Neurologist testifies that synagogue shooter was not mentally impaired during shooting

Synagogue mass shooter Robert Bowers showed no signs of delusions or cognitive issues in a lengthy pretrial interview, according to a neurologist testifying for the government in Bowers’ federal death penalty trial.

Ryan Darby of Vanderbilt University Medical Center was the prosecution’s first witness Wednesday in the eligibility phase of the trial and directly contradicted defense experts who said Bowers is schizophrenic.

Darby discussed his three-hour evaluation of the defendant and his interpretations of MRI and PET scans of the shooter’s brain. He also provided background on Bowers’ personal history and belief system.

The prosecution aimed to counter the defense argument that Bowers was mentally impaired and unable to form the intent necessary to be eligible for the death penalty.

The defense has argued that he suffers from schizophrenia, epilepsy, delusions and other abnormalities.

Darby pushed back on those conclusions.

In particular, he testified that the white-matter lesions found in Bowers’ brain, which defense experts had presented as potential evidence of a disorder, were not abnormal and instead potentially caused by risk factors such as smoking, obesity, high cholesterol or drug use. Bowers was a daily cigarette smoker who relied on prescription pain medications and heroin, and experimented with cocaine.

“I would not expect significant cognitive dysfunction from the scan,” Darby said, referring to the MRI.

He confirmed testimony from other experts that there is no way to definitively tell whether a person has schizophrenia from a brain scan. He also reported disagreements among doctors who examined Bowers’ EEG scans as to whether signs of epilepsy were present.

Expert witnesses for the defense had testified that Bowers’ brain is asymmetrical, a potential sign of schizophrenia.

Darby agreed that scans showed asymmetry but disputed any evidence of dysfunction. He said that the size of the hippocampus was normal and that there was no sign of damage. If one of his own patients’ scans came back the same way, Darby said, he would tell the patient that the readings were normal.

Darby outlined Bowers’ personal history, which the shooter described during the May 2023 evaluation.

The defendant had a poor relationship with his mother but a positive one with his maternal grandfather. Growing up, he was interested in cars, guns and “blowing stuff up” — to the point that one of his hobbies as a child was making homemade bombs with friends and creating explosions in empty courtyards.

He became a truck driver as an adult and worked long hours on the road, taking breaks from the difficult lifestyle for weeks at a time, Darby said. He gradually developed an interest in politics, and by 2017, he was immersed in far-right online circles, devoting his free time to watching YouTube videos and seeking out social media networks as he took a break from his trucking job.

Darby noted that Bowers denied experiencing any sort of mental impairment. The shooter failed to identify any history of seizures and denied having issues with hallucinations, delusions, impulse control, paranoia or apathy. 

He did say that he experienced depression throughout his life and had difficulty “putting himself in other people’s shoes,” citing his inability to relate to movie characters, according to Darby.

Bowers’ descent into far-right media led him to Christianity, which he initially discovered in a flyer for a local church, and to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. The theory posits that white people are being gradually replaced by minorities through an influx of immigrants and refugees. Bowers saw himself as a “soldier in that war,” Darby testified.

Darby described Bowers’ planning process for the shooting and provided information on the shooter’s state of mind before, during and after the attack. He began his planning in April 2018 and researched extensively, ultimately deciding to target Congregation Dor Hadash because of its support of HIAS, a refugee advocacy organization. 

“This was not impulsive,” Darby said.

Further, Bowers described his state of mind during the shooting as “calm, focused and goal-directed,” Darby testified. 

The neurologist came to the conclusion that Bowers was not mentally impaired in any way at the time of the shooting.

Darby testified that delusion, a key component of the defense’s argument that the defendant was impaired, is not relevant because for whatever misguided antisemitic beliefs that he held, none of them were “personally salient” to him — meaning that Bowers never felt that anyone was coming for him in particular.

Asked by U.S. Attorney Eric Olshan whether he felt Bowers was capable of forming the intent to kill a person, Darby answered yes. 

The shooter told Darby that after the shooting, he felt “in awe of his accomplishment” and compared the feeling to how America’s Founding Fathers might have felt after ratifying the Constitution. Additionally, he expressed his continuing belief in antisemitic conspiracies and the great replacement theory, and that his only regret is that he hadn’t killed more people.

According to Darby, Bowers pointed to a recent Dor Hadash bike riding fundraiser for refugees as evidence that he “hadn’t done enough.”

In a lengthy cross-examination, defense attorney Michael Burt questioned Darby’s motives as one of the prosecution’s hired experts and dove into Darby’s past medical publications to poke holes in his process. Burt noted that in a past presentation Darby gave, he said that one result of frontotemporal disorders is unawareness of symptoms — something that the defendant displayed in the evaluation.

Burt also highlighted a 1973 incident, when Bowers was 6 months old, in which his parents exchanged grave threats toward each other and their baby, as evidence of potential lingering trauma.

The trial will continue Thursday, but there is no court on Friday.

Related story: Resources are available to ease trauma during synagogue shooting trial.

This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting trial by the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle and the Pittsburgh Union Progress in a collaboration supported by funding from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.