A quick note before we start, this episode includes sounds of shootings from a college campus. It also features music with violent and explicit language. If you're listening with small kids, you may want to save this one for later. This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedanta. On a chilly April morning in 2007, a nightmare unfolded on a college campus in Virginia. A 23-year-old student, acting alone, opened fire in a dormitory. He shot and killed two students.
Then he walked across campus and began killing people in an engineering building. The sound of gunfire was caught on a student's cell phone. We weren't sure what it was. It was gunshots, but for a while we thought it led to construction.
We heard this horrible screaming laughter. Dina Harrison was a student in the building. So we all were sitting in the classroom and basically panic broke out. So I would hear people screaming laughter and more screaming.
And I counted 24 gunshots in a minute, and I lost track after that. I just started praying. By the time the assault ended, 32 people were dead. The gunman took his own life.
The shooting at Virginia Tech was quickly seared into our minds as one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history. The news media tried to convey the sheer scale of the massacre. There was terror and then sorrow today at the campus of Virginia Tech.
An act of evil on a scale that we've never seen in this country before. Four hours after the news began to break, Blacksburg, Virginia is still in shock from its wounds. But even as the country mourned, people began to ask why campus officials hadn't been more proactive. Why hadn't they spotted the warning signs?
Why hadn't they locked down the school after the first shooting at the dorm? At a press conference, campus police tried to explain. We had information from witnesses, and the evidence had seen that led us to believe the shooter was no longer in the building, and more likely off campus. Reporters grilled officials, who at times seemed lost for words.
Gene, can you outline your lockdown policy for the university? Are you saying that do we have a policy to lockdown the campus? Yeah, when? What circumstances do we do it?
What's your time for you? It's not in my communication. Eventually, the state of Virginia and the university paid victims' families more than $11 million to settle lawsuits. Across the nation, universities scrambled to improve their security protocols.
Many added expensive upgrades to emergency alert systems and hired new police officers to stay on top of possible danger. A weariness to cold on college campuses. A subtle fear was in the air. A low-grade buzz of anxiety.
People weren't taking chances. At schools like Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, small things that were out of place led to intense scrutiny. His car was discovered, parked in a very conspicuous, very unusual, no-parking area of the university here in Edwardsville. And they found, visible in the car, a note.
This week on Hidden Brain, we explore a complicated case that unfolded in a month after the Virginia Tech shooting. It was so complicated that even today, years later, people still disagree about what really happened. At the heart of the case was this question. How can we know, really know, what's happening inside another person's head?
Perception, reality, and judgment. This week on Hidden Brain. Three months after the Virginia Tech massacre, an Illinois gun dealer picked up the phone and called the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. He told a nation that he was worried about a client who was trying to purchase guns.
It was the first time he'd ever made a report to the ATF in I think about 10 years of being a gun seller, gun dealer. Tom Gibbons is the Madison County, Illinois, state's attorney. Tom says the man who contacted the gun dealer was agitated and adamant. He said he needed the guns quickly.
And what he was purchasing was unusual. He was buying three low-cost, exact same models of a gun. A semi-automatic handgun, a .380 caliber. The gun dealer explained that the man, whose name was Olitosun Odewale, had purchased the guns wholesale on the internet and needed him, a licensed transfer agent, to complete the transaction.
Olitosun's background check was clean, but the gun dealer felt something wasn't right. The ATF suspected Olitosun might possibly be his straw purchaser, someone buying guns for someone else. But Tom Gibbons says police also considered more sinister motives. Having three identical weapons, if a person's going to do something harmful or commit a mass casualty event, having three identical firearms has the advantage of being able to use the identical ammunition, to use the exact same magazines with that ammunition no matter which of the guns you're using.
And of course buying low-cost multiple weapons allows you to have multiple weapons available at a single time. The ATF quickly learned that Olitosun was a student at Southern Illinois University. The ATF contacted the local police department and they began to look into it. According to documents later filed in court, the ATF agent also called campus police detective Rick Weissenborn.
The ATF gave the detective a heads out that Olitosun had ordered weapons over the internet. Rick Weissenborn wrote a memo to his colleagues that advised them to use caution if they encounter the young man. Two days later, a police officer on a routine campus patrol came across an unattended car. He alerted Rick Weissenborn, who went to investigate.
Police traced the license plate to Olitosun Odewale. His car was discovered parked in a very conspicuous, a very unusual, no parking area at the university here in Edwardsville. Police monitored the vehicle to see if anyone approached it. For two days, Rick Weissenborn drove past the car himself.
No one showed up. The detective notified his supervisor. Campus police were authorized to throw a vehicle that had been left unattended for more than 24 hours. So when his car was being towed, it's the police department policy that the car is inventoryed.
It can inventory the contents and they found, you know, visible in the car, a note. It was protruding from underneath the center console. It had writing on both sides. On one side, what seemed like rap lyrics.
Turned the page over and there were more lyrics. Tom says they read like this. And then you may have to bleep some of this out. I lead she a follower.
I'm single and not with her, but she got a throat deeper than a sword swallower. Further down on the page was more writing. Tom says these were not lyrics. Send $2 to, and then it's a PayPal account.
If the money doesn't reach $50,000 in the next seven days, then a murderous rampage similar to the Virginia Tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university. And then in all capital letters, this is not a joke. Police didn't take it as one. Detective Rick Weissenborn took photos of the vehicle.
While snapping pictures of the back seat, he noticed relief straps and pulled them to lower the seat backs. He found a wad of clothing. There was a long sleeve shirt, a short sleeve shirt, and a knit cap with a ski mask. The detective seized all of it.
Officers also found six rounds of .25 caliber ammunition in the car. They felt they needed to act fast. It was pretty early in the morning, I remember, and I'd just gotten out of the shower. This is Thomas Phillips III.
He was Oletosin Odawale's roommate that summer. He remembers a loud pounding on the door. And there's about eight police officers standing there. Thomas was asked to step out of the room.
Police told Oletosin he was under arrest. Oletosin was wearing basketball shorts and a tank top. He didn't have shoes on. They cuffed him, they had his hands behind his back, and he didn't lift my way when he came out.
I don't also think that he saw where I was sitting because I was sitting off to the side of the stairs. But they took him out the long way towards the back where they had a car waiting for him. A search of the dorm room uncovered a camcorder, video cassettes, and a Dell laptop computer. Tom Gibbon says there was also something else.
A Jennings .25 caliber pistol. A loaded firearm. The gun belonged to Oletosin. So let's review.
A young man attempts to purchase multiple guns over the internet. He's described as agitated and anxious by a gun dealer involved in the transaction. The ATF launches an investigation. The young man's car is found, apparently abandoned on a campus side road.
Inside it is a piece of paper with a threat on it, alluding to a ransom and a possible massacre on a university campus. When the young man is arrested, a loaded gun is discovered in his dorm room. State's attorney Tom Gibbon says police felt they had prevented a serious crime. So connecting the dots, it became apparent that in fact he was planning.
He was, if not planning an actual mass casualty event, he was planning to be able to credibly threaten that. And he was taking steps, actual steps towards making a terrorist threat. It wasn't long before the news media got a hold of the story. Coming just after the Virginia Tech shooting, the story generated wall-to-wall coverage.
Thomas Phillips. For, I'd say about a week solid, news coverage had his face on CNN, MSNBC, like pretty much any news station you could turn to that had headline news. And he was either the first or second subject of it. That's all we saw in the news of him, was pretty much, he's a terrorist.
He planned this entire attack. He left a threatening note in his car. There was ammunition. He was purchasing guns to either fund this attack or carry the attack out.
They showed a table of guns that he never got, but that he wanted to actually buy at some point. It turned out Oliflsen had actually ordered four guns off the internet, three of them low-caliber guns identical to one another, and the other was a .45-caliber Mach 10 semi-automatic. States Attorney Tom Gibbons. That is a high capacity, certainly a high caliber.
It's a scary, certainly a scary-looking gun. As reporters pressed for answers, the investigation grew. Friends were contacted, evidence collected. Then police discovered something important.
During the investigation, there were computers seized. And something that was located on his girlfriend's computer was a file that he had created in a program called Movie Maker. And what he had made was a video with this language that was found in the note. It was language that read, the viewers of this collectively deposit a total of $200,000 in the following PayPal account.
Or else, the number of students killed in Virginia Tech will be topped during the summer school semester at a target university. This is not a joke. Tom Gibbons told me that the language was found in a file that had been deleted. If the video was deleted, how did you know what was in it?
Well, because nothing is ever really completely deleted off a computer. Our forensic examiners were able to go in, take an image of the hard drive after securing it, and extract and do an analysis of all the data that remains on a hard drive. On July 24, 2007, Oletosin Oduwale was formally charged with storing a weapon in campus housing and a far more serious crime attempting to make a terrorist threat. The case that was made was effectively that he had constructed this threat.
He was planning to use this threat either to act upon it. It was either that or he was trying to extort money. It was a strange charge, an attempt to make a threat. But since prosecutors couldn't prove the threat had actually been communicated to anyone, that was the best they could do.
I would say that there was only one step missing that we couldn't prove, and that was the actual public posting of the threat. That was the only last piece of evidence that we didn't have that would have made it a completed terrorist threat. But Tom felt they had plenty of proof showing planning, preparation, and effort to purchase firearms. It's like a conspiracy type of case.
It's not exactly conspiracy, but in the same vein, a person is taking actual substantial steps toward the commission of the offense. And by doing that, they are in effect attempting to commit it. I asked Tom if this was like someone who does some research on how to hire a hitman, but doesn't act on it. Well, I would liken it more to the person who takes the gun, drives to the intended victim's house, and for whatever reason, doesn't get out of the car.
But they've taken an actual substantial step toward the act, toward the murder. It's more than just thinking about it. It's more than just a little bit of research. There was a substantial amount of work that went into this.
So I like the analogy that you have just now. And I'm curious from a legal perspective what you do with that, because let's say someone does buy a gun and does drive to someone's house and doesn't get out of their car and drives off. And let's say the authorities have some way of knowing about all of this happening. Can you charge that person with a crime?
In the murder context, no. In the threatening context, you can't, because they're taking actual steps. They're creating things. They're creating a threat.
In Tom Gibbon's mind, a catastrophe had been averted. But had it? To find out, I went to meet the man who police described as a dangerous, would-be terrorist. Stay with us.
Today, the story of a young man accused of an attempted terrorist attack. That young man is Odotosin Odewale. It's a Nigerian name, but it was given to a boy who was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri.
You know, as a kid, me and my brothers and our friends in the neighborhood used to play in our backyard. We used to go out into the woods and play hide-and-seek and cops and robbers and all that good stuff and we used to ride our bikes all throughout the neighborhood. Odotosin's parents left Nigeria and emigrated to the United States when they were young. Odotosin, as he was called, was raised with his five brothers in a six-bedroom house in St.
Louis. He was surrounded by music. Lots and lots of music. One, two, three, it's about Snoop Dogg and Dr.
Dre is an adult. I fell in love with music probably around seven or eight years old. You know, I grew up listening to a lot of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, a lot of West Coast music.
A little bit of like Divya Nas but majority West Coast music. What Tosin is talking about here is 90s style gangster rap straight out of L.A. Young men like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg were riding their talent into St.
Louis. Gangster rap evolved from hip-hop. It's long been controversial because it emphasizes the gangster lifestyle and at times promotes violence, misogyny, drugs and murder. But it's popular and commercially very lucrative.
For a kid like Tosin, it was magnetic. He was all in. In eighth grade, specifically in eighth grade, me and a lot of my friends we used to start like rapping at the lunch table. We freestyle and somebody would do the beat on the table and we'd just go in a circle just freestyling.
It'd be like seven or eight of us. And we would do this every single day, literally every single day. And it was just a lot of profanity, a lot of just, okay, we can finally say what we want to say. Give me an example.
Okay, so UGK has a song called Take It Off which was really, really big around like 95 to 98. And so that was a really, really big song. How does it go? You're probably on the spot.
It was, Take It Off, Trick, Vandoval, let me see it. If you looking for a trail type, nigga, let me be it. Got the V12 bins. I've stayed with you for a long time.
Oh, of course. That's one of my most favorite, favorite groups of when I was a kid. Tosin says the swearing at Tough Dog. That wasn't really the point.
The music itself was what moved in. Got the rhythm, the bass, the drums, the hi-hats. It was kind of like, it was just like a feel. You know, I think what really makes people gravitate toward music is how it makes them feel.
And so hip-hop itself, I mean, even if you're not necessarily from the culture, you know, hip-hop makes you feel a certain way. It makes you feel strong, braggadocious, free. It makes you feel creative. Tosin had a dream that maybe someday he could make a name for himself as a rap star.
But when he was 14, his father sent him abroad for school, first to England and then to Nigeria. Now, that might not seem the best move for an aspiring rap artist, but Tosin says his Nigerian boarding school was full of kids like him. So I was surrounded around a lot of people from New Jersey, New York, Atlanta, California, and London. And a lot of them made music.
And so a lot of what we used to do in Nigeria when we were in the dorms is that he would write rap music. And I think it was in Nigeria where I really got, I guess, like creative and better and because we were able to just really lock in. In America, I was only with my friends at school seven hours a day. Nigeria, I'm with you 24 hours a day for three months.
You know, and so it was, yeah, it was where I guess I fell in love with it more was when I was in Africa. It was in Nigeria that Tosin made his public debut as a rapper. In church, he went to a Christian school and each Sunday, the entire school went to church. It was a huge church.
Sometimes they would allow students in the church to either sing songs on stage or do performances. We decided to do it. do a rap a christian rap in front of the entire congregation 2500 people when toson tells the story you can hear his happiness just remembering that moment i run on stage with the mic and everybody's like ah and everybody's like praising you and i started rapping nobody heard what i said but they were going crazy and it was like this is a church i really fed my ego like oh man like people love me people love me you know like whatever it's just church but um that that was really really um i guess a confidence builder as far as okay you can take your raps away from just your circle of friends and actually like say them to the public when toson was in his last year of high school in nigeria he applied to go to college in the united states he had only one school in mind southern illinois university it appealed to him because it was close to st louis close to his family his friends his home he was accepted in the fall of 2005 he started his freshman year tolson describes it as a pretty typical introduction to college life classes parties students always moving together in huge groups in the spring tolson decided to join fraternity he chose and was accepted by iota phi theta an historically african-american frat thomas phillips met tolson through the fraternity he remembers his first glimpse of him because tolson stood out he was a little bitty kid wearing a gigantic hoodie and the biggest headphones vintage headphones so you know like uh back in like the 80s when they first had like the home stereo headphones that were like the big gigantic cushion pairs with the metal braces on the sides like once you would necessarily wear out in public you might listen to like these headphones in the comfort of your home but something about those headphones and him being as small as he was then uh kind of stuck out to me so as it turned out he was really big into music especially rap music and that was the best pair of headphones he could find at the time that gave him the best sound quality so the two became good friends thomas s tolson was big-hearted he looked out for people he often asked fraternity brothers to help him check out on the homeless in the area he organized campus events including a speech by former black panther bobby seal and he drew people together with his music it was music that made him such a good fit for the fraternity at the time uh most of us in the fraternity at least had some kind of musical talent like if you didn't play an instrument you sung if you couldn't sing you rap if you couldn't do any of the three which i can't then you were either a producer or a mixer tolson of course wrapped thomas produced he started talking about making it big as thomas describes those days to me he says it's important to understand one thing about tolson his music meant everything to him but it wasn't him so uh one of the things that i did notice was that as much as tolson uh his personality his actual personality came through uh in his actions his music was entirely different tolson did read his songs with violent and misogynistic lyrics but that didn't mean that he was a violent or misogynistic person one of his favorite groups at the time uh was three six mafia i'm not sure if you're familiar with them or not but uh a lot of their music at the time was pretty much uh the version of rock and roll's like sex and drugs kind of deal eventually thomas and toson decided to move in together they found a rally two-bedroom apartment not far from campus thomas says it was perfect meaning like if you want to rap about you know how hard your life is and how you know there's a lot of crime in your area and you want to rap about what's real like this is the place that you can actually do it and it feels authentic because you're not actually recording this from you know you know a nice uh apartment in st louis someplace you're not recording this in a hotel or a penthouse or a nice recording studio we're in the basement uh there are roaches everywhere and we're recording this in the closet you know because our studio was in the living room there was a closet in the living room which was for coats like no you have guests come take the coach put them in a closet we turned that closet into a studio booth so our microphone was in there we put foam all over the walls to kind of soundproof it and that was the studio booth the apartment became a rap salon or as toson puts it an artist and so that was how it was it was pieces of paper and notebooks everywhere in the living room a couch a tv a computer studio equipment microphone keyboard and that was our artist space they were experimenting writing rewriting trying to compose songs that worked they paid a couple gigs on campus sometimes they handed out free cds to get their name out but money was always tight and they needed better equipment toson views himself as an entrepreneur he proudly points out that he came from a family of self-starters so he says he started looking for opportunities to make some extra cash he landed on an idea one that in retrospect might not have been the best it involved the internet and guns and so i was thinking okay you know maybe this could be a beginner business where i could buy these guns very cheap from the manufacturers online have them shipped to a local dealer and then resell them for retail price and make a little bit of money and we could use this money and buy all the equipment studio equipment that we could dream of because that was one thing that was kind of harming us our first six or seven months the equipment that we were recording music with was very bad it was just you know the final songs they'd be a lot of static and we just knew we needed better equipment what jose was thinking of is called drop shipping it's used all the time in online sales when you buy a product online from a retailer that product isn't necessarily sitting in a retailer's warehouse sometimes a retailer has to order it from a wholesaler you've paid for a product the retailer doesn't physically possess tossing thought he could adapt this model to the online gun market buy guns wholesale and then mark up the price the basic business idea was buy low sell high period tossing advertised guns for sale online once people bought them he ordered the guns from the wholesaler but with gun sales there's a catch guns bought wholesale must go through a licensed gun dealer before they can pass on to a buyer that didn't worry tossing he wasn't doing anything illegal he contacted a local gun dealer and asked him to put through the transaction and so that was what i was doing you know i never took possession of those guns i never intended to i never did tossing agrees that he called the gun dealer repeatedly to ask about the weapons but that's because he says he had already accepted money from buyers and needed to complete the transaction so to recap we have a young man with big dreams he's got a budding career as a rapper an active social life and a commitment to community service he's buying guns but only he says to sell them and make a little extra cash for music equipment this is not a picture of a would-be terrorist but that brings us to that piece of paper the police found in dosen's car as state's attorney tom gibbons put it they found you know visible in the car a note it had music lyrics on one side but a threat on the other send two dollars to and then it's a paypal account if the money doesn't reach fifty thousand dollars in the next seven days then a murderous rampage similar to the virginia tech shooting will occur at another highly populated university and then in all capital letters this is not a joke it would be hard to explain away a note like this demanding ransom threatening a campus massacre but toson says the problem lies in one word note what the police found he insists was not a note it was scribbled ideas for a rap song this is how toson says it all unfolded it began as an idea one night in the artist's den toson had just finished watching the tv show law and order the episode was about some bloggers who live streamed their home on social media so it's me willow again a lot of you commented on fight that holden and i had yesterday's video and so the way the episode started off while they were live streaming just hanging out masked men kicking the door kidnap the girl beat up her boyfriend and then later they get back on her um online page and start a ransom toson was fascinated by the episode he loved the way it played with viewers all the way through it kept people guessing were they watching an actual kidnapping take place online were they watching performance art toson thought the premise might make a cool spoken introduction to a rap song and so that was where the idea i was trying to figure out something i'm trying to figure out something that would be real to what's actually in life like there is paypal there is youtube and there is etc etc and so it was kind of like a copy of that but it's something that wasn't as fake as that something that was actually real sometimes rap songs start this way with introductions that set a scene with lyrics that don't write that says silson's friend thomas is what they were playing with you heard the uh introduction to naz's uh it was written i haven't how does it go uh it starts off with uh two slaves in the field and this is back in you know slavery days so in american history so what happens is that the two slaves hear the overseer coming and they decide to stage a revolt right at that point damn you master you ain't my master man and you hear the slaves beating the master down and you hear the you know the slaves being dragged away once the revolt pretty much quailed at that point so it's an introduction that draws you in and you hear this violent introduction and then the lead song comes on tolson wondered whether the demand for a ransom and the threat of a campus shooting could make for a good intro the friends played with the idea and tried out a few things they wrote some lyrics on a piece of paper they even made a lyric video where the words of the song scroll on the screen tolson felt it didn't work but some of the lines he wrote on the other side of the paper did eventually become a song it was called poppy mommy poppy it's like a club song it's about like girls dancing in a club i wrote it complete from beginning set the lyrics on the other side of the paper were the ones that tolson discarded it was the reference to the virginia tech shootings the threat of a mass killing when tolson decided to move back to campus sometime later he threw all his notebooks and paper and clothes into his car to move them to a dorm one sheet of paper slipped under the center console it was the sheet police would later find in his car tolson says the police simply had him wrong he wasn't a terrorist in the making he was a student a musician a budding entrepreneur he left his car on a campus side road for a simple reason he'd run out of gas he says he was going to get more fuel when he got paid at the end of the week and that loaded gun in his dorm tolson agrees he shouldn't have had the gun in campus housing but he insists it was an innocent mistake he legally registered the weapon and thought that that made it okay to have it with him on campus but tolson and his friend thomas say owning guns was not unusual in their part of the midwest it just wasn't a big deal one of the things that uh i kind of want to like make sure that everybody's clear on is that down in southern illinois and st louis missouri area and all that uh there was a pretty big gun culture so when we moved all camps one of the things that he mentioned that he wanted to do and that we both ended up doing was applying for our boy cards the uh firearm identification uh that illinois has you get to get a id to own or carry a firearm thomas and tolson both say they had no idea the police were poking around so when the cops burst into their dorm and arrested tolson it came as a complete surprise so as far as my mind i'm thinking okay maybe i have a warrant for a ticket or i really didn't know what was going on and so i asked him several times that hey can i call my dad i don't call my dad just to let him know what's going on i can't call my older brother and they wouldn't let me make any phone calls he said it wasn't that a couple of days later when thomas came to visit that he actually began to understand what was going on so i picked up the phone and was talking to him through the glass and first he asked me was like how am i i said i'm fine i'm just trying to figure out what's going on and then that's when he says do you remember uh that night when we were writing and producing and you wrote the thing about the paypal account and the thing we got from the law and order episode and i was like yeah and he says that's what this is about and so when he said that twice he said that's what this is about tolson worried they thought he was a terrorist and then came to charge for attempted terrorist threat i never heard of a charge like that before you know attempted terrorist threat not a terrorist threat still those who were sure the confusion would soon be cleared up so my dad gets here with our lawyer we'll be able to explain this and you know and that'll be the end of it they made a mistake and we can go back to our lives but when the story hit the news tolson says everything got worked they were they were saying a nigerian citizen oh tolson odwale and making it seem like i was like a foreigner that i came over here just the way i was being portrayed as if like i was a terrorist and of course my name was mispronounced on purpose to make it sound really really foreign and just different and um they would not describe me like i was a kid born and raised in st. Louisville the news media kept harping on the note they distorted it tolson says and so yes when you now paint it that way as a note and violence and guns it's very easy to make anybody feel like oh yeah this is one bad guy because you can craft information and make something appear the way you want to if you have the upper hand tolson says no one in law enforcement wanted to hear his side of the story thomas phillips felt the same after police initially talked to thomas he tried to go back to them and explain that they had it all wrong it's a shame that i can actually tell somebody like a law enforcement official after the initial interview this is what actually happened to y'all add this to the story and that no one's going to hear it because everybody's mind's already made up with what actually appears to be uh the case why did that happen there were lots of issues race culture the fear of mass shooting and there was the music after we ran the analysis we found that in every dimension rap lyrics were evaluated more negatively compared to when the lyrics were perceived to be country stay with us a few months after tolson was arrested a visitor showed up to meet jeffrey ordangan a professor and lawyer at northwestern university pritzker school of law the man was toyan odewale tolson's father tolson was unruffled and extremely poised and dignified tolson's father wanted jeffrey to take on his son's case he was intrigued and agreed jeffrey drove five hours south to see tolson at the madison county jail it was a contact visit because i was an attorney and that was our first meeting he was i recall he was shackled at the ankles and handcuffed at his wrists and he was a um quiet young guy great eye contact not particularly frightened like so many people are in that situation in light of the virginia deck massacre jeffrey says he understood why police suspected tolson but he says they should have quickly figured out that they were off track once you did your investigation you should have known that you were off on a uh fool's errand you should have known and it wouldn't have taken too much effort to realize that he was not uh plotting or planning some kind of massacre uh you could have uh realized and seen very readily that these were lyrics in fact there were lyrics on the opposite side if i recall that note um on both sides and i believe that there were lyrics throughout the car and his apartment when they searched it they found notebooks with hundreds of pages of grab lyrics investigators were unable to find evidence that tolson had a violent site teachers and students maintained he wasn't threatening but the prosecution disagreed states attorney tom gibbon says despite tolson's insistence that what was on the paper were lyrics he remained certain that they were not i probably read at least a thousand pages of his writing uh to get to to get to know the mind of bolitos no diwali um and to understand the difference between the types of writings that he did and uh so you know having and after reviewing all that spending a lot of time looking at it mostly my free time at night um i became convinced that in fact this was genuinely a crime this was an individual playing a very serious crime um this was not uh prosecuting someone for writing lyrics this was prosecuting somebody um for all of the substantial steps that he had taken toward very serious crimes and potentially a mass casualty event so now we have two different stories one is a tale of a potential terrorist plotting a campus massacre another is a story of a young man who has unlawfully stored a gun at his university but otherwise has done little wrong it would be up to a jury to decide which story was a truthful one and how to understand those words written on that piece of paper but before we head to trial i want to introduce you to one more person my name is sharis kubrin and i'm a professor of criminology law and society at the university of california irvine charis was called as an expert for the defense in tolson's case in part because of some interesting research she's done she was noticing a large number of prosecutions that were introducing rap lyrics in court she had a basic question are violent lyrics perceived as more threatening more dangerous more literal more in need of regulation when they are described as rap compared to other music genres this question she felt was intricately linked to the outcomes of criminal cases because prosecutors are using rap lyrics as evidence in these criminal trials i felt this raises a whole host of questions about whether prosecutors judges jurors may be relying on perception and stereotype about rappers and rap music in their interpretation and evaluation of the lyrics we identified a set of violent lyrics it was actually lyrics from the song bad man's blunder um and it's a kingston trio folk group from the 60s and the lyrics go something like this well early one evening i was rolling around i was feeling kind of mean i shot a deputy down strolling on home and i went to bed while i laid my pistol up under my head well early in the morning about the break of day i figured it was time to make a getaway stepping right along but i was stepping too slow got surrounded by a sheriff down in mexico well early in the morning about the break of day i figured it's time to make a getaway stepping right along but i was stepping too slow got surrounded by a sheriff down in mexico so we took this set of violent lyrics and we told participants in our experiment that they were either rap lyrics or country music lyrics charis then asked them how threatening and offensive they perceived the lyrics to be and whether they felt the lyrics should be regulated and after we ran the analysis we found that in every dimension rap lyrics were evaluated more negatively compared to when the lyrics were perceived to be country charis then replicated the study again she didn't play songs for volunteers she just printed out the lyrics from a johnny cash song i'm called boyming sue but i busted a chair right across his teeth and we crashed through the wall into the street by the way johnny cash gets invoked a lot because everyone knows his you know his song i shot a man in reno just to watch him die right and so johnny cash gets kind of invoked like well why can johnny cash say lyrics like that where he's shooting a man in reno and there's other violence but when rappers do it it's seen as literal but anyway we selected these lyrics from a boy named sue well i hit him hard right between the eyes and he went down but to my surprise he came up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear but i busted a chair right across his teeth and we crashed through the wall and into the street kicking and gouging in the mud and the blood in the beard i tell you i fought tougher men but i really can't remember when he kicked like a mew anything like a crocodile we found that those people who thought that those were rap lyrics were much more likely to evaluate them negatively on all those dimensions compared to those participants in our study who thought they were country as a criminologist charis says her results are troubling i am not necessarily advocating to not find people guilty of a crime that they've committed what i'm advocating for is the use of proper techniques and proper evidence to arrive at that decision right now prosecutors are relying too heavily on a form of artistic expression that is fictional that has a lot of artistic conventions knowing full well that the vast majority of jurors and judges don't really know what the artistic conventions of rap music are the prosecutors in this sense are taking shortcuts and it's at the expense of people's lives and by the way no other form of artistic expression is treated this way in the courts because it's not as if rock musicians and heavy metal musicians and punk musicians are having their lyrics introduced as evidence against them this is happening only for rappers and rap music on october 18 2011 in madison county illinois olatosin odowale's trial began jeffrey odagan says things went wrong from the start you know olatosin odowale was a very dark-skinned nigerian young man whose interest was rap and the whole defense was centered around rap the jury was all white overwhelmingly rural and the average age was in the 40s and 50s so if you put that profile together a 50 year old white rural juror trying to understand our defense who none of them if i recall had ever listened with any frequency to rap music some of them did not know what it was but this was the jury that we ended up with and so that was a problem tom gibbons did not argue the case but supervised the attorneys who did he believes they acted with care and caution i wanted to make absolutely sure that we weren't using the authority of the state's attorney's office uh to prosecute somebody for their thoughts to prosecute somebody uh for in this case rap lyrics um that's not an appropriate use of the power of a prosecutor's office and the power of law enforcement again much of the attention was focused on that piece of paper that police found in tolson's car tom gibbon says the defense argued strenuously that the writing was rap lyrics although i have to tell you one of his lawyers tried to rap the words in this note in trial and it was a miserable failure because these are not rap lyrics to this comment tolson just shakes his head he admits the lyrics were not very good which is why he didn't end up using them in a song but it was still rap they didn't want to tell people it was rap music they wanted to say it was a note so they didn't show where it rhymed where it actually rhymed if you don't know rap music and i just give you that sentence where can you make it rhyme it doesn't look like a rhyme if this account doesn't reach 50 50 000 seven days get ready for a murderous rampage similar to the vt shooting will occur at another highly populated university and this is not a joke so if you don't know rap music you won't be able to piece that together majority of southern illinois midwestern people that are 40 50 60 years old prosecute as police officers they don't know how to break down rap music or anything so i said hey that was like a small piece of like a rap verse that we didn't even want to use like it out here he's lying after a five-day trial the jury returned its verdict guilty state's attorney tom gibbons the jury convicted mr odewalli uh they took all the evidence into account uh they deliberated uh for i don't recall the amount of time i think it was a couple hours at least um and they returned a verdict of guilty on both counts and he was sentenced to five years in the department of corrections on the uh attempted terrorist threat and a year in madison county jail on the unauthorized possession of a weapon based on the level of defense jeffrey ordangan says the trial was a disaster it was a first amendment train wreck in my view jeffrey sees two flaws in the prosecution's case first they criminalized speech by taking a work of art uh something that was intended as a work of art and distorted it into criminal intent second he says the criminalized thought by criminalizing thought if what i mean is we need to charge this man with a crime because for all we know he was thinking about acting on what we surmise were evil intents even though we have no evidence that he intended to communicate that thought jocelyn says his worst moment came after the trial at the graham correctional center they strip you naked you take the bend over they make sure you don't you know you're not sneaking any weapons just a very degrading process and then uh when they finally put me in a cell and then they lock the door and then you hear the clink and it's a it's a small cell it's like five by nine but there's two metal bunk beds in there into you and another guy and you just feel so claustrophobic but you can't leave tolson says it felt like being punched in the gut jeffrey ordangan appealed a conviction a year and a half later the case came before an appellate court the conviction for the terrorist charge was overturned the court said in the absence of sufficient evidence that the defendant had taken a substantial step toward making a terrorist threat his writings as abhorrent as they might be amount to mere thoughts since tolson's case went to trial there have been many other cases in which rap artists have had their lyrics introduced as evidence in criminal proceedings criminologist charis cubran not a lot of people know that this is happening i don't think we quite understand the implications of using rap lyrics as evidence and what that means for defendants like can they get a fair trial can we ensure that their first amendment rights are protected um when these lyrics have the potential to bias jurors when i met him at his home in new jersey olatosin odowale was 31 years old he says the trial the conviction the prison time he's put all of that behind him but one thing still upsets him having lyrics he considers embarrassingly bad attached to his name there's a lot of stuff that you will never hear that you'll never see because i either didn't think it was good or i didn't think it would be received well this was supposed to be one of those things that the world was never supposed to see or hear every artist aspiring or well-established knows what it's like to try something and then toss it aside the drawings askew the photograph is blurry the verses don't rhyme the cutting room floor is littered with false starts and failed attempts but these dead ends and errors are essential to the artistic process toson never ended up becoming a rap star he's still a musician but he's more focused now on finishing his education launching a career in real estate and starting a family one day some of toson's work did find the spotlight people spent hours poring over his music analyzing his words but like others before him toson discovered that the artist doesn't always control how his creations are understood sometimes the stuff on the cutting room floor ends up being your legacy this episode of hidden brain was produced by reina cohen jennifer schmidt and tara boyle our team includes maddie penman and renee clarr original music for this episode was composed by ramtean our unsung hero this week is mary glendinning mary is a research librarian at npr and she played a crucial role in tracking down information for the story when you picture a librarian you're probably thinking of someone who deals with books but mary and her team are so much more than that they're fact-checkers detectives masters of the archives and data experts thank you mary and all the researchers at npr for your hard work i'm shankar pitanatham and this is npr