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Westphal and his team spent 14 hours interviewing and testing Minassian before his trial. A Canadian psychiatric team, led by Dr. John Bradford, also examined Minassian. Bradford concluded Minassian did not fit the criteria for a not-criminally-responsible verdict.
In conversations with Westphal’s team, Minassian discussed various motivational factors for his attack. He assigned relative weight to his motivations.
He settled on: Loneliness, an affinity for the murdering-incel Elliott Rodger and support for a brand of incel philosophy known as Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) being 40 per cent of his influence; his obsession with mass murderers at 25 per cent; a desire for infamy at 20 per cent; and anxiety over starting a new job at 15 per cent.
Westphal said he didn’t put much stock in Minassian’s reasoning. He said when Minassian talked about his job anxiety and loneliness he seemed more genuine.
Minassian outlined in detail his desire for notoriety.
“It would have been the fact that I had done something, I had brought something to my name,” Minassian said in one interview. “I’ve done something for attention, rather than failing at something.
“An example would be, if you’re walking on the sidewalk and you slip on a banana peel, and everyone laughs at you, that’s not you doing something on purpose, that’s you failing. And by accident and it’s a screw up. It’s kind of like, you lost, and now everyone remembers that,” Minassian said.
“Whether you do something good or whether you do something bad… let’s say you make a really cool app at your work, or, let’s say you commit a mass killing. In those cases, it’s not under the category of you slipping on a banana peel, it’s you — you’ve done something, you’ve been proactive and you accomplished something.”
Westphal said this shows Minassian’s binary view of the world, just two extremes with nothing in between.
Westphal continues on the stand Thursday.
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