All three stories — about a veteran shooter in Tennessee, teenagers “speedrunning” into Scientology churches, and the Pulitzer-winning Star Tribune coverage of the shooting in a Minneapolis Catholic church — may seem unrelated at first. But they are united by how violence, threat and religious spaces become part of the spectacle: for some, on social networks; for others, in news feeds. And at the same time — by how differently media and society handle (or fail to handle) those scenes: sometimes stoking a sense of play and “adventure,” and sometimes trying to restore dignity to victims and force the reader not to look away.
The story of veteran Craig Mark Berry of Dover, Tennessee, described in the NBC News piece “Tennessee veteran accused of shooting his wife has died, ending days-long manhunt” (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-veteran-accused-shooting-wife-died-ending-days-long-manhunt-rcna343893), begins like a typical crime report: a 1:30 a.m. call, a shooting in a house, a wife trying to flee by car, him catching up to her in a pickup, ramming and wrecking the car, the sheriff calling her injuries “life-threatening,” though she survives. Next comes the classic US “manhunt” arc — a multi-day hunt for a fugitive: Berry, a former special-operations soldier, in camouflage, with “extensive survival training,” “excellent physical condition” and, authorities say, at least one pistol, an automatic weapon and a large supply of ammunition, hides in a wooded area. Local police, the sheriff, federal marshals get involved, searches are conducted by air and on the ground, public appeals are made, and a $5,000 reward is promised for information.
This set of details is at once documentary and cinematic. Descriptions of the military service, special training, camouflage and the woods automatically create the image of a “dangerous professional” — almost a character from a thriller. But behind this “cinematic” framing is a banal, almost formulaic reality: probable domestic violence, “relationship problems” and a possible “financial motive,” which Sheriff Frankie Gray mentions cautiously, not wanting to speculate. The ending is reported tersely: “Craig Mark Berry is dead and no longer a threat to the public.” The cause of death is not disclosed. The story as a news product closes the moment the external “threat” disappears; deeper causes — post-traumatic stress, family conflict, economic problems, access to weapons — remain out of frame because they do not fit well into the format of a sharp but short crime brief.
The Fox News piece about teenagers who broke into a Church of Scientology building in Manhattan — “Youths accused of breaking into NYC Church of Scientology building in latest viral ‘speedrunning’ trend” (https://www.foxnews.com/us/youths-accused-breaking-nyc-church-scientology-building-latest-viral-speedrunning-trend) — depicts the violence differently: it’s treated like a “game” or a “prank.” A group of young people forces open a locked door on 36th Street, enters, throws objects, damages property and injures an employee. Police classify it as burglary and assault; the church speaks of harassment and threat; social media frames it as another “challenge.”
Here a concept crucial to understanding contemporary media culture appears: “speedrunning.” In its original, gaming sense, speedrunning is completing a video game as quickly as possible, often using glitches and shortcuts, for records and recognition in the community. In the context of a TikTok trend, the word is transposed offline: teens stage “speedruns” through Scientology buildings — attempting to “run as far inside as possible” before security stops them. Everything is filmed for TikTok and Instagram, gathering millions of views. An eyewitness tells Associated Press how a kid in a neon inflatable suit and friends freely walk through an open door, pass by security and staff; other clips show crowds of teens running down Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The split between two perspectives is striking. For participants and online viewers, this is about the “mystique” and “aura” of the Church of Scientology, as one witness puts it. Scientology, long surrounded by rumors, exposés and celebrity testimonies from people like Tom Cruise and Leah Remini, is perceived as an enigmatic, potentially hostile institution. “Running inside” in violation of rules means participating in the myth, trolling both the system and the organization, and getting likes and reactions. That same witness admits: “I think it’s funny… I know it’s technically wrong, but that’s exactly what gives the place an aura.”
For the church itself and law enforcement, this is a different reality: it’s no longer a meme but a series of organized break-ins, property damage and staff injuries, with a religious organization becoming a repeated target. The church states that “some online call it ‘speedrunning,’ but in essence these are organized illegal intrusions seeking attention on social media,” and that “this is not journalism, not a protest and not civic activity. It is intrusion, harassment and violation of religious space.” The statement emphasizes that the church welcomes lawful visitors but will not tolerate those who break in, damage property, threaten and harm people.
Notably, the teen content creator allegedly who started the trend, in an interview with Hollywood Reporter (cited by Fox News), tries to distance himself: he says he does not condone his actions, though, according to him, he “did not break the law,” and he claims he did not encourage others to repeat the “run” or beat his record. But the logic of algorithms and challenge culture is stronger: one demonstrative “running in” to a “forbidden” place, filmed, instantly becomes a template for hundreds of copycats because algorithms reward viral formats and a teen audience is ready to take risks for a few seconds of visible success.
Here the religious space, unlike in the Minneapolis Catholic church story, is not perceived as sacred and vulnerable — rather as a venue for trolling and adrenaline. Where in Minneapolis parents and children went to a “back-to-school” mass and were shot at, the Scientology center becomes something between an escape room and a backdrop for a viral clip. Yet in both cases the central object is a religious space, and in both instances boundaries of safety and respect are violated — though in one story the outcome is tragedy with deaths, and in the other so far only property damage and one injured employee.
The Star Tribune piece “Read the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Annunciation shooting” (https://www.startribune.com/minnesota-star-tribune-wins-pulitzer-prize-for-breaking-news/601837083) shows a fundamentally different way to approach violence in a church. The account opens with a precise time: “just before 8:30 a.m. on August 27, 2025,” when a shooter opened fire on children, teachers and parents during a back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. For the paper, this was literally “their” neighborhood: some reporters live nearby, attend that church, and one editor’s child was at that service. Reporter Jeff Day hears shots from a neighboring yard, first calls 911, then heads to the scene. An editor on the way to the office notices a column of police cars and immediately reports to colleagues in the newsroom Slack. By 8:50, three reporters and three photographers are dispatched to the church; photographer Richard Tsong-Taatarii captures an image of a barefoot mother running to the church with shoes in hand — that image circulates globally.
By 9:20 an online “live blog” is running — a format of live textual updates where posts are refreshed in real time as information arrives. By 10:15 journalists confirm the deaths of two children. This is the typical rhythm of modern news work: immediately ensuring a flow of verified information, photos and video while experiencing personal shock. But more important is what the paper does next. In its Pulitzer submission the newsroom stresses that from the very start it decided not to turn this story into another “one-day” American tragedy that quickly dissolves into the endless statistics of mass shootings. Instead, it sought to “bring to the surface the pain of the Annunciation community and ask the reader to confront it seriously rather than look away.”
The Pulitzer jury noted “powerful stories distinguished by care and compassion.” Here the difference from the other two stories is especially clear. Where crime briefs and viral trends typically rely on effect, speed and “intrigue,” Star Tribune–level journalism consciously chooses slowing down, deepening and empathy. Important is not only the fact of the crime but the people, their faces, their stories, how the community lives through the trauma and how that trauma is embedded in the American context of gun violence.
All three stories are about how violence and intrusion into safe or sacred spaces become part of a larger media script. In Tennessee it’s a half-primitive domestic violence incident turned into a spin-off about a “militarily trained fugitive” in the woods. In New York and Los Angeles it’s the transformation of a religious space into an interactive stage for a TikTok challenge, where real risks — injuries, possible clashes with security and police — are ignored or, conversely, treated as part of the “thrill.” In Minneapolis it’s the extreme manifestation of threat: an armed person shoots children and parents in a church, and only through professional journalism does society get a chance to do more than register a shallow shock.
An important shared motif is the role of media and audiences. In the NBC News piece on Craig Berry, as in most similar reports, there is a degree of romanticization of the “dangerous professional” figure: special forces, camouflage, the woods, the chase — all elements of a familiar genre. At the same time we learn almost nothing about the wife who survived the attempted murder, about her specific story, about what the years before that night looked like. She is present in the text as an object of violence and a medical bulletin (“released from medical care”), not as a subject with a voice.
In the story of speedruns through Scientology churches, Fox News contains both critique and repetition of the same logic: discussion of millions of views, funny costumes, teens saying it’s “fun to watch them break in.” The publication itself amplifies the viral effect: the more attention a trend gets, the more people will see it and perhaps try to repeat it. This raises a classic dilemma: how to cover a dangerous trend without becoming its unpaid promotional channel. The church is explicit: this is not protest or civic action — it is content borne of lawbreaking and attacks on a religious minority.
Star Tribune, by contrast, demonstrates another standard: journalists are literally inside the tragedy but use their proximity not for emotional hysteria or sensationalism but for careful, compassionate work. The newsroom recognizes its responsibility: “We felt the obligation to tell this story… to verify facts, to be on scene, to take photos and videos.” It also emphasizes the decision not to allow the tragedy to dissolve into the news stream. This is an important example that media can do more than exploit shock — they can help society make sense of and remember events.
If we consider terms that may need explanation, beyond the mentioned “speedrun,” it’s worth clarifying what a “manhunt” is and how it works. Essentially it is a large-scale law enforcement operation to find a dangerous suspect, involving local and federal forces, sometimes using aviation, thermal imaging, dogs, and mass public appeals. In the NBC News account it is presented as a dramatic hunt for an armed veteran, although in reality it is a forced reaction to a domestic conflict escalated to a dangerous degree. There is a paradox here: society spends huge resources searching for violence that has already occurred, but much less on preventing such situations: working with veterans, gun access control programs, family support that can spot escalation in time.
Another important concept is the boundary between protest and content. In the 21st century many forms of political action inevitably become visual and designed for platform distribution. But in the Scientology case we see overlap: there are no articulated demands or grievances; only “aura,” “mystique” and the desire for a spectacle. An organized “game” of violating religious boundaries, layered over long-standing stigmatization of Scientology, easily becomes inadvertent harassment of a religious group disguised as a joke.
The broader trend emerging from these materials is the gradual conversion of violence and threat into a routine media background. Shots fired in a Tennessee home, “runs” through a Manhattan church, a school-shooting-style attack in Minneapolis — all become “stories” that users of news sites or TikTok switch between. Which genre they fit into — “crime,” “viral trend,” or “serious reporting” — is decided by editorial teams and algorithms. Those choices largely determine whether we see people and structural problems behind the facts or simply treat everything as another slice of content.
Of the three approaches shown in these sources, the Star Tribune’s path appears most mature and responsible: careful, slow, compassionate coverage of a tragedy that focuses on people rather than effect. The story of speedruns through Scientology churches illustrates how easily religious space and safety can be turned into play objects for social networks and how hard it is to talk about rights, respect and the law in that logic. The crime chronicle about the veteran hiding in the woods exposes another problem: behind a surface that reads like a cinematic plot remain invisible the causes that lead to outbreaks of domestic violence among people with military backgrounds.
The key conclusions and consequences here are that society and media need a more conscious ethics of working with violence: not to replace genuine pain and risk with mere spectacle, to be able to distinguish protest from a content challenge, and to see the real people and vulnerable communities behind the “dangerous fugitive” and the “funny stunt.” Otherwise, scenes of shots fired in a house, in a church or in the vestibule of a religious center will remain merely successive episodes of an endless feed, rather than prompts to rethink how safety, responsibility and respect for others’ spaces are organized.
