The man accused of killing four members of a Muslim family in an alleged act of terrorism told a jury on Friday that his brain had been “corrupted” by online conspiracy theories and that he had developed a preference for interaction after all. in an act of violence.
During his second day of testimony, Nathaniel Veltman told the court that as his intellectual state deteriorated from the pandemic, he began consuming more content online that included baseless conspiracies about COVID-19 and Muslims.
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“This content started to distort my view of the world,” he said. “It started to provoke a seething anger. “
The 22-year-old said he was drawn to “anything fringe and conspiracy-related,” though he didn’t identify with much of the content he saw in the first place.
He said he tried to block some of the internet sites he visited with an app meant to block access to pornography and even deleted or destroyed some of his electronic devices, but kept coming back to disturbing content and became “addicted” to it. .
“Little by little, I became desensitized to abusive language,” she testified. He said the curtains included a video recorded by the gunman responsible for New Zealand’s 2019 mass killings at two mosques.
“My brain is getting corrupted. “
On the stand in the courtroom in Windsor, Ontario, where the trial is taking place, Veltman detailed what he described as a procedure of intellectual decay that began when he began spending a lot of time on the web during the early months of the trial. pandemic when her school in London, Ontario, canceled in-person classes.
In the past, he had described a tendency to be paranoid and obsessive-minded about topics such as faith and pornography, which stretched back to what he said were troubled formative years and intensified when he used drugs and alcohol.
Eventually and after two failed attempts to end his life in March 2021, Veltman said he began intentionally seeking out content that he had tried to resist in the past.
“I was no longer looking to avoid things that I knew were triggering something in me. I felt like I had nothing to lose,” she said.
Veltman said his suicidal mind “suddenly turned into something else. “
“(I had) a preference to interact in an act of violence and avenge the things I saw,” he said, referring to far-right Internet sites that spread baseless conspiracy theories about Muslims.
Veltman is accused of intentionally hitting the Afzaal family with his pickup truck in June 2021 while they were driving in London, Ontario.
Salman Afzaal, 46; his wife of 44 years, Madiha Salman; his daughter Yumna, 15; and her 74-year-old grandmother, Talat Afzaal, were killed in the attack, while the couple’s nine-year-old son was seriously injured but survived.
Veltman has pleaded guilty to four counts of first-degree murder and one count of attempted murder.
Jurors have already noted a video of Veltman telling a detective that his attack was motivated by white nationalist beliefs. The Crown argued that Veltman planned an attack for 3 months before driving his Dodge Ram pickup truck directly into the Afzaal family.
Asked through his attorney Christopher Hicks, Veltman said he drove his truck to Clinton, Ontario, to have his windows tinted a few days before his arrest. In the past, he had said he wanted the windows darkened for privacy.
Veltman said he walked around town waiting for the paintings on his vehicle to finish, bumped into a radio tower and climbed it. As he climbed higher, Veltman said he began to think about letting go.
“I thought I wasn’t suicidal anymore,” he testified. It scared me. “
Veltman told jurors Friday about two instances in which he took psilocybin, or magic mushrooms.
He said he took a “large” amount of magic mushrooms in April 2020, causing him to hear “demonic voices” and writhe on the ground.
“I’ve forgotten who IArray is, I’ve forgotten where I lived, I’ve forgotten what planet I’m on. . . It’s like a total erasure of memory,” he testified.
Veltman said he fed on magic mushrooms on June 5, 2021, a day after his grandmother’s death, and went to see her body.
Veltman said he was disappointed by the death of the woman he considered his “surrogate” mother and pressured a friend to give him more drugs than the friend’s idea was for him. He said he was looking for psychedelics because he was so disturbed. In the moment.
“I’m desperate to escape this hell I’m going through in my mind,” he told the court.
The attack on the Afzaal family took place on June 6, 2021.
Veltman told jurors Thursday that he had a “fundamentalist” Christian upbringing marked by his mother’s normal punishments, which included whipping.
He said he homeschooled until 11th grade and that isolation from the wider network made him socially awkward and attracted to the “outcasts” and “bad” crowds later in life.
The Veltman case is the first in which Canada’s terrorism has been brought before a jury in a first-degree murder trial.
The trial will resume on Monday.
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