Video Shows Autistic Man Charging at Police

I let my anger get the best of me, and I was hasty in not waiting for more details to come in. That’s on me. Between what ICE has been doing lately and what happened at Uvalde, my faith in law enforcement has taken a beating I haven’t fully recovered from, and I brought that baggage into a story before the facts were in.

If you’ll recall, a Spokane County sheriff’s deputy shot and killed 20-year-old Joel Malin outside Evergreen Middle School in Spokane Valley, Washington, on Tuesday morning, after a 911 caller reported a suspicious man near the school armed with what they specifically described as a black and silver Glock 19. The deputy encountered Malin within five minutes of that call, in the school’s bus lane, and shot him.

No students or staff were hurt. Malin died at the scene. My first post ran with the family attorney’s framing that this looked like an itchy trigger finger and a kid who probably just wanted help since he’d once attended Evergreen and his mother had told him it was a safe place to go if he needed it.

Then the video came out, and it changed things. Surveillance footage released by the Spokane Police Department, which is leading the independent investigation into the shooting, shows Malin rushing toward the deputy’s patrol vehicle and, within about three seconds, raising what looks exactly like a handgun into a shooter’s stance.

Investigators later recovered a realistic replica firearm at the scene. Watching that clip, I can’t in good conscience keep arguing the deputy had some obviously safer option available to him. Three seconds is not a window for de-escalation training to kick in. It’s barely enough time to register what’s happening, let alone decide whether the gun pointed at you is real. At this point I have to agree the deputy didn’t have a choice.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time I’ve had to write my way through this exact scenario. There have been a number of cases over the years of students brandishing pellet guns or replica firearms in a menacing way at school, only to be shot by police who had no way of knowing the guns weren’t real.

I supported the officers’ split-second calls in those cases too, and I wasn’t happy about it then either, because there are no winners in a situation like that. A cop doesn’t get to feel good about killing a teenager holding a toy. A family doesn’t get their kid back because the gun turned out to be fake. Everybody loses, and the only question left is whether the loss was avoidable, which, in a three-second window, it usually isn’t.

However, I don’t think that’s the end of the story here, and this is where Evergreen starts to diverge from those earlier cases. In most of those, I figured we were probably looking at some version of suicide by cop, a documented and heartbreaking pattern where someone in crisis manufactures a scenario designed to get police to end their life for them. I don’t think that’s what happened with Malin.

By every account his family and attorney have given, he was a happy, friendly guy and not someone showing the kind of despair that pattern usually involves. I’ll also remind you that Malin was described as autistic, with the mental capacity of a 13-year-old.

I want to be careful here, because there have been autistic school attackers in the past, some of whom even tried leaning on that diagnosis as a legal defense, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But that history does a real disservice to the overwhelming majority of autistic people who live ordinary lives without ever hurting anyone. Not everyone who has autism is a potential school shooter. Some people apply that ‘logic’ to trans people also, but that’s a tangent for another day.

So if it wasn’t suicide by cop, what was it? Here’s where I’ll admit I’m speculating, but I keep circling back to the possibility that someone Malin thought of as a friend put him up to this. Depending on what his online life looked like, it wouldn’t take much for him to have wandered into a corner of the internet built around exactly this kind of manipulation.

I’ve written before about the so-called True Crime Community, or TCC, a loosely organized online subculture obsessed with mass shooters and violent crime, where members trade in glorification of past attackers and sometimes actively groom vulnerable people toward committing violence of their own.

It doesn’t take a sophisticated recruitment pipeline to pull someone in. Sometimes all it takes is stumbling into the wrong Discord server or the wrong Roblox lobby and getting the attention of someone who sees a lonely, trusting person as an opportunity rather than a human being. I want to be clear that I have no evidence Malin encountered anything like that. I could be completely wrong, and this whole post could turn out to be nothing.

Police have said the investigation is still in its early stages, and I’m going to leave it there for now instead of pretending I’ve got this figured out. For his family’s sake, I hope the answers that come next are real ones, not just enough to close a file.

(Sources)