WE
Where He Went Wrong
The Michael Sewell Story Was he really a terrorist or just a perfect storm of being misunderstood? How did society contribute to the downfall of Sewell’s life?
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COLLIN ADAMS • reporter
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ichael Kyle Sewell, former Martin student, was much like many of his peers. You could hear him laughing during lunch in room 172, you could see him padded up after school, or with the football team, and you could recognize him as a standout, opinionated kid in every class he attended. The difference is that late 2018, Sewell would conspire to aid terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). He would be arrested and face federal charges along with making local headlines. And it would be an eye-opening moment to fellow students and the local community. Sewell had expressed great interest online in going overseas to fight for LeT and had been in talks with a “facilitator” for the organization. Sewell continued talks with this “facilitator” from around November 2018 until Sewell’s arrest in February of 2019. Unbeknownst to Sewell, the facilitator was undercover FBI agent, Michael Phillipp. According to court documents, during this time, Sewell expressed that he would be ready in three to five years to fight for LeT and that he was an adept marksman and boxer, going so far as to calling himself a “killing machine” and “a maniac who can kill anyone and not feel a thing.” In these online conversations, Sewell was very open about his hatred towards the homosexual community and expressed that he wished death upon all homosexuals and liberals, even taking it as far as wishing to burn all of them alive. He bragged to Phillipp that he had practiced killing on cats, dogs, camels, goats, and pigs, but had not yet killed humans, stating he would rather wait. While Sewell was preparing, he may have figured the best way to help LeT, until he could go fight himself, was to help recruit. Enter Jesus Wilfredo Encarnacion, a 29-year old resident of New York City. Sewell had met Encarnacion online and had been teaching Encarnacion the practice of Islam. Encarnacion would later admit to great interest in going overseas to fight for ISIS along with wanting to one day commit a major terrorist attack in the United States. Sewell dissuaded him from doing this, expressing that ISIS had no land but that LeT or the Taliban were worth fighting for. Sewell gave Encarnacion’s contact information to Phillips in an effort to get Encarnacion recruited to LeT. Phillipp told Encarnacion that if he could get a plane ticket to London, LeT would be able to get him to Pakistan from there.
Encarnacion bought a plane ticket from JFK International Airport in New York to London for Feb. 7, 2019. Sewell congratulated Encarnacion, and that short conversation would conclude Sewell’s interaction with Encarnacion. Encarnacion was arrested at JFK Airport while passing through security on Feb. 7. Sewell was arrested at his home in Arlington, Texas on Feb. 8. Both were charged with attempting and conspiring to aid a foreign terrorist group. On September 17, 2019, Michael Kyle Sewell pled guilty and received the maximum sentence of 20 years in Federal Prison.1
Questions How does this happen? It seems people quickly accepted everything reported and would accept the belief that Michael Sewell – this student who went to our classes and played on our teams – was a terrorist. I wasn’t satisfied. Something about this bothered me. The whole case seemed odd. I wanted to dive further into what happened to Michael and why. Everyone is quick to wonder: Where did he go wrong? I wasn’t satisfied with this question either. We know where he went wrong – he was a disturbed teenager who converted to radical Islam. I had questions that I’m afraid no one else is asking. Such as: Why did Michael plead guilty and receive the maximum sentence? Or why wasn’t Michael’s mental state evaluated on this case? Where did all this hate from a kid considered nice by his teachers and peers come from? Why did the court take Michael literally when there are some flaws in his testimony? Billionaire philanthropist Ray Dalio has a saying I love and wish many more people would apply to themselves and can be applied to this situation: “Never look at someone else as the problem. You can never change someone else. Always look at yourself as the problem because that’s the only
1. Encarnacion has not yet been sentenced or had a court date publicly released. He is currently being held in Federal Prison, MCC New York. Sewell’s attorneys have also filed an appeal that has not been scheduled.
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person you can change.” Which leads question I believe we should all be asking: Where did we go wrong?
The child who is not embraced by the village A study performed by psychologists Ashlie Perry & Binneh Minteh found there are individual characteristics of the homegrown terrorists and common themes. They are generally male, young (under the age of 35), educated and lack a criminal record.2 They also noted that individuals who feel isolated from the broader society are drawn to membership with a group that they feel gives them an identity.3 The need for belonging is intertwined with the motivation for identity. For Michael, LeT may have given him an identity.4 But why did LeT become Michael’s identity? “Hurt people hurt people” is a quote I really love. You can always look at those who hurt other people either physically or mentally and know there is an underlying pain in the person. In the same way that anger is a derivative of fear, harming is the derivative of hurting. You can find many examples of this in history. Hitler was beaten by his father5, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was bullied throughout school, movie shooter James Holmes had been suicidal since he was 11 years old, and even former Martin student and witnesses for convicted murderer Travon McIntyre (AKA Tay-K 47) testified that a troubled childhood that led him into years of trouble and gang activity. Psychologist Gordon Neufeld stated that bullying is a learned act and develops over time. From leading a mass genocide, homegrown terrorism, a mass shooter, to even a gang member, there seems to be a similarity: something pushed all these people to a hateful state of mind. You can argue about who was mentally ill or who was just angry and had nowhere else to go, but they all shared the same emotion: anger. This way of thinking does not have to come from a movie facade that a person would have to witness a tragic event or lose everything or the ones they love. It can be as simple as feeling as if they don’t fit in or belong. Sewell would be no exception to this. He would
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be a victim to near-constant bullying throughout his entire time in school. ••• “How would you describe Michael?” “He was a good kid, but he was socially awkward,” Hugo Avila, Sewell’s former spanish teacher, said. “He would come in here sometimes almost crying from being so frustrated from what kids in the hallways would say to him. This was even before anything had come out on the news, but they would call him terrorist because he liked reading his Quran or he would always bring up his Muslim beliefs randomly in class and it would be like, ‘Dude we’re talking about Spanish.’ Things started getting weird when he started talking about wanting to beat people up for making fun of him.” “Did it start that way or was it progressive?” I asked. “It had to have been progressive. You don’t go from nice kid to, ‘I want to beat everyone up overnight.’” The way Sewell was treated might have made him angry, depressed, and to feel as though he was not of any value. In the words of Aaron Stark, who did a Ted Talk in 2018 about growing up with a troubled childhood and having thoughts of attempting a mass shooting himself, “When you get told you’re worthless everyday, someday you’ll believe it.” It was not hard to tell that Sewell did not fit in. His classmates described him as a socially awkward kid who struggled to find his place in school. I remember him squinting his eyes in the middle of a conversation before turning the conversation on an unexpected turn. He was commonly referred to as “book sniffer” as he would forget his glasses and have to read the Quran pressed to his face. He would come to school wearing a Pakistani flag on his shoulders. He would sometimes take off running in the hallways for no reason. I even remember one day in class out of the blue he wanted to put me into a headlock to show how strong his forearms were.6 Those are just some examples. In the words of Tim Levinel, Sewell was a mismatched character7. There is nothing wrong with being a mismatched or a socially awkward person as that
2. All can be applied to Sewell. 3. The same principle can be generally applied to other famous situations such as JonesTown or the Branch Davidians. 4. I strongly encourage you to go onto SSRN.com and read the full article “Home Grown Terrorism in the United States (US): Causes, Affiliations and Policy Implications” 5. It has been debated which mental illness Hitler may have had or if he had any at all, but he showed symptoms of Borderline Paranoid Schizophrenia, Hysteria,and Megalomania. 6. No, he did not choke me out and no, I did not escape the headlock.
does not define who a person is or will become. But in a world of insecure high schoolers where you are defined by social media likes and fitting in, mismatched people overall do not fare well in high school as they are different from what is deemed “cool” and “popular” and often fall victim to the bullying and harassment of their peers. The identity Sewell found in Islam and LeT mitigated his insecurity and loneliness. It would come to give Michael purpose. We turned our backs on Michael and that set the stage for his anger to push him to speaking of committing horrific acts and created a mindset full of anger and hate. Christian Picciolini, a former Neo-Nazi member and now an anti-hate activist, spoke about the loneliness and struggles he faced growing up. He speaks of being a vulnerable 14 year-old who could not find his place in society, and being reached out to by the leader of a Neo-nazi organization named “HammerSkins” and would later go on to become the leader of the orginzation that recruited him. Picciolini in 1992 used his love of music to write racist and prejudiced songs to perform, which to his regret would later be music that partially inspired Dylann Roof to walk into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal on June 17, 2015 and kill nine. So how did Picciolini turn around his life and come to care for the people he had once hated? He answers with one word: love. It took development of relationships with the people he hated from people of color to homosexuals for him to learn “hatred is born of ignorance.” Picciolini concludes that he has found that people become extremist because they want to belong. And the only thing that can heal them is receiving compassion and love from the people they least deserved it from when they least deserved it. What about Sewell? Was he really a radical Islamist? Did he really have all this hate in his heart? Or was it the idea after he found a group he felt he belonged in, he would make these radical claims and threats in an attempt to win favor and support of his new home? If Piccioloni has taught us anything it’s that a broken person will sacrifice who they really are in order to fit in. Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang referenced Piccioloni in saying “If anyone
had reached out to me when I was that hurt and a broken 14 year old boy, I would have gone with them. If it would have been a coach, I would have gone with them or a teacher I would have gone with them. But instead, it was a hate group.” Avila said he thought that might be the case with Sewell as well. “As far as I know, Michael never had a close-knit group of friends he could trust, he never had a group that loved him here at school, so he went out and found a group that he thought did love him,” Avila said. A short simple African Proverb can sum this all up in one sentence: “The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
I killed a camel There has always been a well-known correlation between serial killers and killing animals during youth. Famous serial killers Luke Woodham, Jeffery Dahmer, and the infamous Ted Bundy fall into this category. When Michael bragged online about killing dogs, cats, camels, and pigs, that should not be taken lightly. Animal cruelty is a terrible crime in and of itself, but the red flags that can come is enough to where anyone who brags about this needs to be monitored and should seek help. But here’s my question. Michael had told me he had never been out of the country: Where do you kill a camel in the United States, let alone Texas? There are roughly 3,000 camels in the United States and almost all are privately owned. If Sewell had killed one, which there is no evidence of8, it would almost have to have been on private property (such as a zoo or farm) which would have launched its own investigation that would most likely have tied back to Sewell. But there is no evidence of any reports of camels being killed during that time frame. Is it possible that Michael was telling the truth about his experience harming animals? Yes. Is it probable? I would argue it’s not. The fact is, Sewell was on the Dallas FBI’s watchlist for months. Moreover, he was allegedly on the no-fly list and banned from traveling, which is another reason I don’t believe Sewell was telling the truth. Psychologists Aurelio Mares and Brent Turvey say people lie for two reasons: the first being that the deceptive person (the liar) sees something to
7. A mismatched person is defined in psychology as someone who does not act or respond in the same sense that society would expect people to respond. Malcolm Gladwell wrote several pages about this in his book Talking to Strangers. Though he did not use it in the same context I am using it here, the principles still apply. 8. Though it may have happend, as far as I could find, there is no evidence of Michael killing any animals, nor any record of a camel being killed in Texas. That may be why he was never charged with animal cruelty.
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gain in telling the lie. The second reason being that the deceptive person is incapable of discerning what the truth is, either temporarily or owing to some permanent mental defect. Throughout the court documents, it’s clear that Sewell was very desperate to win over the favor of Phillipp by bragging about his skills in marksmanship or boxing, or in this case, killing animals. Assuming that Sewell is lying, why did he lie? Maybe Sewell knew it would be a viable attempt to win the favor of Phillipp. or Sewell is menatlly ill and can’t decipher the truth from his imagination. It is the job of the United States judicial system to find beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendant is guilty. If there is a reasonable doubt in the simple statement of Sewell killing animals, what else did the court take literally that may not have been anything more but a lie from an insecure teenager trying to fit in?
In a world where everyone is mentally ill, why not Sewell? June 15, 2013, a 16-year old male named Ethan Couch killed four people, injured nine, and paralyzed one. He was arrested on site for driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol in Burleson, Texas. As tragic as this story is, it gained national attention and sparked outrage nationwide when in December 2013, Judge Jean Boyd sentenced Couch to 10 years probation and therapy. How does a kid who tragically affected and killed so many people get 10 years of probation? One word: Affluenza. “Research shows that of the 93 thousand children who are detained in the juvenile justice system, between 75 and 93 percent are estimated to have been traumatized to some degree. Studies consistently show that approximately 65 to 70 percent of these youth have a diagnosable mental health disorder. Approximately 25 percent are significantly impaired by the severity of their disorders.” This is an excerpt from an article titled “Kent Make-up Their Minds” by Carmen M. Cusak on SSRN.com. The study argues that our judicial system does not do a fair job at deciphering childhood trauma and PTSD in troubled youth, therefore making a compelling argument to push more kids through a Mental Health Court.
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The study states that from 1997 to 2000, one third of patients who went through the court were deemed qualified for further mental help, but we do not do this on a nationwide scale. There are thousands upon thousands of mentally disturbed people being placed in prison that could be better off in a mental rehabilitation program. How different could Sewell’s situation potentially be right now, or even thousands of others if they went through a Mental Health Court? But this is not how an American courtroom operates. Our judicial system is not designed to look and seek help for the mentally impaired, and if a court is going to explore this option it has to always be presented by the defensive side. ••• Ethan Couch’s lawyer hired a psychologist who testified that Couch had “affluenza.” He argued that he had a condition that he had grown up in an upper class environment with wealthy parents and that he was unable to know right from wrong, and did not understand boundaries. Essentially, he argued that Couch was a spoiled teenager who had grown up with a silver spoon, without rules, and that he didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong. This pushed his defensive argument that he needed rehabilitation instead of prison time. And it worked9. But “affluenza” isn’t even a real condition. There is no scientific evidence backing any condition like affluenza even exists. Couch’s team used a term to describe entitled spoiled kids from a book that came in the 1990s and somehow convinced Judge Jean Boyd that this word was a noun and a true medical condition that led to the death of four, and the injury of several others. If a court can rule Couch as mentally impaired, clearly a case like Sewell can too, right? Why does Couch receive legal mitigation but Sewell receives the maximum sentence? Why couldn’t Sewell plea he had his own version of “affluenza”? If Couch could, Sewell could too right? Maybe. But maybe there is a reason for the success found in courtrooms for the wealthy compared to the rest of the general population. It may be very simple and may have had a crucial role in Sewell’s sentencing, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
The Queen of Cuba Ana Montes, The Queen of Cuba, was an analyst and advisor for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency from 1985 until right after the 9/11 attacks. Montes had been hired by the DIA in 1985
9. An article titled “Mitigations: The Forgotten Side of the Proportionality Principle” published on SSRN. com details and opens a great argument for legal mitigation and how it’s misused, comparing cases where defendants were presumably over-punished and cases where defendants were under-punished, including great examples of situations very similar to this.
after serving previously to the Department of Justice. Montes was passionate about what she did, and she was very good at her job. She was spoken very highly of by her co-workers and received numerous awards in a time span that had never been done before. She seemed to be the perfect agent for the DIA. It wasn’t until an American plane was shot down over Cuba that any red flags had ever come up. The full investigation is complex and is not the purpose of this story, but on Sept. 21, 2001, Montes was arrested in her office. She was charged with espionage after it became clear she was aiding the Cuban government and was a mole in the DIA. The information she had given Cuba ranged from the identity of four American spies in Cuba to aiding another mole in the US government. DIA Counterintelligence agent Scott Carmichael led the investigation that prosecuted Montes. He blamed Montes for the death of at least one American, a Green Beret, Sergeant Gregory A. Fronius. Carmichael even stated that damage or extent to what Montes had informed Cuba may never be fully known. In 2002 Montes was subject to facing the death penalty, She took a plea deal: Montes pled guilty and instead of the death penalty, Montes was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison. She was sent to serve her sentence at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas and has a current release date in 2023. Why did Ana Montes commit terrible acts of treason to aid one of the United States’ biggest national security threats, and just because she pleads guilty, she gets a good deal? A government official who shared classified information, woke up every day with the intent of aiding an American threat risking national security and the lives of hundreds of millions of Americans and was responsible for at least one death, receives 25 years instead of the death penalty. The point of the plea deal is for a suspect to agree to cooperate with the government in exchange for a lower punishment. Let’s compare this to Michael, who had not yet physically commited a crime and got 20 years in prison. Michael had not committed any physical crimes, assuming he did not kill the camel. Michael had spoken of committing crimes, but is that punishable? We have already discussed the reasonable doubts in some of Sewell’s statements along
with the fact he had done nothing but make threats online with no physical action nor harm to anyone. Sewell had spoken of committing future crimes in war, but court documents don’t suggest he spoke directly against the United States. Nor did he threaten a school or public place (unlike his co-conspirator Encarnacion10). Am I saying 20 years is unfair for what Sewell did? Not at all. Who knows what the correct punishment is? But there is a flaw to have Montes and Sewell serving roughly the same sentence for two very different offenses where one endangered millions and committed treason – and the other was a high school student who did nothing beyond making threats online with no physical crime. Maybe the reason for this is as simple as Sewell got stuck with a defense attorney who provided a lukewarm defense, while Couch and Montes had top-tier private defense teams. ••• Brook Antonio II is a federal public defender. His office is based in Fort Worth and shared with several other public defenders. Antonio was assigned to represent Sewell along with William Hermesmeyer who shared the same office space as Antonio. When anyone is convicted of a charge, they are given the simple right to obtain a lawyer. If a person cannot afford to pay out of pocket for one, the state will pay for an attorney to represent them. This is protected by the sixth amendment and the position is referred to as a public defender. Here’s the catch with using a public defender. A study by Morris Hoffman analyzed more than 5,000 cases in Denver. She found that not only were you more likely to be found guilty when you had a public defender, but your sentence was on average three years longer11. It makes sense. The average salary for a public defender in 2019 was $53,218 while the average private criminal lawyer is making $133,791. While there are certainly excellent public defenders, law is a lucrative field and experienced defense lawyers are often going to be working for themselves in a private office, and why wouldn’t they? If they’re good at their job, why not go where you can make a top living compared to the lower pay of being public? Along with this, the personal investment that comes when you’re paying them out of pocket proves to be crucial in court. Maybe, most importantly though, is that private attorneys are not overworked with an overwhelming amount of cases. That cannot be said with public defenders. If their clients are guilty or innocent,
10. There were notes of Sewell mentioning an unnamed American political figure, but the extent and context of what Sewell said about them was not included in court documents. 11. The study’s main focus was why some defendants turn to public defenders when they have the opportunity to hire a private defense attorney.
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it will not affect their employment. They will continue to be hired by the government and have no backfire if they never win a case. They are simply not as intrinsically invested in their defendant as a private attorney is because there is no reason to be. If a private attorney gains a bad track record, he doesn’t get hired. If a public attorney gains a bad track record, nothing changes. But is it really as simple as Sewell having poor representation? Would Sewell have likely fared better with different attorneys assuming they were public? 94 percent of state cases end in plea deals, and 97 percent of federal cases end in plea deals. And in a federal case like Sewell’s, the plea may be the right call since federal prosecutors have a 93 percent conviction rate. It usually does turn to a “cut your losses” situation. Thus, why the plea is so common. Between both Antonio and Hermesmeyer, they represented 17 defendants in 2019. Every single one of them took a plea deal. None of them went to trial. Which leaves one question: Why did Sewell take a plea deal but still received the maximum sentence of 20 years? That is not why you take the plea deal. If you’re going to receive the max sentence, you might as well take your chances in trial. What do you have to lose? The idea of pleading guilty and receiving the maximum sentence is illogical. Maybe Sewell’s attorneys were weak and didn’t give him proper legal advice, or maybe a judge decided Sewell deserved 20 years. But I refuse to accept that Sewell deserves almost as much time as Montes or that Montes deserves as little time as Sewell, depending on your belief of which punishment is justified12. Whatever went wrong in the sentencing of Sewell is subjective and could be discussed, but I have little doubt in my mind that if Michael Sewell was from a wealthy family, with a private attorney who was willing to go to trial and potentially push a mental insanity plea, he would have still been sentenced to 20 years in prison13.
Minority Report In 2002, a movie called Minority Report was released. It was about a futuristic society where police can predict crimes before they happen and arrest the suspected criminals leading to a safer and more advanced society. The movie
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takes a twist when it comes out that the system actually may not be accurate and they are prosecuting people for future crimes that would never be intended to be committed. The last conversation I want to open: There is no evidence of Sewell ever commiting a physical crime towards anyone or anything. Sewell was arrested on the speculation he would go on to fight for LeT, and he will lose 20 years of his life for it and has gained a lifetime criminal record. Is this a society we want to live in? Where we will ruin a person’s entire life over the speculation that they may one day commit a crime? After studying Sewell’s situation and spending much time debating this question. I’m still not sure. ••• I want this to be noted that I wrote this with one intent: for all of us to look at ourselves and ask, “What could I have done better?” The harassment and disadvantages Sewell faced from his school life to his legal process is not an anomaly. It happens all the time to the Michael Sewells of the world. I like to imagine that this could have been prevented if Sewell had one person in his corner to stick up for him. Sadly, I don’t think there was anyone like that. I had built what you may call a friendship with Michael but I would never speak to him outside the one class we shared together, and I too was one of the people who would sometimes make jokes about him, which I now regret. This is not a plea for Micahael’s innocence. He had clearly become a threat to others and himself, and in that aspect I am happy they caught him. I attempted and failed to get ahold of Sewell’s family to get stories about and references to Sewell’s childhood to early life, and couldn’t find anyone who credibly knew anything about his home life. I hope we all look at ourselves and see that Sewell was not a bad kid, but the way we mistreated him affected his choices and pushed him away. Along with some unfortunate circumstances he had no control over what led to him to what I believe was an unjust punishment. I hope we all are more cautious with what we say and how we act towards our peers, from the jokes we make to what we say behind their backs. Along with you find it in you to be a friend to someone who doesn’t deserve it, and reach out to the Michael Sewell in your life, a kid who isn’t fitting in and feels lost and be the one who reminds them they aren’t worthless. It may save a life.
12. I reached out to Antonio Brook II on numerous occasions for a comment and failed to get a response. 13. I would argue even a public attorney who is willing to go to trial would have gotten less than 20 years for Sewell, but we will never know. I do like to wonder what would happen if someone like OJ Simpson had to use a public defender or what would have happened to Sewell if he had the same accessibility to top-tier attorneys like Simpson and Couch did.