Gray State and David Crowley

Crowley was born on July 7, 1985, the middle child of Dan and Kate Crowley. His brother, Dan, Jr., a personal trainer, was older by three years, and his sister, Allison, an architecture student, was younger by two. The three of them were brought up in Owatonna, Minnesota. Dan, Sr., is an engineer who has his own company, which makes equipment he designed to coat solar panels and architectural glass. He and David’s mother divorced when David was twenty.

Crowley had been a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. Afterward, he had gone to film school, and in 2010 he began writing a script that he called “Gray State,” in which a totalitarian foreign regime conquers the U.S. government and a band of patriots form a resistance. On LinkedIn, Crowley described “Gray State” as “a film about a near future collapse of society under martial law.”

When David Crowley returned from military service in Iraq in 2007, he was a changed man. He’d become a pacifist and wanted to be a filmmaker who could expose what he saw as the injustices of a world order that too often profited from war and the suffering of others.

In January of 2015, Crowley and his wife and daughter were found shot dead at their home. Reports of their deaths appeared in the United States and abroad. The Huffington Post called Crowley a military man, and USA Today called him a filmmaker. The police determined that Crowley had shot his wife and child and then shot himself, but commentators on the Internet soon began saying that Crowley’s death seemed “suspicious” and “mysterious,” and that he had likely been murdered by government agents intent on preventing the movie from being made. Among certain conspiracy-minded, anti-government, Libertarian, and alt-right believers, Crowley has become a species of martyr. In January, the international hacking collective Anonymous, which declared war on Donald Trump last fall, posted a tribute to Crowley, suggesting that the government killed him.

Hennen believes that the crime scene was staged by Crowley’s killer. The police discovered slightly open—“Very suspicious in Minnesota in the winter,”. Furthermore, no neighbors heard gunshots. “A forty-calibre gun, which is what the police found, is so loud that it would have woken up the whole neighborhood,” Hennen said. “I believe a silencer, or a suppressor of some sort, was used by the killers.”

On Facebook, there is a page called “Justice for David Crowley & family,” which says that its purpose is to “help to clear the good name of David Crowley.” The page is overseen by an accountant in Minnesota named Dan Hennen. He and Greg Fernandez, Jr., a tech worker in California, conduct long discussions on YouTube in which they find fault with the police investigation and ask why someone whose future seemed so promising would kill himself.

By the time of his death, Crowley and his film project “Gray State” had become a star of the then-emerging alt-right movement. This was before the rise of Trump and the movement really took hold. Nonetheless, it had captured his imagination, with its focus on government conspiracy theories, and cravings for political revolution.

Crowley had been meticulously documenting his life on camera right until the very morning of his murder-suicide on Christmas Day in 2014. When police arrived, they were greeted by the sound of a music playlist blaring from Crowley’s home speaker system that contained an assortment of orchestral tracks from films like “Spiderman 3” along with more contemporary songs. As officers entered the family home, they found a message scrawled in blood on the living room wall which read, “Allahu Akbar,” looming over a copy of the Koran opened to a section on forgiveness — a detail seemingly designed to fuel the wildest fears of the conspiracy theorists who’d obsessed about him.

“Gray State” began in the summer of 2010, when Danny Mason, whom David had met through a professor at film school, sent David an e-mail with links to Web sites devoted to conspiracies and suppressed information. According to Mason, “He came back in thirty-six hours, having stayed up for twenty-four hours, and said, ‘You’re on to something, let’s see where this goes.’ ”.

Crowley’s engagement with “Gray State” was consuming. “Every little part of this project is me,” he recorded himself saying. In addition to writing six very different drafts of the script, he made three trailers, for which he auditioned, rehearsed, and directed the actors. Crowley posted a trailer for “Gray State” on YouTube in 2012. It has been watched more than two and a half million times, and the film has more than fifty-seven thousand followers on Facebook. Its supporters included “conspiracy theorists, survival groups,” Crowley wrote, “libertarians, veterans,” and “the military,” many of whom believe that the government has plans to impose martial law, confiscate guns, and hold dissidents prisoner in camps built by FEMA.

“Gray State” is a hectic and vengeful fantasy. After the conquering force imposes martial law, soldiers come to Minneapolis—the seat of the government, since the coasts have fallen. Some people submit to the new regime and live as before; others retreat to the hills to gather guns and make a plan.

Before writing a first draft, David and Danny Mason wrote scenes for the trailer, which they shot with Mitch Heil in 2011. It is two minutes and forty seconds long, and it cost six thousand dollars. No scene lasts more than six or seven seconds. A number of scenes were filmed in front of green screens, which David filled with C.G.I. helicopters, tanks, and other military equipment. The sets are lit sombrely, so that the people, the buildings, and the rooms seem cast in shadow. The twilit quality makes it feel as if David were not so much entering a world as trying to get out of it.

The trailer has three acts—origin, resistance, and outcome. It begins with red crosshairs defining an aerial bombing target in a city. A man starts awake, breathing heavily, and shields his eyes from a powerful light just beyond the drawn blinds of his room. The words “It happened while we were sleeping” appear in white letters on a black screen. To keep track of his story, David constructed a version of a storyboard, taping file cards and Post-it notes and scraps of paper to a wall. The arrangement covered about twenty-five feet, and it looked like the flag of a hapless and turbulent nation. David called it his writer’s wall, and he said that it could be read horizontally for the story or vertically for the themes. He had a friend film him standing in front of it, like a weatherman, while he said that it exemplified his use of “ancient methods of storytelling.”