[eerie music]
♪
[gunshots blasting]
[dial tone]
♪
[eerie piano playing]
MAN: There's this thing inside of me, it's like...
the appetite.
It's like a wolf that's...
filling... the hunger.
♪
WOMAN: A deadly shooting tonight in the parking lot
of this local shopping center.
Authorities say two of the gyms, employees were
gunned down after closing for the night.
J.C. Escamilla, who was escorting
Maggie McCombs to her car, died instantly.
21-year-old Maggie McCombs is in critical condition.
[distant siren wailing]
There was a brief scuffle.
The suspect apparently was trying to get
to a gun that was in his waistband.
Officers subdued him, and they
brought him downtown for questioning.
WOMAN: Hey, Yu, tell us what happened.
What happened there?
Can you tell us what happened?
Tell us about the girl.
Some people, if they have blood on them, want to show it off,
but he never brings it up.
These external things in the world don't really
concern him -- He views people as separate
and distant from himself in the world.
SAHNI: He's totally matter-of-fact, as if they're
not talking about a shooting of two human beings.
It's really more like, hey, I went out hunting for her,
and I caught her -- That's very consistent with
psychopathic behavior.
He just has no value for human life.
He's trying to tell her, "I'm fine."
People who suffer from psychopathy
know that they are different.
He's discussing it as he would any other topic
and without any sadness or any anger or any excitement.
It's simply a description of events.
Yu Masaki doesn't B.S.
and doesn't lie, because it has no meaning.
There's no thrill in it for him
to lie to the police officer.
He represents one of the more extreme forms of psychopathy
in that he doesn't even derive pleasure from his interactions.
SAHNI: Masaki is asked a question,
and he turns himself into the victim.
This is somebody who has a lot of self-loathing.
He looks depressed. He sounds depressed.
This is somebody who just doesn't have a lot of purpose.
MORGAN: Not only is there no point to Yu Masaki's life,
from his own viewpoint,
there's no point to anyone else's life either.
Masaki's own brother identified when they were children
that he was different.
He was having problems then.
He was showing antisocial behavior then,
enough so that his brother said to him,
"You're gonna be a criminal."
MORGAN: He's definitely blaming society for not accepting him.
But we can't attribute all of his feelings about life,
the universe, and everything to just being in the United States
and not speaking English as well as everyone else.
In trying to understand why do people become psychopaths,
we do think about the chicken and egg problem.
So the nature-nurture dynamic of what were we born with in
life and how did early experiences
shape or enhance or reduce those capacities?
There are some people who may be born
with some biological characteristics that predispose
them to psychopathy.
♪
It's interesting that the detective pushes him
a little bit on that and says,
"Do you know that she was laughing at you?"
He kind of says, "I don't know."
He holds these wounds so strongly to himself and clearly
uses them as his justification for how he's ended up here.
He experiences a level of rage or anger or chronic rejection,
and he doesn't really have
the skills to work through those emotions.
So then the emotions just build up and build up
and build up,
and it may very well have come bubbling up at the point
that Maggie McCombs rejected him.
MORGAN: He's saying, "I can't make this work,
so why should you?"
This was his idealized woman, and the other guy
just represents the deficits that he struggles with.
He represents the example of what I'm not,
so it reminds me of how much I can't do,
so I'll shoot him.
MAN: Friends and investigators say Masaki was obsessed with
Maggie McCombs and had been stalking her
for more than a year.
He'd shown up to her front door at home and was eventually
told to never come back to this Planet Fitness
after his repeated, quote,
"extremely aggressive advances" were turned down by Maggie.
It might seem like a bit of a paradox.
So how could he long after this woman if
he's at the extreme end of psychopathy with no empathy?
And that's because it's about the world inside his head.
It's not really about a relationship with her.
It's whatever she represents inside his head.
They didn't go out socially, they weren't friends.
He wouldn't have had many opportunities outside of
his own stalking behavior to learn who Maggie was.
So to say that he's in love with her --
He's in love with a concept, he's in love with an obsession.
His comments carry that feeling of this existential
recognition of the emptiness and meaninglessness of life.
I think this represents that, um,
psychopathic disconnectedness.
SAHNI: Masaki really is helping to connect the dots for us,
that some of his rage and his anger and feeling
rejected by Maggie stems from his anger at his mother.
[eerie music playing]
So this is a psychiatric evaluation that was
performed on Masaki after the shooting and the murder.
His mother allowed him to do what he wanted because
of his reactivity when he did not get his way.
He admits to not speaking and having outbursts
of anger many times directed to his mother
since childhood.
The outbursts of anger would sometimes be destructive,
destroying property or threatening harm.
Sometimes it was directed to self --
Banging his head against the wall.
Sounds like maybe she was frightened or she didn't
want to have to deal with the demonstrations of anger.
But he learns, "I get what I want by insisting."
And we see that in his behavior with Maggie.
She keeps saying no, but he goes, "No, I'm just persisting.
I'm gonna get what I want."
And that feeds right into that obsession with her.
You get a little window into what kind of behavior
might have been modeled for him by his father,
that it was okay to treat women this way, and it was okay
to not tolerate rejection,
and you should always get what you want.
Children that grow up around violence
learn to use it as problem-solving.
MORGAN: And if we happen to be
biologically predisposed to psychopathy,
it just shunts us down that road even further.
So it's possible with Yu Masaki that his early
experience simply gave him a further kick in the direction
of being distant, aloof, separate,
not needing as much of a relationship from other people.
I remember everything...
pretty well, details.
There's days where I just...
I wake up and I just kind of wonder why this happened.
I wanted to make it through this, and I wanted to be
able to live and just have the life that I've always wanted.
MAN: 28-year-old Yu Masaki flashes a smile before
shuffling up to the judge,
ready to enter pleas for the murder of 31-year-old
J.C. Escamilla and aggravated assault
of 21-year-old Maggie McCombs.
How do you plead? Guilty? Not guilt?
- Or no contest? - Guilty.
Throughout the interrogation,
he is flat, there's no emotion.
But here, Yu Masaki, we see him
sauntering up to the judge's bench.
It's the most emotion we've seen out of him so far.
He's smiling, he's suddenly important.
He's relevant.
People see him, people hear him, and I think
that's ultimately what Yu Masaki was after,
and he got what he wanted.