When asked by his fifth-grade teacher what he wanted to be when he grew up, Dr Nicholas Kardaras said ‘psychologist.’
But 10 year-old Nicholas had no idea his career treating mental illness would, in 2020, lead him to sit across the table from a teenage killer who stabbed three friends with a utility knife.
Corey Johnson, the 21 year-old Floridian who grew violent after becoming enthralled with the Islamic extremist group ISIS, was the latest in a line of cold blooded killers Dr Kardaras had been employed to analyze.
And he found Johnson to be similar in character to that of the other young, dangerous criminals he’d met over the years: surprisingly regular. In fact, he’d even go as far as to describe him as a ‘sweet kid’.
Far from being devoid of empathy, many of Dr Kardaras’ subjects have appeared, to the niave observer, to be perfectly nice.
The world-renowed expert has spent much of the last two decades assessing the mental health of violent people – many of them teenagers.
Dr Nicholas Kardaras, a tech addiction expert, often asseses potentially violent people who have been ‘brainwashed’ by violent media and hate groups to commit grisly crimes
Corey Johnson stabbed his friend and his friend’s mother, and killed the friend’s younger brother at a sleepover in March 2018
Now, Dr Kardaras has given DailyMail.com a fascinating account of his professional life – including what it’s like to look into the eyes of murderers and potential school shooters.
He has also shared his fears for the future. Concerningly, he predicts an uptick in shootings and stabbings as a direct result of increased exposure to violence in video games and online.
As part of his role as expert witness in trials, Dr Kardaras must determine what motivates violent tendencies.
He must assess if the accused is mentally ill, a cold-blooded psychopath, or a lonely, empty, person looking for some extreme thrills.
His judgement can contribute towards saving someone from a life sentence.
So what is he looking for, specifically?
Psychopaths have a, ‘dark, shark-like look in the eyes, a dead stare’, as Dr Kardaras calls it.
‘More often than not, if the person is prone towards violence, it’s an emptiness, it’s almost like a dead fish.’
The dead stare can make the onlooker feel as though the other person is looking straight through them, free of any sort of emotion or expression.
Dr Kardaras said this signals to him that the person is looking for a ‘rush’ of good feelings – like the buzz a typical person might experience from eating chocolate or watching a funny movie.
Offenders pursue this rush by looking for violent content online, or by playing violent video games. And the more they see, the more desensitized they become and the more disturbing content must be to satiate that need.
Dr Kardaras is a professor at Stony Brook University and runs an Austin-based recovery program for teens addicted to tech and social medi
As for those who are driven to violence by psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia or psychosis: ‘Typically, you can see if a person is having what we would call intrusive voices.
‘Their eyes will jitter, and they’ll look around because they’re seeing and hearing things that you’re not.’
Corey Johnson did not have that trademark dead stare or a psychopathic profile, Dr Kardaras says. Nor was he suffering a psychiatric illness.
‘I was expecting or maybe hoping to find an inherently sociopathic, violent person, because that would kind of explain everything,’ he says.
‘The Charles Manson factor, somebody that’s defective in that certain way or has an inherent sense of violence, that would make the world seem more explainable.
‘It was a different presentation than I was expecting, which made it more unnerving for me.’
He was, ‘quite a well presented sweet kid’ and ‘the type of person my wife and I would look for to babysit their kids’.
Alarmingly, Johnson was like an increasing number of offenders Dr Kardaras is seeing these days: he was a regular kid, who had become radicalized through the internet.
Johnson converted to Islam in 2017, one year before he committed the crimes.
On the night of the attacks, he went to sleep over at a friend’s house, a boy named Kyle whom he’d known since they were children.
According to court documents, Kyle had ‘noticed an immediate change in the defendant and witnessed his beliefs become more extreme over time.’
He’d also entered into a long-distance relationship with a woman named Hafsa, with whom he had been planning a religiously-motivated attack.
Court reports stated he sent her photos of the six-inch utility knife he would use and the children he would target.
When everyone went to bed, Johnson flew into action, first going for Kyle’s brother’s friend Jovanni, who was sleeping closest to him. Jovanni later died from his many stab wounds.
Kyle’s brother suffered 30 stab wounds, while his mother suffered slashes to her wrist and Achilles tendon, and cuts on her forehead, chin, neck, chest, left wrist, and right elbow.
Johnson fit the mold as a chronically disenchanted, lonely youth looking for community and belonging.
Johnson was sentenced to life in prison by Palm Beach County Judge Cheryl Caracuzzo in 2022 after pleading not guilty by reason of insanity
A major driver of violence in schools has been violence in media as well as hyper-realistic violent video games. In many cases, school shooters are not psychopaths, but rather embittered youth aiming for notoriety and infamy
When hate-filled people come together to air their grievances via social media they form a community where the hate can grow, Dr Kardaras says.
‘The other folks who are finding community are also people with fetishes and dark fantasies and violent folks.
‘You don’t want them to be combining their collective voices, because they feed off of each other.’
FBI agents told Dr Kardaras that hate groups were actively recruiting new members in shadier corners of the internet, such as 4Chan, and on messaging apps like Discord.
He adds that school shootings seem to appeal to people seeking visibility, notoriety, and infamy.
In the case of the Sandy Hook massacre that left 20 children and six teachers dead, shooter Adam Lanza was ‘obsessed’ with the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and its perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
Eight years later, after Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech University that left 32 people dead, the media brought to light the admiration the young man had for Harris and Klebold, calling them ‘martyrs.’
‘So the blueprint is laid out for them, and they try to one-up the one that came before,’ he says.
Assessing children for possible violent behavior, trying to understand their psyches better, is not an exact science, and it’s possible to get it wrong.
He said: ‘Nobody has a predictive crystal ball.
‘I can tell you that I’ve had many, many, many adolescents who had written very troubling things referred to me. And the vast majority of them are writing they’re sort of just the rantings and writings of a frustrated angry young person.’
Given that social media has become an indelible facet of everyday life, it’s reasonable to believe that the population of hate-filled disenchanted youth could grow.
And the world’s unprecedented connectedness allows that hate to spread like wildfire, threatening everything in its path.