This story was reported by Rick Hampson, Chris Kenning, Gregory Korte, Kevin McCoy and Nicquel Terry Ellis and was written by Hampson

USA TODAY Network

In the span of 10 days before the midterm elections, Americans saw four terrifying new faces of hate crime.

These were men whose festering ideological grievances were exacerbated by a mental illness or personality disorder. They were engaged with fellow haters on social media, but isolated from society. Their economic prospects were dim. For each, there was a point in life where they turned toward violence, and an incident that seems to have given them the final push.

Their targets covered the waterfront of hate — Jews. African Americans. Women. Political opponents. And their cases crashed into the national consciousness in in a span of 240 hours.

It started Oct. 24. Gregory Bush, 51, having failed to get into a black church outside Louisville, went to a Kroger. There, telling a bystander that “whites don’t shoot whites,’’ he killed two black shoppers in cold blood.

Two days later, Cesar Sayoc, 56, was accused of mailing pipe bombs to a number of President Donald Trump’s political critics.

The next day, Robert Bowers, 46, invaded a Pittsburgh synagogue, shouted "All Jews must die!," and fatally shot 11 people.

Finally, on Nov. 2, Scott Beierle, a 40-year-old misogynist, shot two women to death in a Tallahassee yoga studio and then killed himself.

This type of hate criminal differs from one on which criminologists focused in the late 20th century: weekend haters — groups of young men who get their kicks and cement their bond by beating up a member of a minority group or defacing a synagogue or other symbol of perceived otherness.

Since 9/11 and the rise of the internet, they’ve been supplanted by a hateful new man. He is more ideological, more committed, and ultimately more violent.

But how did lives covering a cumulative total of 193 years crash together in the space of 10 days? And what were their paths to this disastrous crescendo?

What turned Sayoc, a chronic liar, small-time thief and one-time stripper — the personification of his sleazy Florida beachfront haunts — into an accused terrorist?

How did Bowers, once an amiable, unexceptional delivery man, become a reclusive, online anti-Semite and gun nut? How did a guy who’d jokingly tell his buds, “I’m going in!’’ when he headed to the bathroom become the zealot who used the same phrase, with no irony, before invading a synagogue on a day of worship?

Bush was a diagnosed schizophrenic with paranoid delusions. Does that explain why someone who married an African-American later became so antagonistic toward blacks?

Beierle was a creepy bully of a substitute teacher who burdened students with extra work while he watched pornography on a classroom computer. But how did that lead to murder?

On the route to hate

Hate crimes reported to the FBI rose 17% last year, the third consecutive annual increase. And experts agree that such offenses are under-reported. Most jurisdictions responding to the FBI — including, absurdly, the greater Miami and Las Vegas police — reported no hate crimes in the previous year. Even the death of a woman who was run over by a car driven by a participant in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville last year was not reported as a hate crime.

If hate crime is increasing, so is our knowledge of hate criminals. Those who struck this fall shared some characteristics, and passed some of the same milestones on the path to violence.

A GRIEVANCE

Hate criminals collect grievances like some people collect autographs. “These are not happy people,’’ says Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State-San Bernardino.

Sayoc hated attacks by liberals, Democrats and the media on his hero, Donald Trump.

Bowers hated what he viewed as an international Jewish conspiracy to encourage illegal immigration into the U.S.

Bush hated black-against-white racism.

Beierle hated women who didn’t want men — including him.

A MENTAL ILLNESS OR PERSONALITY DISORDER

Hate criminals are not, as Levin says, happy people. Each appears to have been somewhere on a spectrum between personality disorder and psychosis.

It didn’t always look that way. Scott Meigs, who worked at strip clubs with Sayoc for two decades, says he thought Sayoc was quirky; he didn’t think he was delusional.

Sayoc harbored delusions of grandeur and seems to have suffered from the psychological disorder known as “grandiose narcissism.” He falsely claimed to have been the grandson of the man who “unseated the Communist Party of the Philippines;’’ to have played pro soccer in Italy; to have played Arena Football professionally; to be a Seminole Indian.

His behavior was always erratic. His college soccer coach says he once chased an opponent during a match off the pitch and into an adjacent creek. Years later, when Sayoc visited his old coach at another college, he brought along a co-ed band of strippers, two of whom made out at stops along the campus tour.

Sayoc’s family repeatedly insisted that he seek mental health treatment. He repeatedly refused.

Bowers’ parents divorced shortly after his first birthday; then he lived with his mother. When he was 6, his father was arrested for attempted rape. Six months later the father shot himself to death at a campground 100 miles north of Pittsburgh.

In 2004, police were called to Bowers’ own address on a report of a suicide attempt.

Bush, according to his son, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder — schizophrenia with a mood disorder, such as bi-polar. But he disliked the side effects of his medications. "I'm lucky I made it this far,’’ he once wrote on Facebook, “with all the trouble I've caused myself when I get off my medicine.’’ He told his son the meds made it hard to sleep.

In 2000, after he and his wife separated, he was found in a bathtub with his wrists slit. Around the same time, he shot his cellphone because it wasn’t working.

Beierle struck almost everyone he ever met as odd, creepy or threatening. In grad school he walked with a exaggerated gait and often made inappropriate comments to women. A roommate recalls Beierle never had visitors himself, but sat around the living room in his briefs drinking beer when others did. He’d scream in his sleep.

His roommates knew he’d been in the military and thought he might suffer from PTSD. But Beierle once bragged about having repeatedly rebuffed suggestions that he get help.

A PERSONAL ISOLATION

Each was a man apart from others.

Sayoc, the most engaged and outgoing of the four, was estranged from his family. Even his grandmother, with whom he lived for a time, reportedly sold her home to get him out.

A bad relationship with his mother ended completely about four years ago when she refused to let him use her mailing address until he sought mental health care.

His former lawyer, Ronald Lowy, says he sensed in Sayoc an emptiness that was filled by Trump – a surrogate for the father who abandoned his family during Cesar’s early childhood.

He married a fellow stripper in 1998, but that lasted a matter of months. As for friends, an aunt told the Palm Beach Post she didn’t remember Cesar ever having any. He admitted as much in an otherwise blustery legal deposition in 2014: "I really don't, you know, socialize with too many other people.’’

Bowers was once “a happy dude,’’ a friend and co-worker at a bakery told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. But he seemed to lose his social network when he quit in 2002, only to find a hate-filled community online.

Bush’s marriage only lasted a few years. After that he lived with his parents, whom he was charged with assaulting in 2009 and locking inside their home. His only son, Greg Bush II, 20, says he and his father were not close.

Beierle had few steady relationships, none of them with women. In his YouTube video, Plight of the Adolescent Male, Beierle calls beautiful women the “epitome of arrogance.”

AN IMMERSION IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is both a window onto the passion that motivates hate crime and an echo chamber that nurtures it.

Sayoc used social media to advertise his support for Trump and show himself at rallies and other events.

Bowers’ nascent infatuation with fringe ideas — while at the bakery, he puzzled friends with tirades against UN “Blue Helmets’’ (peacekeepers that the far right considers a threat to U.S. sovereignty) — blossomed online into xenophobia and anti-Semitism. He seems to have moved right thanks initially to talk radio, and then kept going online.

A new platform, Gab, had an anything-goes tolerance for extreme speech that gave Bowers a chance to network with like-minded people.

“They sit there and imbibe this content, and some of them go on to do horrible things,” says Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who has studied the use of social media by right-wing hate groups. Bowers, he adds, had “clearly been steeping in it for quite a long time.”

In 2017 the online right divided after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville ended in a woman’s violent death. One faction viewed the rally as a setback, because it alienated more moderate followers — the optics were bad.

Hardliners wanted to press on with direct action. So did Bowers. Which explains the meaning of his post shortly before he attacked the synagogue: “Screw your optics, I’m going in.’’

Bush’s online passion ran more to sports than politics — he was a big University of Kentucky fan. But in exchanges on Twitter, he displayed a casual, almost unconscious racism and resentment against black people.

Tommy Juanso, a Louisville attorney, said he communicated with Bush on Twitter beginning in 2011, usually to discuss basketball, video games and music.

After the Kroger shooting, Juanso wrote a letter to the Courier-Journal, saying he believed that Bush “saw black men as one homogeneous group and indicated that they were some of the most racist people he'd ever met.” Juanso speculated that Bush was caught in “a weird dynamic between feeling insecure and superior at the same time. He felt superior because of his race, but people weren’t seeing him that way.”

Juanso said Bush made fun of his biracial heritage, referring to him as "the Big O," in reference to Barack Obama.

Beierle, who struggled with face-to-face relationships, seems to have lived most fully online. In another of his YouTube treatises, The Rebirth of my Misogynism, he complained about women who gave out their phone numbers but didn’t say they already had boyfriends, or didn’t return his calls.

He self-identified with a term from an online subculture — “incel,’’ for “involuntary celibate.’’

AN ECONOMIC MALAISE

The accused hate criminals “didn't seem to be going places,” observes Christine Sarteschi, author of a reference work on U.S. mass murderers. “Their life didn’t turn out in the way that they planned it.’’

After dropping out of college, Sayoc worked as a stripper. An attempt to run a dry cleaning business was undermined in 2002 by his phoning a utility with a bomb threat, In 2004, he was driving to a pro wrestling school in the Midwest when he was busted with a trunk full of steroids; he never got to the school.

He lost a house to foreclosure in 2009 and declared personal bankruptcy three years later. In May, 2015, he was arrested for shoplifting a briefcase and a garment bag from a Walmart in West Palm Beach.

When he was arrested for the pipe bombs, he was working as a glorified strip club bouncer, living in a battered van festooned with bulls-eyed photos of Trump critics, and delivering pizzas part time.

Bush left his job as a UPS package handler in 2001, went on disability, and moved in with his parents.

Bowers, a high school dropout, also lived with relatives for a while before moving to a low-rent apartment complex. He’d been sued by bill collectors. After a post-bakery stint as a long haul trucker, he seems to have eked out a living as a self-employed computer and audio technician.

Beierle, despite two master’s degrees from Florida State University in public administration and planning, could not hold a job as a substitute teacher.

A TURNING POINT

There’s a point at which each of the four paths seems to have taken a decisive turn.

Sayoc's was when Trump ran for president.

Although he’d welcomed Trump’s declaration of candidacy in 2015, until April 2016, most of Sayoc’s social media posts were about things like cars, women, bodybuilding, sports and big houses. Then, abruptly, there was a new focus — ISIS, radical Islam and prominent Democrats and other Trump critics.

Jonathan Albright of the Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism has analyzed Sayoc’s Facebook posts. He places the date of Sayoc’s radicalization as April 28, 2016: “His entire demeanor changed on that day.”

That change was marked by a Sayoc Facebook post that linked to a news story from a right-wing Israeli media organization. The report said the Egyptian government had closed 27,000 small Islamic places of worship in “a move intended to protect young people from the militancy and extremism.’’

In the ensuing days, Sayoc’s Facebook posts focused on ISIS, Qaeda and Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood. An April 29 Facebook post featured an image of a man firing a flamethrower that Sayoc captioned: “It is beyond time to wipe out slime of Humanity Islam Muslims.”

Coincidentally or not, one day before the sudden change in Sayoc’s Facebook posts, Trump gave a major foreign policy speech. He said U.S. mistakes “helped to throw the region into chaos and gave ISIS the space it needs to grow and prosper.” He mentioned ISIS at least five more times, and mentioned Al Qaeda and radical Islam — a phrase he said his opponent, Hillary Clinton, “refuses to say.”

Bowers’ turn began not online but on the radio, to judge from reporting by the Post-Gazette.

In the ‘90s, he started listening to arch-conservative, Pittsburgh-based talk show host Jim Quinn – “that was his God!’’ Patrick Kelly, a co-worker who lived in an apartment over the bakery, across the hall from Bowers, told the Post-Gazette.

Bowers created a website to archive Quinn's broadcasts. After the shooting, Quinn said he didn’t recall Bowers. But being his show’s archivist "was kind of a big deal" to Bowers, according to Robert Walters, who also worked at the bakery.

Bush fixated for years on an incident at a Louisville fireworks show. He was with his wife, an African-American, whom he recalls being obscenely heckled by some other blacks because she was with a white man — him.

He returned to it obsessively, as in this post on April 9, 2014: “Black Dudes were pissed, called her a Whore. I'll never forget it.”

Beierle’s turning point may have come back in his hometown of Vestal, outside Binghamton in upstate New York.

In The Rebirth of my Misogynism, posted in 2014, he dated his hatred of women to his eighth-grade home economics class, and named several girls in the class. “The target of their collective treachery can be anyone," he said. "How do you respond when they … attempt to tear somebody down? Well, that's where it began. … Until I figured out how to address it."

By high school, according to the Tallahassee police, there already were complaints about Beierle stalking and groping girls. In the next decade, in another state, he’d twice be charged with groping women.

A CATALYST

After a decisive turn toward extremism, there’s often a specific event that leads a hater to act on his passion.

Sayoc appears to have been galvanized by the intensity of the election campaign and the concurrent attacks on his hero, Trump.

Imon Karim met Sayoc in September while trying to sell a security camera system to the strip joint where Sayoc worked. They stayed in touch. Sayoc was obsessed with the upcoming elections. Around the time the pipe bombs started turning up, Karim says, Sayoc told him – with typical grandiosity -- “’Something’s gotta get done, and I’m going to do something about it.’”

Bush’s catalyst may have been pharmacological.

One of his longtime neighbors, Barbara Waller, says that about a month before the shooting Bush’s mother confided that her son had expressed fears that he was being targeted, saying repeatedly, “Can’t you smell that? They’re trying to gas me.’’

Bush’s mother told Waller she was seeking a “’mental inquest.’ … She told me several times, ‘Greg’s not doing well. He’s pretty sick.’” The mother said her son had been prescribed a new medication. And Bush’s son says that the last time they spoke, Bush “seemed like he wasn't talking his meds or they weren't working.”

Bowers’ catalyst may have been the immigrant caravan moving from Central America toward the U.S. border that Trump made a major issue in the midterms. Online, on sites like Gab, a conspiracy theory flourished — billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who is Jewish, was secretly paying the migrants to caravan.

In an Oct. 10 post Bowers called the migrants “hostile invaders” and accused HIAS, a Jewish-American immigration agency, of aiding and abetting the caravan. On the weekend before his rampage, HIAS sponsored a refugee event at the synagogue Bowers later attacked. He linked to the event on Gab.

For Beierle, the last straw may have been getting fired — again.

He’d lost a substitute job in 2016 in Leon County, Florida, for looking at porn in class. Then, this May, he was dismissed from another sub job in another county for inappropriately touching someone who fit the profile of an old antagonist — a middle school girl.

A problem of perception

Despite some similarities, the four men’s paths suggest that there is, in fact, no one path to hate crime, and hence no way to know when passion will cross into violence.

What’s more, to study these men is to sense that, on some level, their hate was a proxy for something else – a trauma, a deficit, an illness.

Their hatred may have been fungible. While each had a primary object of hatred, he also despised other groups. Sayoc, the Hillary hater, mocked gays. Beierle, the misogynist, made a video attacking blacks. Bowers, the anti-Semite, also attacked Africans and Black Lives Matter activists on social media.

Julien Brown roomed with Beierle in Tallahassee for a year, starting in fall 2011. He told the USA TODAY Network — Florida that Beierle made inappropriate comments to women who visited their apartment.

“He was very weird and made everyone uncomfortable. It worried me at the time. … But there wasn’t enough evidence, and I would have been wasting the police’s time if I had made any kind of report,’’ Brown said. “I had nothing.”

And neither, as we squint to see the next new face of hate, do we.

This story is based on reporting by Rick Hampson, Gregory Korte, Kevin McCoy and Nicquel Terry Ellis of USA TODAY, Chris Kenning of the Louisville Courier-Journal and Jeff Burlew of the Tallahassee Democrat.

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