lasts only minutes but distorts time percep-
tion in such a way that the user feels as if
they were high for years. On occasion, Haas
liked to get zooted on such potent intoxi-
cants, then wade through a crowded rave in
a three-piece suit and an Israeli gas mask;
he loved how his appearance confused the
glowstick-waving teens.
After earning his associate’s degree in
1998, Haas settled in the town of Athens and
juggled a full-time job as an ISP technician
with freelance coding gigs. The late 1990s
and early 2000s were a time of abundance
for skilled programmers; anyone proficient
in LightWave 3D or Macromedia Director
could make six figures. But Haas had a
knack for botching every good opportunity.
No matter how straightforward an assign-
ment was, he’d take the most convoluted
approach possible to demonstrate his supe-
rior intellect. If a client asked for a project to
be coded in a relatively simple language like
Lingo, for example, he’d do it in C++ instead
and inevitably miss the deadline. “You ask
him to walk a straight line, he’d find a way
to insert algebra into it,” says Scott Yannitell,
Mark’s younger brother and Haas’ room-
mate for a time.
Haas’ productivity was also hampered by
his escalating drug use. He was now ingest-
ing all manner of opiates—oxymorphone,
hydrocodone, fentanyl, Dilaudid—and he
suffered multiple overdoses. When friends
expressed concerns about his narcotic
adventures, he swore that his geeky atten-
tion to detail prevented him from risking too
much harm. “I do that dumb thing where I
actually research the drugs I use,” he wrote
in an online chat. “I know, how silly of me.”
There were occasions, however, when
Haas would temporarily shake off the
druggy haze and dazzle with his brilliance.
Mark Yannitell recalls that Haas figured
out how to dramatically improve an open
source video encoder so that it could crunch
multimegabyte files in a matter of minutes
rather than hours. Yannitell urged his friend
to capitalize on his achievement, but Haas
hemmed and hawed before dropping the
project altogether.
“He was like Cypher from The Matrix—
y’know, ‘You see code, but I see brunettes
and redheads,’” Yannitell says. “But when
he reached that genius moment, when he
was on the cusp of some big idea that could
maybe change the world, he got nervous.”L
IKE SO MANY other children of
the 1980s, Jerold Haas could
trace his love of program-
ming back to the Christmas he
unwrapped a Commodore 64.
As a preteen he would seques-
ter himself in his room for
hours to fiddle with the budget computer,
writing elementary software on analog
cassettes and exploring the nascent online
realm with a 300-baud modem.
The son of a firefighter father and an
insurance agent mother who divorced when
he was young, Haas was bright enough to
skate through school in Springboro, a well-
to-do suburb of Dayton; he could ace any
test despite having played Super Mario Bros.
the entire night before. But his lax study hab-
its caught up with him at Ohio University,
where he was studying computer science,
and he washed out after his sophomore year.
Haas’ response to this failure was to float
around for a spell. He traveled to Florida
with $200 in his pocket and lived on the
streets for months, reveling in the chance to
observe society from an outcast’s point of
view. He didn’t spend a dime of the cash he’d
brought along, instead saving it for bus fare
to return to Ohio. (In the end he hitchhiked
home.) He would later credit his dabbles in
homelessness with shaping some of his core
values: “Given my prior past, my idea of liv-
ing maximally is likely closer to the Average
Joe’s minimalism,” he once wrote to online
friends. “I don’t like money or much of what
it represents in modern society.”
Haas’ next stop was Hocking College, a
two-year technical school in Nelsonville,
Ohio, where he trained to become a broad-
cast engineer. Aside from twiddling knobs
at the campus TV station, his main preoc-
cupation was creating psychedelic audio-
visual shows as part of a performance-art
combo called the 555 Timers. (The group
was named after a type of integrated cir-
cuit used in joysticks.) It was during his
days at Hocking that Haas, who went by the
nickname Darry on the Ohio rave scene,
became an omnivorous consumer of drugs.
“Darry would find something to put up his
nose, and regardless of what it was, he’d
get involved,” says Mark Yannitell, a fellow
member of the 555 Timers.
Haas had a fondness for esoteric halluci-
nogens, particularly one called DMT, known
for producing a “businessman’s trip” that
In 2006, Haas’ childhood friend Jerritte
Couture contacted him about a job. Couture
headed up a web development firm outside
Dayton and hired Haas to work as a full-
stack developer. Haas did the job remotely,
from Athens, for four years, until Couture
drove over from Dayton one day to check
on his employee. He was shocked to discover
that Haas was living with his girlfriend and
her father in a house that had literally been
hit by a tornado; there was a gaping hole in
the roof. The floors were buried beneath
mounds of newspapers, old cereal boxes,
and plates encrusted with rotten food that
emitted an unholy stench.
Haas seemed oblivious to the filth, his
attention devoted to chatting with people
online. (“Maslow didn’t know about the
internet when he created his hierarchy of
needs,” Haas once wrote. “I could be wrong,
but I think it’s just below food.”) Under the
alias tonehog, he spent countless hours
moderating a cyberpunk web forum where
he opined about his pet topics: libertarian
politics, social anxiety, high-fat diets, and
shibari bondage.
Fearing for his friend’s well-being,
Couture eventually convinced Haas to
move in with him and his family in the sub-
urbs of Dayton and start working full-time
at his company, Edge Webware. Haas left
his girlfriend behind in Athens and instantly
curtailed his drug use. At the office, he
embraced the role of the lone weirdo amid
Midwestern squares—the resident expert
on matters such as government surveil-
lance and a newfangled invention called
bitcoin. “The way his ego worked, he was
turned on by the things he knew that you
didn’t know,” says Ron Campbell, the pres-
ident of U!Creative, a marketing firm that
had brought Edge Webware in-house. “He
felt like he knew a whole world that you
didn’t—that you’re living in this polished,
2.2-children, white-picket-fence world, but
he knows a dark world you know nothing of,
a humanity you know nothing of.”
But Haas couldn’t sustain this state of
near-normalcy. He moved out of Couture’s
home in 2013, reunited with his girlfriend,
and once again drifted into darkness.
Dressed in ratty black clothes, Haas would
show up hours late for work or nod off at
his desk. His dental hygiene was so poor
that several of his teeth rotted into goo. One
Halloween he whipped off his shirt and ran