved heads and wearing combat boots, began to be seen in the streets in the early 1970s. Their style was meant to symbolize tough, patriotic, working-class attitudes, in contrast to the sissyish, pacifistic, middle-class views of the hippies.
It was a time when England received a flood of immigrants from third world countries, and “skins,” prompted by a sagging economy, blamed these “nonwhites” for England’s problems. It was classic hate rhetoric: When times are tough, blame anyone but yourself for getting you into the fix in the first place. Do not accept responsibility for your own lot in life; it’s the other guy who’s causing the problems.
Solution: Get rid of the other guy. His elimination will solve our problems. Then, and only then, will we be free to prosper.
The racist and chauvinistic attitudes that prevailed at the time among many skins later evolved into a crude form of Nazism. From the beginning, skins drew public notice for their bigotry and taste for violence, exemplified by their frequent assaults on Asian immigrants, attacks that came to be known as “Paki-bashing.”
In the years that followed, as the Thatcher government of Britain took the country down a path of fiscal conservatism and trickle-down economics, the skinhead movement spread from England to the Continent and beyond. Racist skins are found today in almost every industrialized country whose majority population is of European extraction.
Those attracted to the movement are primarily white youths between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, with males outnumbering females. While skins attempt to maintain the mythology of the movement’s working-class origins, in reality, skins come from a broad range of socioeconomic backgrounds, favoring the middle class.
Most skinhead gangs range in size from fewer than ten to several dozen members. To those devoted to the movement, being a skinhead is a full-time way of life, and not simply adherence to current fashion.
Neo-Nazi ideology combined with the gang lifestyle provides skinheads with a seductive sense of strength disproportionate to their actual numbers, a sense of group belonging and superiority over others who are not fortunate enough to be white and embrace the skins’ lifestyle.
Skins also like to style themselves as modern-day Vikings. Invocation of Viking imagery offers the skinhead a perception of himself as a racial warrior.
Skinheads glorify Hitler and aspire to create his vision of a world
wide pan-Aryan Reich. These strands, a sense of power, of belonging, and of destiny, combine to create the appeal the skinhead movement holds for disaffected and disenfranchised youngsters like Bryan and David Freeman and Ben Birdwell.
Neo Nazi skinheads first appeared on the streets of America in the mid-1980s, about the time that the Freeman brothers personalities were in their formative years. From a membership of a thousand in twelve states in early 1988, their ranks grew, approaching four thousand by 1993. These numbers have held steady. While the numbers do not seem overwhelming, skins are violent disproportionate to their numbers.
American skins began using boots, guns, and knives in their violent activities, and they have since graduated to firearms. The ease of obtaining a firearm in the United States has made the American skins second only to their German counterparts in the ferocity of their synagogue desecrations and other forms of mayhem and intimidation.
There is no single national skinhead organization. Instead, loosely linked networks of skinhead gangs operate in scattered communities. In Pennsylvania, one skinhead gang well known to law enforcement authorities is the Eastern Hammerhead Skins. It was their mailing labels Brenda discovered in Bryan’s Death Book.
Gangs frequently change names and network affiliations. Individual members are often highly mobile, with little to tie them to a particular location. It is not uncommon for a group to leave a city and resume activity in another locale after feeling pressure from law enforcement and the community.
The most commonly perceived misconception about skinheads is that they come from lower-class homes, from parents who are poorly educated, who have not been able to imbue in their children a strong sense of morality. While this can be used by sociologists and others to explain crime in general, in this country it does not apply to the skinhead phenomenon.
Americana skinheads, who claim to represent working class youth, frequently come from middle-class homes. Their roots lie not so much in economic decay as in domestic instability. This instability can take the form of broken homes or single-parent families, or as in the Freeman case, a home where religious intransigence and a failure to acknowledge that the family system has broken down, leads to the child seeking a surrogate family elsewhere.