Conspiracy film "Gray State" director shot his wife, daughter before turning gun on himself

Apple Valley deaths mystify family friend, medical examiner rules deaths were murders-suicide

Article by: PAT PHEIFER , Star Tribune

“You could not imagine a more committed couple” than David and Komel Crowley, he said.

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APPLE VALLEY, MINN - David Crowley, an independent filmmaker and screenwriter, shot his wife, Komel, and their 5-year-old daughter Rani in the head before shooting himself, according to a report from the Hennepin County medical examiner’s office released Wednesday.

The three bodies were found by a neighbor Saturday afternoon in the living room of their home in the 1000 block of Ramsdell Drive in Apple Valley. They had been there for up to four weeks; no one had talked to them since before Christmas.

Crowley had written a screenplay and produced a trailer for a movie called “Gray State,” about government conspiracy and militarization. He wrote to Jason Allen, a producer based in Los Angeles, that he was working 18-hour days to build his concept “into an empire.”





The story came to light when a neighbor stopped by the house about 12:30 p.m. Saturday to collect packages that were piling up on the front stoop of the tidy white rambler. The neighbor called police after looking in a window and seeing the bodies lying in the living room. A black handgun lay nearby.

Mason Hendricks, a close friend, said Crowley and his wife amazingly close and in-tune and speculated that even their deaths had to have been a mutual decision.

“You could not imagine a more committed couple,” he said. “They just fed off each other.”

Crowley left behind a two-sentence note, but Hendricks wouldn’t say what it said.

“It’s very short. It’s very puzzling. Honestly it doesn’t [explain what happened.] It doesn’t put much into perspective. It’s two sentences. That’s all it is.”

Hendricks said he last talked to Crowley on the phone on Dec. 2. Another friend talked to him by phone on the 16th or 17th of December, then his brother, Dan, dropped off Christmas presents on the 26th or 27th.

Crowley, 29, a filmmaker and screenwriter, worked at home and it wasn’t unusual for him to become a recluse while working. Komel Crowley, 28, was a self-employed dietitian who was trying to develop a business. Their daughter wasn’t in school yet or in day care because both parents were usually with her, Hendricks said.

“It’s a surprise, it’s a travesty, it’s honest-to-God ­terrible,” Hendricks said. “But literally there was no indication.”

“There are no answers,” he said. “What you’re ultimately hearing is you had an awesome human being who loved his family and loved life. Then there’s something that none of us know.

“He’s not a person who snaps. He was too methodical,” Hendricks said.

Crowley’s garage contained an arsenal of props for the movie — camouflage clothing, automatic weapons, gas masks and flak jackets. He and a friend had started a company called the Bullet Exchange, to rent the props and train actors to use weapons in films.

Komel Crowley was Pakistani, and her family in Texas didn’t approve of her marrying a white military-type guy, Hendricks said. Crowley and his family didn’t talk too much either, he said.

Hendricks said that Crowley lost 20 or 30 pounds last fall, but attributed it to being consumed by his projects.

“When he gets into something, he gets into it,” Hendricks said. “He didn’t look like himself. I don’t know.”

Although Crowley was an Army veteran and had served in Afghanistan, he wasn’t a “gun nut,” didn’t suffer from PTSD and was very anti-militarism, Hendricks said.

“I know that people and media and different outlets are going to paint him as this right-wing extremist that had guns. The guy believed in peaceful stuff,” Hendricks said. “He believed in waking people up through knowledge, not through violence.”

Allen, the aforementioned Los Angeles producer, said Wednesday that Crowley’s words and actions when the two met in September and in an e-mail Crowley sent him on Dec. 17, seem contradictory to a man who was about to kill his family and himself.

The two met in Los Angeles, when Crowley asked Allen to consider signing on to the project as an executive producer.

Allen, a first assistant director who said he has worked on independent films, music videos and commercials, said, “David had this consistency and this very steady way about him. In many ways it felt very contradictory to the actions of a murder-suicide. I truly saw an optimism to it.”

Crowley talked in the two-page e-mail to Allen about being “almost completely abandoned” by his original film partners and being “at the end of a tunnel all alone.”

But he said, “Gray State fans are growing at a rate of 100-200 per day even now, and when I get started I can only expect they’ll keep coming.

Crowley told Allen in the e-mail that in a few weeks he would release a documentary called “The Rise,” a “manifesto on the Gray State model,” as well as “a few new trailers for a Gray State series.”

Crowley wrote, “I have no idea who much money is going to come together when this kicks off here in a few weeks, but it might be enough to get started on a series, then independent feature(s) running a common story line.”

Allen was out of town over the holidays and didn’t respond to Crowley’s e-mail until Jan. 8. By then the family was dead.

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