The Awards & Recognitions section of the Web site of Gilbert, Arizona, lists some of the area’s accolades: #1 Best City for Early Retirement, #2 Safest City for Trick-or-Treating, #6 Best City to Raise a Family in the West. Gilbert recently surpassed Scottsdale as the Arizona city with the highest median income, and, according to F.B.I. statistics, only one American community of its size had a lower crime rate in 2022. Although Gilbert has more residents than Boise or Salt Lake City, its official documents avoid the word “city”; the municipal government has opted to preserve Gilbert’s status as a town, one of the largest in the United States. Driving down Gilbert’s wide, smooth roads, past vast developments enclosed by white fences, you get the impression of a place that, like an adolescent, hasn’t yet adjusted to its proportions.
On a Saturday evening late last October, teen-agers in Gilbert circulated aimlessly, looking for a good time. One party was disappointing, full of “Mormon kids that were, like, pretty sober,” a teen-ager later said. (Arizona’s East Valley, which includes Gilbert, has one of the largest populations of Latter-day Saints outside Utah.) But a flyer had been posted on Snapchat for a party at a house in an upscale neighborhood in Queen Creek, adjacent to Gilbert. The flyer read “HALLOWERN COSTUME RAGER Open Invite ss ALC provided first come first serve.” People started showing up around nine—kids in lifted trucks, in their parents’ BMW, in a black Camaro, in a friend’s Camry. The girls were dressed like cowgirls and white-swan ballerinas and giant cans of Twisted Tea; the boys were dressed as soldiers and mobsters and prisoners in orange jumpsuits. They drank Blue Raspberry Lemonade Smirnoff vodka, played beer pong, and smoked joints in the yard.
Preston Lord, a slight, gangly sophomore known for his school spirit, was there with friends from the basketball team. The party was wilder than they were used to. They “spent most of the time being ‘wall huggers,’ ” hanging out in the garage, one of them later said. Some older girls confronted them teasingly—were the boys sure they were old enough to be at a party like this? (This account of the party is drawn from an eleven-hundred-page report made by the Queen Creek police; many interviewees were minors, and their names were redacted.)
Sometime before ten, Lord and his friends watched as a teen-ager they knew, a Latino boy in a baseball cap, filmed two partygoers arguing. Treston Billey, a stocky eighteen-year-old wearing a white pin-striped suit, told him to delete the video. The air had a pre-fight crackle to it; people stood around waiting to see how the tension would break. Lord and his friends, together with the Latino boy, left the party and walked down the street. A group of older guys followed them. Because they were “tall and strong-looking,” one of Lord’s friends said, he thought they might be football players. Many of them were dressed as gangsters, in fedoras and suits with pocket squares. They taunted the younger kids as they left, singing “Na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.” One witness described them as “skipping.”
The Latino boy in the baseball cap was dressed as a “cholo,” wearing a saint pendant on a long fake-gold chain. When the pursuers caught up to the younger group, one of them snatched the chain and tossed it to his friends. At some point, Lord and his friends began to run. One jumped over a fence and into a neighbor’s yard; another hid in a bush. But the older kids caught up with Lord and knocked him down. When he was on the ground, a group of guys began “kicking on him,” “standing right above and beating down,” “getting on him and going at it,” witnesses told police. The beating was over in seconds. “He’s out,” someone said. A neighbor’s surveillance-camera footage showed ten boys running away, some of them laughing.
A handful of partygoers, including several lifeguards, pulled Lord off the street and attempted CPR. Lord wheezed, then fell silent. There was blood on his face and coming out of his nose. He never regained consciousness. Two days later, he died; the coroner ruled the death a homicide.
A boy named Taylor Sherman took a video of Lord’s body and sent it to a group chat. “Slumped the fuck out haha,” he wrote. Later that night, Sherman’s friend Talan Renner told him, “I might have hospitalized that kid. I hit him pretty hard.” Other people who had been at the party, and who had witnessed, heard about, or participated in the attack on Lord, talked about it in D.M.s and group chats:
Queen Creek, which sprawls east of Gilbert, is a new enough town that its police department was formed in 2022; Lord’s death was its first homicide case. Gilbert itself had only about five thousand inhabitants in 1980. But, in the nineties, as Phoenix boomed, proliferating suburban developments made Gilbert, the former “Hay Capital of the World,” the fastest-growing municipality in the country. “You used to drive down the road and see sheep crossing,” a school official said at the time. “Things are changing.” These days, the city, some twenty-five miles east of Phoenix, is closing in on a population of three hundred thousand. But the area’s tendency toward sprawl must contend with the reality of scarce resources. “Gilbert’s not far from being full,” Grady Gammage, Jr., a land-use attorney who writes about development in Phoenix, told me. Owing in part to Arizona’s dwindling groundwater, the state has temporarily halted some new construction in Queen Creek, where Preston Lord’s family lives and the Halloween party took place. When I visited, in January, housing developments sat among bare fields that were awaiting the resumption of building.
Rumors about who was responsible for Lord’s death spread quickly among teen-agers, and then among adults. On Facebook, a pseudonymous account under the name Lily Waterfield served as a gathering place for outraged parents. Weeks passed; in the absence of arrests, rumors metastasized online. In late November, the women behind the Lily Waterfield account tagged Wendi Meisner, whose son, Jake, was alleged to have participated in the beating. “Your son was involved in the murder of Preston Lord. Do what’s best for the community. Turn in your son,” they wrote. “Your son won’t get away with this murder. The community is demanding justice!!!!!!” (Meisner said that her son had “no involvement” and threatened legal action.)
In December, the Arizona Republic reported that Lord’s death was not an aberration but the culmination of an alarming trend: a group of largely upper-middle-class teen-agers had been wreaking havoc in Gilbert and the surrounding East Valley communities for more than a year, with few consequences. The paper reported that the group called itself the Gilbert Goons, a name that apparently originated in a Snapchat group. High-school students knew about them—one victim later described them to law enforcement as “a group of kids just harassing Arizona”—but the Gilbert police seemingly did not. “We do not have documented incidents associated with that group name,” officials told the Republic. The newspaper detailed seven violent attacks by members of the group, many of them captured on video. Others soon surfaced. The Goons seemed to be a loose association of some two dozen kids, mostly but not entirely white and wealthy, who attended high schools in the Gilbert area. (The Republic would eventually identify ninety-five Goon-related assaults, stemming from eighteen incidents. Michael Soelberg, chief of the Gilbert police, called that number “exaggerated.” He added, “Any teen-violence case, they’re lumping them all together as a Goon-related assault, and that’s not accurate.”) The videos were shaky, chaotic, difficult to follow; the person filming would sometimes gasp, “Oh, my God,” sounding shocked or thrilled or some giddy mixture of the two. Some of the clips seemed to show drunk teens posturing and throwing wild punches at one another. “You’re talking all crazy on Instagram,” a girl yells in one, before shoving another girl against a car and hitting her repeatedly. Others depicted unprovoked blitz attacks: a group of kids swarming someone, knocking him to the ground, and kicking him over and over.
In January, Jaimie Weinberger, a mother of three with a thick fringe of eyelashes, gave me a tour of Gilbert in her white Yukon S.U.V. We passed large houses hidden behind long, pale walls, medians tastefully landscaped with desert plants, and a disorienting number of shopping centers. Three-quarters of Gilbert residents are white, and, even as Arizona has become a swing state, the city remains solidly conservative—Donald Trump won the area by fifteen points in 2020, and most of the East Valley is represented by Andy Biggs, a former chair of the House Freedom Caucus.
“One thing to know about Gilbert is that there’s a shopping center on literally every corner. All of this, in the past couple of years, has been built up,” Weinberger said as we passed a Five Guys, a Shake Shack, and a Torchy’s Tacos. “I mean, there is literally every restaurant you can imagine here. Which I feel like is part of the draw to Gilbert. Because there is everything.”
“We can get to three different Targets within five minutes of our house,” her husband, Cody, who was driving, added.
Like many other Gilbert parents, Weinberger had become preoccupied with Lord’s death and was a regular on the Facebook groups and Reddit forums in which the case was discussed in obsessive detail, and in occasionally conspiratorial tones. “My husband’s, like, ‘You are just so engulfed in all of this,’ ” she told me later. “But my kids are growing up here.”
About a week after Lord’s death, Queen Creek police executed search warrants at four houses in a wealthy subdivision called Whitewing. The community is gated, but Weinberger had the security code. We drove through the snaking streets, past sprawling homes that Weinberger regarded with an appraising eye. In Gilbert, minute gradations of wealth are particularly visible in real estate: Is the neighborhood gated or not? Is the house custom-built or tract? “So all these are custom builds, and these lots are probably half acres, so that’s premium. Land is a hard thing to come by in Arizona, especially in Gilbert,” Weinberger said. “I would say every house in here is at least a million and a half, current market. I mean, there’s a really outdated, crappy house for one point eight five.”
Weinberger directed her husband down a short street, past a lamppost encircled with an orange ribbon. “Now this area is just covered in orange,” Weinberger said. People in Gilbert were painting rocks orange and tying orange ribbons around tree trunks as a sign of support for Lord’s family. (Orange was reportedly Lord’s favorite color.) In Whitewing, the orange decorations had become fodder for a proxy war. The week before my visit, someone had tied large orange bows to the community’s front gate. The Whitewing homeowners’ association had ordered a landscaper to remove them. After an uproar online, the bows were restored. Farther down the street, a spacious ranch house had thick ribbons tied around nearly every available surface: the mailbox, planters, wrought-iron lanterns. The orange décor appeared to be aimed at the family who lived across the street, the Renners. Talan, a seventeen-year-old football player with a blunt chin and wavy brown hair, had been linked to Lord’s death; his nineteen-year-old brother, Kyler, had recently been arrested on drug and assault charges. Both brothers had been identified as Goons. (Kyler’s attorney, a public defender, has said that the state has not alleged that he is a member of a gang.) “Did you see Kyler’s mug shot? He looks . . . not well,” Weinberger said, pulling up a picture of a young man with thin lips, bad skin, and a piercing, anxious gaze.
In the year leading up to Lord’s death, some of the young men implicated in his beating, and also other alleged Goons, had engaged in an escalating series of transgressions. At a houseparty in December, 2022, two Goons commanded a sixteen-year-old to get on his knees. When he refused, a group encircled him, shoving, then punching him until he fell to the ground; according to his mother, Lori Nitzen, he was beaten unconscious. Thirteen days later, a sixteen-year-old named Connor Jarnagan was attacked with brass knuckles in the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger—the fourth beating with brass knuckles in five weeks. One mother was so alarmed by her daughter’s friends that she created a fake Snapchat account to keep tabs on their posts, which depicted violent beatings and “more guns than anything I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” as she told the Republic.
I spoke to a couple whose daughter, whom I’ll call Alyssa, had been friends with several boys later identified as Goons. Like other parents I spoke with, they seemed bewildered by their child’s actions in the past few years, as if, since the pandemic, teen-age bad behavior had sparked into something unrecognizable and extreme. (Violent crime rose nationwide in 2020. It has since returned to pre-pandemic levels, over all, but rates of youth violence remain elevated in many places.) During the lockdowns, Alyssa was in middle school, and she began hiding in the closet, seized with panic attacks, her father, Brad, told me. She had always been “spicy,” her stepmother, Cheryl, added, but by the spring of her sophomore year she was exhibiting “a darker energy I couldn’t put my finger on.” (Brad and Cheryl are pseudonyms.)That year, she began dating Kyler Renner. Kyler was reserved around adults. He drove a turbocharged Camaro with a custom paint job, and was surprisingly well dressed for a seventeen-year-old: Gucci belt, Louis Vuitton backpack, Burberry boxer shorts. Kyler and Talan’s parents divorced in 2020, and Kyler lived with his father in a house south of Whitewing that was ostentatious even by Gilbert standards; it had an indoor golf gym, a basketball court, and a lazy river snaking through the expansive back yard.
One evening, while browsing through Alyssa’s prom pictures, Cheryl found what she believed to be Kyler’s second Instagram account. (It was linked in his main account’s profile, and featured selfies and pictures of his car.) Some of the posts were glamour shots of Kyler’s Camaro; others showed someone casually handling a silenced submachine gun as the person drove down a dark street, the camera zooming in on the odometer as it approached a hundred and twenty miles per hour, or a hand flipping through fat stacks of rubber-banded cash. “I was just scrolling through, shaking,” Cheryl said. When Alyssa went back to school after summer vacation, her behavior deteriorated. (She eventually moved in with her mother full time, and is currently estranged from Brad and Cheryl.) One of Alyssa’s friends tested positive for cocaine use and said that Alyssa had provided the drugs, so Cheryl and Brad requested a meeting with school administrators and Alyssa. “I thought the minute we sit her down with an authority, that’s going to scare her,” Cheryl said. “And it didn’t.” Even the school resource officer seemed intimidated by the teen-agers he was supposed to be protecting. “I remember being, like, ‘There’s a vaping issue, they’re doing drugs, this is scary,’ ” Cheryl said. “And he was, like, ‘Well, there’s two thousand of them and there’s four of us. What do you want us to do?’ ”
Arizona’s strong libertarian tradition has led the state to embrace a consumer-oriented approach to its educational system. “I don’t think people understand what it’s like here,” one parent told me. Since the mid-nineties, Arizona has had open enrollment, meaning that students can attend any public school within a given district. “There are eleven different schools with over two thousand kids, some with three thousand kids, all within seven miles of me,” the parent went on. “The troublemakers can switch schools really easily. Or kids switch schools because of bullying, or because they just don’t like the kids there.”
Several parents told me that open enrollment contributes to a sense of unrootedness in the East Valley. That feeling was compounded when, in 2022, Arizona became the first state to implement a universal school-voucher program. Students can now have their pick of strip-mall schools, online religious homeschooling programs, or “traditional academies”—charter schools that emphasize discipline and often boast Roman columns out front. The voucher program was designed to help poor children leave failing schools, but a large majority of the money has gone to wealthy families whose children were already enrolled in private education. (The program has also led to a funding crisis for the state, which currently faces a budget shortfall of more than eight hundred million dollars.) “It’s really eroded the sense of community and destabilized what was already a pretty destabilized system,” Beth Lewis, the director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a public-schools advocacy group, said. “Parents will get frustrated with something going on, rightly or wrongly, and they just say, ‘Forget it, I’m going down the street.’ ” Weinberger, a former elementary-school principal, told me, “Schools have to uphold this image to maintain their enrollment. And, because there’s so much competition, principals are encouraged to minimize issues to keep enrollment numbers up.”
Lord’s death shocked many parents in the community. Others were less surprised. “I have received over 50 text messages from worried parents, furious parents, heartbroken parents asking what we can do. Asking how can this happen HERE? I hate to break it to you all but it has been happening here for a long time,” a former educator turned “childhood advocate” named Katey McPherson wrote in a widely shared Facebook post soon after Lord’s death.
I met McPherson for breakfast at a popular spot in Gilbert’s self-consciously quaint downtown. “Welcome to Goonville!” she said brightly when I sat down. “Every morning, it’s something new and fucked up.” McPherson has an appealingly frank and dishy manner. She is the mother of four high-school-age daughters, who are, apparently, trouble-free, and she spoke about the Goons raptly but as if from a slight distance, as though they were unruly neighbors who couldn’t keep their mess out of the front yard. After two decades as a guidance counsellor in East Valley schools, McPherson became a consultant, lecturing around the country on topics like the plight of America’s boys: “Why they’re always in trouble, why they’re addicted to video games, everything.” The Goon drama aligned with her professional interests; it also seemed to have awakened a latent detective instinct. “I have a little informant that sends me all of their assault videos, because they’re tired of knowing they’ve hurt people. And then I send them to the police,” she told me. “I have, like, this whole Goon board,” she said. (The Goon board mapped the connections among various floppy-haired boys.) The state police’s gang-intelligence task force was looking into the Goons, and regularly consulted her for assistance. “We talk very frequently. They’ll e-mail me, ‘What do you know about this kid? Is he connected to So-and-So?’ ” McPherson said. She’d become impressively well versed in the social world of Gilbert’s troubled teens. “I don’t even have to look at my Goon board anymore,” she told me. McPherson often shared information with me before it was publicly known. “Arrests are happening this week!” she texted me in early March, three days before Queen Creek police made their initial moves in the Lord case.
Before Lord’s death, police had treated the beatings as isolated incidents. Many people assumed that the boys’ wealth had insulated them from consequences. “The cops know who these kids are,” Lori Nitzen, the woman whose son was beaten unconscious in December, 2022, said. “It’s crazy. The law isn’t doing anything.” Parents of victims told me they felt that Gilbert police hadn’t taken the Goons’ crimes seriously. Stephanie Jarnagan, whose son, Connor, was hit with brass knuckles, said that officers initially told her they were having trouble investigating her son’s attack because they couldn’t find witnesses. It was only when Connor tracked down screenshots of one of his assailants bragging about the beating that the case moved forward. At the time of the attack, ten months before the assault on Lord, Connor’s father told police in an e-mail that it was “well known” that “these guys go around jumping people but no [one] wants to talk about it because they are scared.” When police searched a suspect’s phone, they found a group chat in which someone had written, “as soon as they find out we r the ones who got into all the fights We’re gettin charged w 30+ assaults.” (One of Connor’s assailants, a seventeen-year-old, eventually pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated robbery.) “It’s really hard for me to say, because we are supportive of law enforcement, but I don’t know how all these things have fallen through the cracks,” Stephanie told me. A teen-ager being questioned for a Goon-related attack told police after Lord’s death, “All summer long, there was fights happening at In-N-Out non-stop, and cops never did anything about it.” He added, “But now a kid dies and everybody wants to do something about it.”
Chief Soelberg said that the police had done their best with limited information provided by the public. “None of our cases, none of the suspects, none of the witnesses, none of the information ever mentioned the term ‘Gilbert Goons,’ ” he told me. “What’s important to note is that the information we know now is much different than the information we had prior to Preston Lord being killed.” After Lord’s death, stories and videos of fights began circulating online, as parents scrutinized social media and victims of previously unreported assaults came forward. The material appeared to reveal a hidden world of rampant teen-age violence and crime. (It could get confusing: Goon investigations would ultimately ensnare multiple Masons, a Kyler, a Tyler, a Taylor, a Talan, and a Talyn.) The “truck kids” lived in north Gilbert, McPherson said. “Everyone would consider them, like, the hick Goons. They drive big lifted F-150s, they might have those big exhaust pipes off the back and a big American flag. They drive fifteen, twenty miles out into the desert and have bonfires. They have these little tiny motorcycles, and they jump over the bonfires with them.” In south Gilbert, the Goons looked like J. Crew models. “Some of them are pulling a 3.8 and have a job and play a sport, and they’re just beating people up on the weekend,” she went on. The high-school Goons ran around with some older guys: recent grads, dropouts, older brothers.
The Goons had expensive vehicles and no curfews and longish hair that hung in their eyes. They liked car surfing—riding on the outsides of moving vehicles—and hanging out in the parking lot between the In-N-Out and the Walmart, where the boys got in fights and the girls stood around, watching them fight. They shared videos of their exploits in a group chat labelled Social Studies. Online, they affected street language: “I’m on my trap phone,” one of the Whitewing boys messaged an antagonist not long after Lord’s death. “i got a revolver and a 12 gauge shotty i dont trust myself enough to go around yo crib.” (His correspondent didn’t seem impressed: “talking this crazy when you inna mansion?” the person replied.)
Much of the community’s condemnation had been aimed at Travis and Becky Renner, the parents of Kyler and Talan. “They’re super known in the community,” McPherson told me. “They own a lot of businesses.” The pair were college athletes—he ran track at Kansas State; she was a gymnast at Arizona State. In Gilbert, they owned a number of fitness-adjacent businesses, including Orangetheory franchises, smoothie shops, and a martial-arts studio. A decade ago, the Republic wrote about a mission trip that the couple took to Uganda, where they helped to fund the construction of a well to supply clean drinking water to a village. In the accompanying photographs, Becky and Travis grinned amid a crowd of Ugandan children wearing Orangetheory T-shirts. The Renners seemed to embody a Gilbert ideal: athletic, entrepreneurial, spiritual. But, below the surface, the family was struggling. Kyler went to rehab when he was in high school, and Talan spent time at Diamond Ranch Academy, a Utah residential treatment center and boarding school for adolescents with behavioral issues. (Diamond Ranch lost its license and closed last July after a state investigation into the deaths of several children in its care.) In 2018, Becky filed a restraining order against her husband, accusing him of physical abuse, though she dropped the order after they got divorced.
In the wider Phoenix area, the story of the Gilbert Goons was met with a mixture of shock and Schadenfreude: moneyed, manicured Gilbert had an underbelly after all. “I’m guessing my reaction was fairly typical. Holy crap, this is happening in Gilbert? Gilbert? Inconceivable!” Gammage, the author, told me. “Because, you know, it’s this upper-middle-class paradise, it’s these pretty, big, fancy houses. That’s certainly the image.”
As McPherson saw it, the Goons’ transgressions were a symptom of parental neglect and decadence. “Our home tripled in value in ten years,” she said. “So, as part of that, there’s this fast-money, fast-life-style thing, where people that didn’t have money gained equity in their homes and bought a boat, bought a Jet Ski. The parent community became very, well, I call it California—they were trying to be like the reality shows. I’ve even seen my own friends morph, where they’re swinging and having Adderall parties.” Another parent admitted to me that her child had been friends with members of the group. “Look, I wasn’t perfect. I did my best, and stuff still happened,” she said. Trying to rein in her misbehaving kid had been deeply isolating. She believed that parents in the East Valley were too concerned with maintaining their public images to admit that their children were out of control. “No one talks, like, ‘My kid is being a complete shithead, I’m struggling, I don’t know what to do,’ ” she said.
Despite Gilbert’s reputation as a safe city, the community has a history of troubling teen violence. Decades before the Goons, Gilbert was menaced by a group of “clean cut high school boys with nice cars, fat allowances, and a mean streak,” as the Republic described them in 2000. The group went by a few different names, but by the late nineties they were calling themselves the Devil Dogs. The Devil Dogs were into steroids and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. They wore white laces in their Doc Martens, to signal that they were white supremacists. One Devil Dog later told police that the group sought out fights “pretty much every weekend.” They favored choke holds and head stomps and yelling “White power,” even when their victims were white. They hung out in a Taco Bell parking lot, where, on a spring evening in 1999, nine drunk Devil Dogs accosted two young men, barking at them and calling them “homos” and “pussies,” and then beat them. Another time, also at the Taco Bell, a group attacked a teen-ager, kicking him in the head and fracturing his skull; his injuries were so serious that he was taken to the hospital in a helicopter and rushed into surgery.
As with the Goon attacks, few of the altercations resulted in prosecutions. Police said that witnesses wouldn’t coöperate, or that victims declined to press charges. Sometimes, when things got out of hand at the Taco Bell, employees called leaders from the Mormon Church instead of the police. According to Mike Sanchez, a former Gilbert police detective who investigated the Devil Dogs, the Church’s involvement gave the young men an “aura of invincibility.”
On Memorial Day weekend in 1999, an eighteen-year-old named Jordan Jarvis was attacked by a group of Devil Dogs. Jarvis’s face was so disfigured from the beating that he needed multiple reconstructive surgeries. Even months afterward, his speech was garbled. “He doesn’t like to talk because he is hard to understand,” his mother told a reporter. Jarvis agreed to press charges, and the family’s answering machine filled up with messages consisting of nothing but loud barking.
Sanchez was surprised when his investigation into the teen gang intersected with a much larger case. It turned out that one of the Devil Dogs’ older brothers was selling Ecstasy for Sammy (the Bull) Gravano, the Mafia hit man turned informant, who had moved to the area as part of the witness-protection program before renouncing his anonymity, which he found too confining. The Devil Dogs had apparently served as a kind of intimidation squad. Gravano ultimately pleaded guilty to federal and state drug charges, for which he served nearly eighteen years. “In my criminal life,” he told the judge, “this is a minor thing.”
A Gilbert city councilman, Mike Evans, said at the time that he was urged to keep quiet about the Devil Dogs, because if he spoke out “it would hurt economic development.” Ultimately, a half-dozen young men were prosecuted for the assault on Jarvis. But teachers, coaches, and local officials wrote letters urging the courts to be lenient. “We have some thugs, and they need to get their noses bloodied. But they don’t need to go to jail on assault charges with hate-crimes tags on them. They acted like jocks are supposed to act, obnoxious and aggressive,” a former Gilbert mayor, James Farley, wrote to the judge. (All six young men pleaded guilty; five of them received sentences of six months in prison, and one was sentenced to two years.)
There are some obvious resemblances between the Devil Dogs and the Goons. Both scandals involved high-school athletes from privileged families who liked to beat up strangers, and who filmed their fights—on videocassettes, in the case of the Devil Dogs. But Sanchez saw other parallels as well: police who regarded certain teen-agers with a boys-will-be-boys tolerance; parents in willful denial of their children’s crimes; a community that prioritized a reputation for safety over actual safety. “Gilbert has always been worried about a black eye,” he told me. “Image is everything. It’s that nineteen-fifties sitcom where everyone’s great, then you close the door and the dad beats the wife, the kid’s an alcoholic, the daughter just had a pregnancy.”
In the nineties, leaders in Gilbert had attempted to sweep the Devil Dogs story under the rug, Sanchez said. But, in the age of social media, doing so was now impossible. Facebook groups and Reddit forums dedicated to the area’s teen violence swelled to thousands of members. City-council meetings drew overflow crowds; every month, parents gathered to march in Lord’s memory, and to make demands. They called for the mayor’s resignation, a new police chief, a task force to address the violence. After a mayoral candidate’s son was spotted in a video alongside several Goons, his father dropped out of the race. Parents organized a boycott of the Renners’ businesses; when I visited, a gym that Becky Renner used to run sported a large banner proclaiming that it was under new ownership. The address of the family’s old house was shared online. “You’ve got kids out in front of the house, and people are driving by and yelling at them and cursing at them and accusing them of being murderers,” Soelberg, the police chief, told me. At Becky Renner’s new house, the attention grew so fervid that the family moved out; several people told me that it was for rent, for ten thousand dollars a month.
By the spring, the public pressure was having an effect. Law enforcement had officially named the Goons a criminal street gang. In March, SWAT teams assembled to make arrests. “It sounded like a war zone,” someone who lived nearby told me: police shouting through bullhorns, helicopters circling overhead. Queen Creek police had recommended charging three young men—Talan Renner, Treston Billey, and Jake Meisner—with second-degree murder, and two others with lesser charges. Instead, the district attorney’s office charged seven—including Taylor Sherman, who appears not to have participated in Lord’s assault, although he filmed its aftermath—with first-degree murder. Some faced additional charges for aggravated robbery, stemming from the theft of the necklace, or for kidnapping, because Lord was allegedly prevented from escaping. All are being charged as adults and, if convicted, could face life in prison. (The D.A. has said that she won’t pursue the death penalty.) In their mug shots, some of the young men look stunned, as if the reality of their situation were only now registering.
When police asked teen-agers—Goons and their friends and ex-friends and girlfriends and ex-girlfriends—about the group, they struggled to explain it. It was a nickname from back in middle school, when Talan and Kyler and Jake were known as the Goonies. It was “a large friend group that [hung] out.” It was a group chat that turned “into this big thing.” The Gilbert Goons was just a name that other people called them, a teen associated with the group said. A name “which none of them liked.” ♦
