The Synagogue Massacre That Never Happened

New York Times

23-03-2025

Matthew Mahrer as a boy wrote a 25-page book about his grandfather's experiences as a prisoner in a Nazi internment camp.
Christopher Brown did favors for the Orthodox rabbi across the street, who needed someone to turn on electrical devices during the Sabbath or Jewish holidays.
In November 2022, they were both in free fall. Christopher Brown, then 21, posted on Twitter that he wanted to 'shoot up a synagogue and die.'
Matthew Mahrer helped him get the gun.
They were drunk or high, heading into New York City with a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, an extended magazine and 19 bullets. When they were arrested in Pennsylvania Station that night, it rattled a Jewish community that was still on edge from the massacre of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue four years earlier.
Their arrest was a chilling story — an 'antisemitic sicko' bent on mass murder — made more sensational by the revelation that his accomplice was a Jewish.
'There were 19 bullets in that ammo clip,' said Glenn Richter, who attended a synagogue near the Mahrers. 'Had they decided to go around the corner and go into the synagogue, I and others could have been among those 19 casualties.'
Underneath the fear were the more complicated stories of two young men living with mental illness, thrown together by institutions that left them more troubled than when they went in.
Bullied as children, medicated from a young age, Christopher Brown and Matthew Mahrer followed a line of failings, personal and institutional, to the brink of atrocity.
A Jewish Boyhood, Interrupted
Fifteen minutes into my first conversation with Matthew Mahrer, he blew up at his parents and stalked out of the apartment, apologizing on the way out.
When he returned soon afterward, calmed, it was as if the blowup had never happened.
'Have you ever heard of post-traumatic growth theory?' he asked.
We were in his grandmother's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side in early January, three weeks before he was scheduled to be sentenced for criminal possession of a weapon. Prominently displayed was a framed fabric gold star with the word 'Jude,' from the camp where his grandfather was interned as a teenager.
At 24, out on bail, Matthew displayed a quick intelligence and low social awareness. He wore his hair in loose curls that partially hid his eyes, and he spoke in unfiltered gushes.
His parents, retreating to the room's periphery to avoid upsetting him, wore the weight of the years on their faces.
Matthew's troubles began at age 3, when he couldn't sit still at preschool, and his parents had to pull him out. The diagnosis then was sensory integration disorder — 'because at that age they're too young to be diagnosed with anything else,' his mother, Susan, said. From then on, his life was a roller coaster of different diagnoses, different therapies and — starting at age 5 — more and more medications.
He was assessed as having A.D.H.D., then later pervasive developmental disorder, anxiety disorder, PTSD and, in high school, autism spectrum disorder. Twice he was hospitalized for psychiatric care, once because he was cutting himself. 'That was his childhood,' his mother said.
He was also bright enough to test into a gifted and talented program in elementary school.
Social skills eluded him. He was the squirmy kid, bullied, unable to sit still. Classmates he thought were his friends beat him up or humiliated him.
By high school he was failing, disappearing in the middle of the school day. His parents began looking for residential schools that provided therapeutic environments.
It was at one of these programs that he met Christopher Brown.
The Making of a Child Neo-Nazi
The Mahrers entered the mental health care system as a solid family unit with a lot of resources. Matthew's father taught in the public schools. His mother had a background in early childhood education and ran a small business. They had experience in navigating bureaucracies and excellent health insurance.
Christopher Brown's family, in Stony Brook, on Long Island, had none of these.
'We didn't have electricity in half of our house, we didn't have any running water, the heat wasn't working,' his younger sister, Kayla Brown, now 22, said. 'We were very neglected. C.P.S.' — Child Protective Services — 'was involved in our life a lot.'
In interviews with Christopher, his parents, an aunt and his sister, each labeled different family members as abusive or neglectful, but all said that a lot of that fell on Christopher.
In the visiting room at Clinton Correctional Facility in January, near the Canadian border, the man who met me was nothing like his numerous toxic tweets. Now 23, he wore a kufi skullcap, signifying his jail-cell conversion to Islam, and spoke softly and thoughtfully about the actions and bigotry that landed him there.
'I'm sorry to Matthew for ruining his life,' he said.
As a child, Christopher was, like Matthew, smart, socially challenged and bullied by classmates. He'd cling to his mother or close himself off in his room and play video games, refusing to bathe or go to school.
Home life was volatile, both of his parents said. His mother, who has Crohn's disease, moved out when he was around 9; his father left a year later, leaving him with his grandmother and an aunt. Christopher would ask, 'Why did you even bother having me?' his mother, KerryAnn Brown, said.
His sister thinks he started to unravel when their mother left.
'I just remember he was more angry,' she said. 'I don't want to say he would get violent, but he would have tantrums a lot, which he never had before. He almost changed into a completely different person.'
Still, Shalom Ber Cohen, the rabbi whom Christopher helped on the Sabbath, remembered him as a pleasant child living in a troubled home. Asked about later events, Rabbi Cohen said, 'It's scary to think it's the same boy.'
Around the time that his parents left, Christopher developed compulsive blinking and other tics that led the school to send him for psychiatric evaluation. The diagnosis was schizophrenia.
Like Matthew, he received therapy and medications, which he resisted taking, to the extent that his grandmother would make him open his mouth to show that he had swallowed his pills.
He, too, started skipping school, finding refuge in the computer. At age 11 or 12 he discovered Facebook and, with it, neo-Nazi discussion groups. 'What attracted me to them was the sense of community, camaraderie, and a sense of purpose,' he wrote in an email from prison. Suddenly, he was part of a crowd that not only welcomed him but also told him the problem was not him but other people.
He never met any of them off-line, he said. But in a flat, affectless tone, he said, 'They corrupted my malleable mind.'
When he was 15, workers from Child Protective Services saw the state of his grandmother's house and removed him to the first of several group homes.
'Why He Snapped'
The two boys met at St. Christopher's, a home in Westchester County for students with intellectual and emotional disabilities.
If the Mahrers thought the school would help Matthew, they quickly learned otherwise.
'There was a lot of verbal and physical abuse and students attacking students and staff inflicting rough treatment on the children,' his father, Michael, said. (The home filed for bankruptcy protection last year, after dozens of lawsuits filed under the state's Child Victims Act, alleging child abuse.)
Many of the students had severe intellectual disabilities or had been sent there after being arrested.
'We thought we were sending him to a treatment center,' Matthew's mother, Susan, said. 'He got PTSD from it. And it formed his outlook, in a sense. This was his peer group.'
Christopher thought Matthew was 'noisy.' Matthew objected to Christopher's racism. Christopher knew Matthew was Jewish.
But they would talk late into the night, united by boredom and a shared interest in video games. Sometimes Christopher mentioned suicide. Neither saw the world as a benign, friendly place.
Matthew says now that he'd viewed his roommate's neo-Nazism as a reaction to trauma and rejection. These were feelings he knew well, he said.
Matthew, in turn, was drawn to the criminal types at the school, for similar reasons. He had previously explored gang culture only vicariously, through hyper-gritty drill rap. He was tired of being 'a Jewish kid from the Upper West Side,' he said, and wanted to belong to something bigger than himself.
After graduation from St. Christopher's, Matthew returned home in early 2020, at age 19.
Moving back with his parents meant adjusting to new rules. Almost immediately, Covid hit, and New Yorkers were told to stay at home to avoid spreading the virus. This was especially important in families like Matthew's, with his grandparents living upstairs. But it was too much for Matthew, who would frequently bolt from the house to wander the neighborhood.
After a 2 a.m. confrontation with his father, at the height of Covid's first wave, Matthew went to a homeless shelter in the Bronx. His first week there, he said, he watched a man die of an overdose in a bed near his. He would remain homeless for 10 months.
Whatever supports his parents had arranged for him were now gone. The city was in an acute mental health crisis, with therapists too overwhelmed to take new patients. 'I was literally begging for therapy, and all I was ever getting was meds,' Matthew said. He started getting into fights, getting kicked out of one shelter after another.
'I felt like such a monster,' his mother said. 'Like, my kid was always welcome to come home. He just needed to agree to be safe. He jumped from being exposed to young people with problems to now being exposed to adults with problems. And with bigger problems.'
After one too many fights in the shelters, in January 2021 Matthew finally returned home.
Christopher, who by this time had also graduated from St. Christopher's, moved to another group home.
He began posting threats against Jews and others on social media, invoking Brenton Tarrant, who in 2019 fatally shot 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. In December 2021, Christopher tweeted, 'I'm about to make Tarrant look like a moderate.'
Researchers who study extremist violence struggle to tell which people who post malevolent threats online are likely to go on to actual deeds. They look for concrete steps, like a specific attack plan or a written manifesto. 'The vast majority' of people posting such threats never act on them, said John Horgan, a professor of global studies and psychology at Georgia State University, who studies radicalization and violent extremism. Often, he said, the only way to tell the talkers from the doers is after the fact.
Christopher and Matthew would talk occasionally by phone or text, sometimes mentioning guns: Could Matthew, who had boasted about having gang connections, get him a revolver? Christopher told me he wanted to play Russian roulette, because he wanted to die, but he did not want the certainty that this particular squeeze of the trigger would be the one.
In August 2022, Christopher turned 21 and aged out of his last group home. He had no money, no therapy and only a few doses of his medication. When he returned to his mother's house, he had not lived outside an institution since he was 15.
His mother was now living on disability insurance at the far end of Long Island, with a man Christopher and his sister both described as abusive. The boyfriend, who died in January, forced Christopher to drink alcohol and would not let him sleep, Christopher said.
Christopher unraveled quickly.
'He was fine for a while,' Kayla Brown said. 'But then, as the abuse from my mother's boyfriend started getting worse, that's when he started to become more argumentative or just more paranoid.'
She added: 'If people knew what was going on in our life at the time, they would understand why he snapped.'
Shortly after Christopher moved into his mother's home, the county sheriff's office served her boyfriend with an extreme risk protection order, sometimes called a red flag notice, barring him from buying or owning a firearm. While officers searched the house, they photographed Christopher's room, where he had a flag with a swastika and another with a Nazi SS insignia.
Recalling this period from prison two years later, Christopher said he was depressed and suicidal, disoriented from alcohol and a lack of sleep. On the chat app Discord in late October 2022, three weeks before his arrest, he mentioned a 'plan' involving a synagogue, debating whether he should do it on his own or 'join the Nazi organization.' Either way, he said, 'I'm not living to see my next birthday.'
The same day he contacted Matthew by Snapchat about getting a gun, saying he needed it because some teenagers were threatening him and his family, Matthew said. Matthew, in turn, contacted a man he knew named Jamil Hakime, who worked at the Administration for Children's Services. Hakime would eventually drive Matthew and Christopher to Pennsylvania and sell them a gun he kept in his house in the Poconos.
Christopher's past threats had never moved beyond venomous talk for his social media followers. Now he seemed to be taking action.
Sleep-deprived and often drunk, he was posting constantly on Twitter, venting about Jews, women, gay people, any group that caught his ire. One tweet threatened, 'I want all Irish out of my country by the time the sun rises or there will be consequences.'
Looking back, Christopher said that his tweets were provocations meant to garner likes, and that he did not plan to hurt anyone other than himself. But on Nov. 17 he arranged with Matthew to get the gun — not a revolver, but a Glock 9 millimeter with an extended magazine. At 2:26 a.m. on the 18th, Christopher, using the handle @VrilGod, tweeted, 'Gonna ask a Priest if I should become a husband or shoot up a synagogue and die.' He added, 'This time I'm really gonna do it.'
It was almost exactly four years since a gunman had entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and murdered 11 people.
A Citywide Manhunt
The threat to shoot up a synagogue, coming just ahead of the Sabbath, caught the attention of a Jewish organization called the Community Security Initiative, which monitors internet forums for antisemitic threats. They set off a multiagency hunt for VrilGod.
At midday on Nov. 18, Matthew and Christopher met at St. Patrick's Cathedral — to seek a 'blessing,' Christopher later told the police — then drove with Jamil Hakime to the Poconos to get the gun. (Hakime ultimately pleaded guilty to transporting a gun across state lines and was sentenced to 27 months in prison.) In the backpack he carried, Christopher had a swastika armband, a knife and a ski mask.
By the afternoon, agents had identified VrilGod as Christopher T. Brown, of Aquebogue, N.Y.
Officers called Christopher's cellphone, reaching him on the drive to Pennsylvania.
'They identified themselves as a detective, and asked if I had Twitter,' Christopher said by email. 'I promptly hung up.' At that point, he said, 'I got scared, and that is when I told Matthew and the driver we had to turn back.' But he said Hakime told Matthew to get his 'boy' under control, and they carried on.
The police, fearing an imminent terrorist attack, issued an alert to all units to 'be on the lookout' for Christopher, warning that he was 'considered armed and dangerous.'
Matthew and Christopher returned to Matthew's family apartment, where they dropped the gun — 'I didn't trust Chris with it,' Matthew said — then rode the subway to Penn Station so Christopher could get a train home to Long Island.
Shortly before midnight, the police and F.B.I. agents surrounded them, guns drawn. As Christopher remembers it, he saw all the guns and asked one officer, 'Is this really necessary?'
After Arrest, Renewal
On Christopher's first phone call from the Rikers Island jail complex, his aunt Maureen Murray said, she immediately noticed a change in him. 'He said the first thing he got when he got to Rikers was a full night's sleep,' she said. 'And he hadn't had it in ages.'
He was also finally receiving some psychiatric care — he was given a diagnosis of PTSD — and proper medication. He was a different person, his mother and sister said.
Denied bail, he befriended a Hasidic inmate, who introduced him to one of the jail's chaplains, Rabbi Gabriel Kretzmer-Seed. Christopher began attending regular services and switched his religious affiliation to Judaism, the rabbi said.
'He definitely seemed sincere,' Rabbi Kretzmer-Seed said. 'I remember him saying he regretted whatever pain he had caused, and definitely seeking forgiveness — wanting to do a 180 from being hateful towards Jews to wanting to explore Judaism seriously.'
During his two years at Rikers, he subsequently changed again, to Islam, which he said brought him peace and 'a sense of true belonging.'
Because the only charges against Matthew were for possession of a weapon, he was granted bail, but he had another problem: News reports suggested that he and Christopher had together plotted to wreak antisemitic terror, even though only Christopher had made the threats.
Influential figures — including the district attorney, several rabbis and a City Council member — moved to have Matthew's bail revoked, calling him a danger to the community. Neighbors campaigned to ban him from the apartment building.
Yet Matthew had known nothing about Christopher's threats until after their arrest, both men said. The Mahrers felt blindsided. Their Jewish son had been made 'a poster boy of antisemitism and neo-Nazism,' his mother said.
But he was also changing emotionally, in ways they did not expect.
After his parents posted bail of $300,000, he was transferred to a psychiatric unit at Elmhurst Hospital Center. There he met a former inmate who was working as a peer counselor to others dealing with mental illness. It was a revelation, Matthew said.
He enrolled in a training program for peer counselors, where he found a purpose that he had never had — to use all his experiences to help people like himself, before they got into the criminal justice system. It is what he meant by post-traumatic growth.
Matthew was also assigned a social worker and care team and placed in a therapy program — what his parents had been trying to find for years.
With focused, appropriate therapy, he was able to stop all his medications for the first time since kindergarten.
'This is the one time that I feel like I was not failed by the system,' he said.
'I Saved Him'
Last fall, nearly two years after their arrest, Christopher pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Matthew pleaded guilty to criminal possession of a weapon. At his sentencing, as the Mahrers watched their son taken away to serve two and a half years in prison, they were left with the irony that it took his arrest for him to finally get the care he needed and to find direction for his life. And now the courts were taking these away.
From the prison upstate, Christopher was still at a loss to explain his actions that day. He and Matthew had been close to disaster, including 'suicide by cop,' but also close to turning the car around, moving on with their lives.
Matthew said he did not blame Christopher for ruining his life. 'In a weird way,' he wrote from prison, 'I'd like to think he saved it, the way I saved him when I took that firearm off his person.' He later added: 'I'd rather be in here than on the outside knowing I helped my best friend commit suicide.'
Matthew and Christopher both say they have received no therapy in prison, despite their diagnoses.
The mental health care system helped produce the two men who were in the car that day and also the progress both have made since. The products of that care will return to society as still young men, their lives ahead of them but forever linked to a potentially horrific event.
From prison, Matthew still talked about post-traumatic growth, about using his experiences to help others. His parents worried that being around criminals will undo the therapeutic progress of the last two years. On a three-way call in January, Matthew shifted abruptly in tone, declaring himself a gangster in a kill-or-be-killed environment. His mother tried to redirect him.
'Every day you're moving past it, Matthew,' she said, treading what seemed like familiar ground. 'Every day is one day closer to putting it in the past.'
At her words, he settled a bit, talking again about constructive plans.
After the call, his mother sighed and repeated a phrase from our first conversation, acknowledging the uncertainties yet to come: 'We always called Matthew our work in progress.'