Alan Crawford

"They need to feel my pain!"

Alan "Al" Crawford is a budding spree killer and stalker who appeared in Alpha Male.

Background
When Alan was ten years old, his parents went through a very nasty divorce, with his mother giving up custody of him. Days after, Alan's father remarried to his nanny. According to Alan, his new stepmother neglected him, and he was sent away to boarding school, where he was bullied and left friendless. He grew up antisocial and without any friends or girlfriends, causing him to hate others. As an adult, Alan became a supply clerk at a chemical company. At some point, he came across and became a member of a website called "No Means Yes", which fell into the manosphere, online communities of men that have been commonly associated with misogyny and anti-feminism. Alan befriended some of the site's other members, including George Cunningham, and the group shared misogynistic and other hateful messages between each other.

Later, when George announced that he got a girlfriend, Melinda Carroll, this caused Alan to realize that even his online friends were finding love while he wasn't. As a result, he began planning on a crime spree as a means to express his rage to the rest of the world. He stole chemical acid from his workplace and started constructing a homemade weapon that would allow him to fire lethal, concentrated sprays of it into people's faces. He also started writing a manifesto that explained his personal ideologies and laid out his plans for a final rampage, which he called "The Day of Reckoning". While still in the process of building his weapon, Alan chose to attack attractive people with splashes of the acid, apparently as precursor events to "The Day of Reckoning".

Alpha Male
After four attacks in two weeks, one of which was fatal, the BAU was called in to investigate under concerns that the unsub was a homegrown terrorist using a new M.O. and preparing for a larger attack in Philadelphia. After spying on a number of couples at a park, Alan attacks a random one, David Turner and Brandi Moore, as the two are sharing an intimate moment together. He then tracks down Melinda Carroll and burns her face as revenge for wooing George, choosing to ignore another potential victim in favor of her. Afterwards, Alan decides to begin "The Day of Reckoning" at the Federal Bar during a singles' night event. At the same time, the BAU are able to identify Alan as the unsub after interrogating George as a suspect, and they deduce where his next attack was most likely to take place at. They arrive at the bar in time; before Alan could take out his weapon, Stephen sits down beside him, pretending to be a customer and hopelessly single. Stephen tries to build a rapport with Alan by appealing to his loneliness, then buys drinks for the both of them.

At that point, an unsettled Alan tries again to produce his weapon, but Stephen manages to calm him down while still pretending to be oblivious. Stephen then bemoans about the unfairness of some people being easily able to experience the joys of sex and love while others don't, and Alan snarls to him that they don't deserve it. Stephen then muses about the horrible feeling of having to love a woman who would not reciprocate their feelings, without seeing him who he really is. In the process, he refers to him by name. Shocked, Alan tries to produce his weapon again, but Stephen stops him and identifies himself as an FBI agent. He then convinces him to stand down by saying that Rossi, JJ, and Alvez have their guns trained on him. When Alan protests that other people needed to feel his pain, Stephen promises that his manifesto will be distributed throughout the world if he comes with them peacefully. Alan surrenders, and Rossi and Alvez handcuff him and escort him out of the bar while everyone else watches on.

Modus Operandi
Alan initially targeted attractive people of both sexes and multiple races, modeling his selection criteria from a series of categories on "No Means Yes", which all denoted to types of attractive people. Once he had a victim or victims selected and their schedules memorized, he would run up to them during a vulnerable moment, shout "I will destroy what you have" in Latin, and throw acid in their faces, disfiguring them. However, his sixth such attack was off-script; instead of choosing a victim based on another category, Alan went after Melinda Carroll, the new girlfriend of his online friend George Cunningham, and burned her instead. Then, for his "Day of Reckoning", he planned to attack people at the Federal Bar and presumably other locations with a homemade weapon that could fire concentrated sprays of acid, which could seriously maim or even kill them, but he was stopped by the BAU before he could even begin.

Real-Life Comparison
Alan seems to have been heavily inspired by Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of an hours-long killing spree in Isla Vista, California, on May 23, 2014, and was even compared to him by the BAU. These similarities include:


 * Both were members of the manosphere who were jealous of other people for pursuing what they believed to be idealized lives of sex and companionship with a romantic partner, which they lacked.
 * Both particularly detested attractive men and women for being able to attract similarly attractive people of the opposite sex.
 * Both committed a number of acts of violence against people beforehand out of rage before carrying out a rampage (though Rodger's crimes were harmless and even resulted in his own injury instead, and Alan failed to go on his own rampage).
 * Most notably, both wrote a lengthy manifesto in which they declared their hatred of women and couples, and described in detail how they were going to carry out their respective rampages. Both even called their rampages by near-identical names (Rodger called his "The Day of Retribution", while Alan called his "The Day of Reckoning").
 * Both had parents who divorced before one of them remarried.
 * Both seemed to have come from affluent families, and were isolated and bullied while attending school.
 * Some of Alan's language seems to have been taken from Rodger's own.

Known Victims

 * Harley MacAfee
 * Simon Wells
 * Neela Travers
 * Colton Davis
 * David Turner and Brandi Moore
 * Melinda Carroll
 * Attempted to spray the following with acid at the Federal Bar:
 * Stephen Walker
 * David Rossi
 * Luke Alvez
 * Jennifer Jareau
 * Numerous unnamed employees and patrons
 * Note: In addition to the seven burn victims, who were selected based on categories found at "No Means Yes", there were at least two other categories that Alan had yet to base attacks on. He ultimately never followed through with these attacks, despite having an opportunity to do so.

Appearances

 * Season Twelve
 * Alpha Male