When his fifth-grade teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras answered “psychologist.”
But 10-year-old Nicholas had no idea that his career in treating mental illness would lead him, in 2020, to sit across from a teenage killer who stabbed three friends with a knife.
Corey Johnson, the 21-year-old Floridian who turned violent after becoming captivated by the Islamic extremist group ISIS, was the latest in a series of cold-blooded killers that Dr. Kardaras had been hired to analyze.
And he discovered that Johnson had a character similar to other dangerous young criminals he had met over the years: surprisingly regular. In fact, he would even go so far as to describe him as a “sweet kid.”
Far from lacking empathy, many of Dr. Kardaras’ subjects have seemed perfectly likable to the Niave observer.
The world-renowned expert has spent much of the last two decades assessing the mental health of violent people, many of them teenagers.
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, a technology addiction expert, often evaluates potentially violent people who have been “brainwashed” by violent media and hate groups to commit horrific crimes.
Corey Johnson stabbed his friend and his friend’s mother, and killed his 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 about the future. Worryingly, he predicts an increase in shootings and stabbings as a direct result of increased exposure to violence in video games and online.
As part of his role as an expert witness in trials, Dr. Kardaras must determine what motivates violent tendencies.
You must evaluate whether the accused is mentally ill, a cold-blooded psychopath, or a Lonely, empty person, who seeks extreme emotions.
Your trial can help save someone from life imprisonment.
So what are you looking for specifically?
Psychopaths have a “dark, shark-like look, a dead look,” as Dr. Kardaras calls it.
“Most of the time, if the person is prone to violence, he is a void, he is almost like a dead fish.”
The dead stare can make the viewer feel as if the other person is looking directly through them, free of any type of emotion or expression.
Dr. Kardaras said this tells 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.
Criminals chase this deluge by searching for violent content online or playing violent video games. And the more they see, the more desensitized they become and the more disturbing the content must be to satisfy that need.
Dr. Kardaras is a professor at Stony Brook University and runs an Austin-based recovery program for teens addicted to technology and social media.
As for those who are driven to violence by psychotic illnesses, such as schizophrenia or psychosis: ‘Normally, you can see if a person has what we would call intrusive voices.
“Their eyes will tremble and they will look around because they see and hear things that you do not see.”
Corey Johnson didn’t have that characteristic dead look or a psychopathic profile, says Dr. Kardaras. He, too, did not suffer from any psychiatric illness.
“I was expecting, or maybe hoping, to find an inherently sociopathic and violent person, because that would explain everything,” he says.
“The Charles Manson factor, someone who is flawed in some sense or who has an inherent sense of violence, would make the world seem more explainable.
“It was a different presentation than I expected, which made it more disconcerting for me.”
He was “a sweet little boy quite well presented” and ““the kind of person my wife and I would look for to take care of their children.”
Alarmingly, Johnson resembled a growing number of criminals Dr. Kardaras deals with these days: he was a normal kid, who had been radicalized via the Internet.
Johnson converted to Islam in 2017, a year before committing the crimes.
The night of the attacks, he went to sleep at a friend’s house, a boy named Kyle whom he had 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 had also entered into a long-distance relationship with a woman named Hafsa, with whom he had been planning a religiously motivated attack.
Court reports indicated he sent her photographs of the six-inch knife he would use and the children he would attack.
When everyone went to bed, Johnson sprang into action, first attacking Jovanni, Kyle’s brother’s friend, who was sleeping closest to him. Jovanni later died from numerous stab wounds from him.
Kyle’s brother suffered 30 stab wounds, while his mother suffered cuts to her wrist and Achilles tendon, and cuts to her forehead, chin, neck, chest, left wrist and right elbow.
Johnson fit the mold of a lonely, chronically disenchanted young man seeking 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.
One of the main drivers of violence in schools has been violence in the media, as well as hyper-realistic violent video games. In many cases, school shooters are not psychopaths, but bitter young people seeking notoriety and infamy.
When hateful people come together to express their grievances through social media, they form a community where hate can grow, says Dr. Kardaras.
‘The other people who are finding a community are also people with fetishes, dark fantasies and violent people.
“You don’t want them to combine their collective voices, because they feed off each other.”
FBI agents told Dr. Kardaras that hate groups were actively recruiting new members in the darkest corners of the Internet, such as 4Chan, and on messaging apps like Discord.
He adds that school shootings seem to attract 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 Columbine High School massacre in 1999 and its perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
Eight years later, after Seung-Hui Cho was involved in a shooting at Virginia Tech University that left 32 dead, the media brought to light the admiration that the young man felt for Harris and Klebold, calling them ‘martyrs’.
“So they’re presented with the plan and they try to top the previous one,” he says.
Evaluating children to detect possible violent behavior and trying to better understand their psyche is not an exact science and it is possible to make mistakes.
He said, “No one has a predictive crystal ball.”
‘I can tell you that I have had many, many, many teenagers who had written very disturbing things forwarded to me. And the vast majority of them write; They are simply the rantings and writings of an angry and frustrated young man.
As social media has become an indelible facet of everyday life, it is reasonable to believe that the population of disenchanted, hate-filled youth could grow.
And the world’s unprecedented connectivity allows that hate to spread like wildfire, threatening everything in its path.