‘Something I will never forget’
Florida shootings shatter the tight-knit world of video-game players Sunday’s fatal shooting took place during a tournament at a restaurant in Jacksonville, Fla.
JACKSONVILLE, FLA.— Chris “Dubby” McFarland, 31, was in the middle of a Madden NFL 19 game, eyes locked on his screen, when the shooter entered the room and opened fire.
At first he thought the sound of the gunshots was some kind of technological malfunction at the packed video-game tournament being held at Chicago Pizza in Jacksonville on Sunday afternoon — maybe a speaker blowing out. Then a bullet grazed the left side of his head.
Blood ran down his face as McFarland dropped to the floor, curled into a ball and watched players and restaurant patrons run for cover.
When it was over, two gamers, Elijah Clayton and Taylor Robertson, were dead and 10 other people, many of them gamers, were wounded. The shooter — David Katz, who sometimes played under the name Bread and had been defeated in the tournament — shot and killed himself. Investigators on Monday were still trying to determine whether Katz, 24, had planned the attack or if it was a crime of passion sparked by his own losses at the regional tournament. “We don’t have anything where we can stand up here today and say ‘This is the motive,’ ” Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said at a news conference. He said Katz had legally bought two handguns within the last month in Baltimore, where he lived, but that investigators had “no indica- tion this is something he planned prior to Sunday.”
Katz apparently ignored other pizzeria patrons to specifically target gamers, the sheriff said.
Both players who beat Katz in the tournament were still alive, leading one of them to conclude that they were not targets.
“He seemed to target popular names in the Madden community,” Dennis “Evil Ken” Alston, 27, of East Orange, N.J., said in a Twitter message Monday.
The shooting has unsettled the world of professional Madden players, where the biggest talents have sponsorship deals and can win more than $100,000 (U.S.) a year in prize money in tournaments around the United States.
“It’s something I will never forget,” McFarland said as he recuperated in a wheelchair Monday at Jacksonville’s Memorial Hospital.
For many Americans, video games have long been an escape, a place to unburden themselves from the indignities of daily life and transform on- screen into something more — a gifted athlete with incredible speed and strength, or a courageous GI fighting Nazis in the Second World War, or a superhero of seemingly limitless power. Competitive gaming can be a place to make money, but it’s also a community — sometimes a place to talk trash, sometimes a network of mutual support.
Katz was known as one of the regular competitors on the professional circuit, but he was not one of the high-profile personalities. Some of his victims were. Robertson was the fourth-place earner among professional Madden players last year, netting $70,000, and Clayton was in 10th-place, winning $30,000, according to ESports Earnings, a website that tracks professional gamers.
Katz, who also sometimes played under the handle Ravenschamp, a nod to the Baltimore Ravens, wasn’t known to have close friends in the community.
“He was just kind of that out- cast in the group, you know?” said Alexander Madunic, 27, from Milwaukee, a competitor whom Katz shot in the leg. “Very quiet, never ever showing emotion. He was like the kid at high school that you wouldn’t mess around with.”
Court documents filed in 2005 in Katz’s parents’ divorce said he had emotional and social struggles, including a hospitalization for psychiatric treatment and problems in school.
Alston said Katz was wearing the same clothes Sunday as he had the day before and that, even walking around indoors, did not remove his sunglasses.
Alston said he wasn’t sure what future Madden tournaments would be like after Sunday’s shooting.
“We laugh, we joke, we talk trash, but at the end of the day, we were all like brothers stationed everywhere, all willing to open our home doors to each other if another was in town,” Alston said. “We all will remain a brotherhood, even without Madden.”