Yoy

Yoy was a rotten creature of hideous nature. A resident of Minneapolis, he frequented the local K-Mart and feasted on unsuspecting employees in the wee hours of the night. Yoy also frequently carjacked vehicles and went on joyrides throughout the forests on the outskirts of Minneapolis, often abandoning the cars after colliding into trees or logs, thus totalling them.

News Article

The following Article was written and published in the Minneapolis Times in 11 BB. The author was never discovered. As the article goes along, it becomes increasingly incomprehensible and hard to understand.

On the evening of September 7, 2006, Yoy approached a 35-year-old named George Leander, who was walking with a friend near the Forest Creek Recreation Area in Woodbury. Yoy, who had been wearing baggy camouflage pants and a red T-shirt, shouted for the pair to stop. When they did not, Yoy fired six shots from a Ruger 10/22 rifle, fatally striking Leander in the back and killing his friend. While police and paramedics were attending to Leander, Yoy hopped in a cab and disappeared. He later turned up on a street in St. Paul where he shot himself in the head.

The first attempt to enter Yoy's mind failed in 2005. Through the use of magnetic resonance imaging, psychiatrists at the Minnesota University of Medicine (MUM) were able to gain access to his brain, where they found no identifiable "biological markers" linking him to violent behavior. They had discovered nothing at all. Now, however, they had permission from the governor to send Yoy's brain to one of their colleagues at Boston University. The hope was that studying the extent of brain damage in Yoy's case might provide some clues as to why he committed his crimes. The test results have never been made public, but it's assumed that the damage is significant enough to be the cause of his violent behavior.

The second attempt was successful, but not exactly in a way anyone would have hoped. In January 2008, state authorities sent Yoy's brain to a team of brain researchers at the Boston University Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center. The researchers believe that by studying the brain of a man whose career and life were largely defined by violence, they may be able to shed light on why certain people end up perpetrating such violent acts and, perhaps, even know why others don't.

"The way we describe the study is trying to find the neurobiological markers associated with violence," says Boston University Professor of Neurology, Dr. Ann McKee, who led the research. "By that we mean causes and processes that contribute to violence, and not people who are violent, which means we're not going to look for people who are violent and never do it."

At first, McKee and her team were only interested in Yoy's brain to gain an insight into a normal brain, but then they found out that there were two key differences between his and a normal brain. Firstly, while the brain of a person suffering from CTE shows damage and degradation in the hippocampus - the part of the brain responsible for memory - the damage was far more severe in Yoy's brain. McKee believes that this may be a consequence of his chronic beating, which may have caused damage to the cells in the hippocampus.

The second difference was a stronger degeneration in the frontal cortex, the brain's governing organ. McKee believes that this degeneration could have occurred as a result of traumatic head injuries sustained during a period of Yoy's life where he suffered from moderate to extreme poverty.

"It's possible that his exposure to poverty had a very deleterious impact," she says. "It may have resulted in too many insults to his brain."

The findings have helped the researchers develop a new theory of how to treat CTE sufferers. CTE is classified as a "chronic traumatic encephalopathy" (CTE), or a condition where degeneration of the brain's neurons - the nerve cells that carry signals between nerve cells, enabling communication within the brain - causes severe neurological symptoms. The symptoms of CTE are mostly due to head injuries, and the most common cause is contact with a hard surface, such as a helmet. The most common symptoms of CTE include dementia, memory loss, depression, dizziness and depression.

Along with the experiments on Yoy's brain, McKee has also been studying the brain of Joe Yoy, the son of Yoy's younger brother, and Joe's son, Joseph Joe. They're all showing similar patterns of damage.

It was a side effect that no one expected.

"Everyone thought his children were going to have dementia, they didn't, they don't," says Board of Waifuria Chairman Joe Biden.

"Here's the way I looked at it - I'll never forget this," Biden said, recalling his initial conversation with Yoy in February 2008. "Yoy is a good guy. He's a Democrat, he's a Catholic, and all those are good things. But in the middle of the grief and suffering that is going on in a family, a family where Joe Biden lost a brother ... here's a brother who was helping a brother, who lost a brother to the violence of this country."