Pittsburgh synagogue attacker viewed himself as a warrior, victims as enemy combatants, psychologist says

Robert Bowers didn’t realize he’s mentally ill.

The Baldwin man — who violently attacked a Squirrel Hill synagogue Oct. 27, 2018, killing 11 congregants — suffered from mental health problems as early as age 10. He spent 9 months in three Pittsburgh-area psychiatric hospitals at 13. He tried to kill his mother and commit suicide.

But nothing seemed wrong to Bowers.

As early as April 2018, as he was suffering from schizophrenic symptoms, Bowers was planning a mass shooting targeting Jewish people based on what experts have called a delusional belief system.

“He has no insight into whether his thinking is confused,” forensic psychologist Richard Rogers testified Friday. “He’s normalized his delusional thoughts.”

Rogers returned to the witness stand Friday morning, poring over 36 pages of notes and picking apart the minutiae of Bowers’ schizophrenia. He diagnosed the shooter with the severe mental health syndrome after spending 18 hours with him over four days last fall at Butler County Prison.

Other defense experts have confirmed schizophrenia and also said Bowers, 50, has epilepsy and significant brain damage.

A professor at the University of North Texas for 33 years, Rogers testified for nearly three hours Friday, the fifth day of the trial’s death penalty eligibility phase.

Rogers concluded his testimony Friday afternoon, and the case broke for the weekend about 3 p.m., eliciting cheers from the jury. Testimony will resume with another defense expert Monday morning.

On June 16, a jury found Bowers guilty of all 63 federal counts against him, including that he killed 11 people who were members of the Tree of Life-Or L’Simcha, Dor Hadash and New Light congregations on Oct. 27, 2018.

They were Rose Mallinger, 97; Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband, Sylvan Simon, 86; brothers David Rosenthal, 54, and Cecil Rosenthal, 59; Dan Stein, 71; Irving Younger, 69; Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; Joyce Fienberg, 75; Melvin Wax, 87; and Richard Gottfried, 65.

The government is seeking the death penalty. In this phase of the trial, the prosecution must prove Bowers is eligible for capital punishment. To do so, the government must prove intent and at least one of four aggravating factors.

The defense, which admitted from the outset that Bowers committed the crimes he was accused of, is attempting to persuade the jury he should not be eligible for the death penalty because schizophrenia and brain dysfunction mean he could not form the requisite intent.

Rogers, whose testimony began Thursday morning, returned to the stand Friday on re-direct examination by defense attorney Michael Burt.

When cross-examination by the government ended Thursday, U.S. Attorney Eric Olshan had spent much of the afternoon questioning why Rogers had chosen not to include many of the details of Bowers’ crime in his final report.

On Friday morning, Burt returned to that theme.

“Were you trying to hide anything from the jury by using that approach, summarizing your report?” Burt asked.

“I do not believe I was. I was being selective … in terms of hitting the key points,” Rogers answered.

Burt then spent more than an hour painstakingly going through the details Bowers gave about why he targeted Jews and what he did that day.

On what Bowers called “Attack Day,” he was calm, Rogers said, but his thoughts also were “fairly disjointed.”

He encountered a screaming woman in the midst of the shooting. He told Rogers he saw her not as a victim but an enemy.

“He was expanding who he was seeing as the enemy,” Rogers said. “Even though she was terrified, he classified her as a hostile invader.”

In his final post on the far-right social media network Gab.com, Bowers referred to refugees as hostile invaders.

“I couldn’t see the rationality of that,” Rogers said. “He saw himself in the role of the warrior. I believe it was very delusional.”

Rogers doesn’t believe Bowers’ thoughts only were based in “fixed, false beliefs,” such as the white supremacist tropes he liked on Gab.com.

“He is absolutely convinced this is reality,” Rogers said. “And he has acted on this in an incredibly violent way. I think this went miles further than right-wing ideology.”

At the time of the attack, Bowers was paranoid that “he was the target of a conspiracy.” Bowers, a former truck driver, was unemployed and living on the margins of society at the time, Rogers testified.

His delusions “included beliefs about being watched, talked about, of being spied on and being in danger because of a plot against him,” Rogers said.

Rogers said sometimes schizophrenics experience delusions based on religious content.

During his 2022 evaluation, Bowers cited John 8:44, which he said proved Jews are the children of Satan, Rogers said. He quoted the Bible’s Book of Revelation and believed the world was approaching a fiery end. “Lucifer’s doctrine” was coming in 3½ years, Bowers told Rogers.

“Some of this thinking was difficult to follow,” he testified. “I think this shows some of his disorganized thinking.”

A person does not need to have hallucinations to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, Rogers said.

Experts testifying in the trial have been divided over whether Bowers experiences hallucinations. The defense displayed medical records from Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh for Bowers when he was 5. They showed he registered a fever of 104.9 degrees and suffered from a hallucination at the time.

An earlier defense expert said that was unusual and considered it in making his schizophrenia finding.

But Rogers disagreed, calling it a “one-off medical issue.”

“Something that isolated and that long ago would have virtually no clinical significance,” Rogers said during government cross-examination.

Among the evaluations Rogers conducted on the defendant in 2022, several were designed to show if Bowers was faking his psychotic symptoms.

The tests showed he was not, he testified.

What they did show was that, in 2018, Bowers was experiencing “extreme persecutory and nihilistic delusions that the Jews are responsible for invaders entering the United States and destroying white persons,” Rogers said Thursday, his first day of testimony.

In spring 2018, he said, Bowers displayed “clearly manifested symptoms of schizophrenia.”

“This became his life,” Rogers said. “The thinking, the planning, the preparation. The act became his life.”