Shortly after coming aboard here one of the first things I did was set up a filter to capture and set aside Jack Thompson’s bullshit from all the tips cc’d to me. After the preamble to his professional obituary two weeks ago, I went back looking through the “Crazy Fucker” queue to see if I could find some kicking-and-screaming ravings that, even if they didn’t deserve to run under the Kotaku nameplate, would at least be fun to read. Instead, I found something unexpected.

It was a news release from mid-May, and in it, Jack was up to his usual schtick of making hay off others’ misery — in this case claiming a murder defendant in North Carolina was motivated by Grand Theft Auto of course. But the story Thompson was citing was published in Fayetteville, by a paper I interned for 15 years ago. And it was written by my housemate that year, a friend and a guy who introduced me to some excellent video games himself.

So I emailed the writer, Paul Woolverton of The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer, to dig deeper into this story.