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A wrongful death lawsuit was filed today against Cody Posey and the makers of "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City," alleging that the video game trained the southern New Mexico teen to gun down three members of his family.

The lawsuit, filed this morning in state District Court in Albuquerque, argues that the video game made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" he wielded July 2004 when he shot and killed his father, stepmother and stepsister then buried them under a manure pile at the Hondo ranch owned by former ABC newsman Sam Donaldson.

"The word is out there - these games are leading to killings," said Miami attorney and controversial anti-video-game-violence activist Jack Thompson in a news conference this morning on the steps of the state District Court.

Thompson filed the lawsuit with Albuquerque attorney Steven Sanders on behalf of the surviving family members of Posey's father, Delbert Paul Posey; stepmother, Tryone Posey; and 13-year-old stepsister Marilea Schmid.

"If doing this can stop one person, one family from going through the hell we've been through, it will be worth it," said an emotional Verlin Posey, brother of Delbert Paul Posey.

Verlin Posey said he spoke with prosecutor Sandra Grisham on filing such a lawsuit. Grisham then contacted Thompson, he said.

The 68-page lawsuit also alleges that the video game trained Posey how to fire a weapon and turned him into an "extraordinarily effective" killer.

"Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game," Thompson said. "If it wasn't for `Grand Theft Auto,' three people might not now be dead."

Besides Posey, the defendants named in the lawsuit are Take-Two Interactive Software and its subsidiary Rockstar Games, which markets "Grand Theft Auto"; and Sony Corp., which produces Playstation 2, the platform on which Posey played the video game.

"No question this is a landmark pioneering case in New Mexico," Thompson said.

Thompson has filed a similar lawsuit in Alabama on behalf of the families of two police officers and a dispatcher who were killed in 2003 by 16-year-old Devin Moore, who obsessively played "Grand Theft Auto" in the months before the shootings.

Moore, said to have infamously told arresting officers that "Life is a video game. You have to die sometime," was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death after a jury rejected his claims that he had been an abused child and was overly influenced by the "Grand Theft Auto" games.

Take-Two representatives have called the link between "Grand Theft Auto" and the Alabama slayings "utter nonsense."

Other similar lawsuits, including one filed on behalf of several victims in the Columbine shootings, have been tossed out of court over issues of First Amendment rights and manufacturers' inability to reasonably predict violent outcomes related to their products.

But Thompson, whose high-profile crusades have made him an enemy of both video-game aficionados and judges, said a plethora of scientific evidence exists to link certain video games with violent, and often deadly, behaviors of their teenage fans.

"The science is really the clincher here," he said. "What they have found is that video games can train a young person to kill in a blink of an eye. Certainly that occurred in Alabama and may have occurred in New Mexico."

Thompson argues that the violent video games are "murder simulators" designed to be physiologically addictive to younger people whose brains are still developing.

Such developing minds process the violence in video games differently than adult brains because the stimuli of the game affects the portion of the brain that deals with emotion more than the portion that deals with rational thought, he said.

"The video-game industry can thus, through operant conditioning resulting from thousands of replications of the virtual act of killing, train minors to be more aggressive, sometimes to be more violent, and sometimes to kill," the lawsuit states.

Attacks at schools, including this month's deadly spree at Dawson College in Montreal, Canada, in which one person was killed and 19 were injured, have often involved gunmen with a penchant for playing violent video games.

"The practice, repetition and rewards for acts of violence (in video games) may be more conducive to increasing aggressive behavior among children and youth than passively watching violence on TV and in films," the American Psychological Association concluded.

Video-game experts say while there may be a correlation between violence in video games and violence in reality, it is a far cry from implicating video games as the cause of that violence.

"This is a billion-dollar, mainstream industry just like the movies, just like music," Jeff Gerstmann, senior editor of Gamespot.com told the Associated Press this month. "The vast majority of people aren't out there doing horrible bad things and blaming it on video games."

After the Posey case made national headlines, Thompson said he suspected a video game was involved. He said he talked about the possibility with an unnamed Lincoln County sheriff's deputy days after the shooting.

"But he told me, no, Cody and his family lived on a working ranch. He wouldn't have time to play video games," Thompson said. "But I told him, `Trust me. These teenaged boys find the time.' "

Thompson said he suggested deputies search Posey's possessions for a Playstation 2 game console and the "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" game, given the popularity of the game among Posey's age group, the link between the game and other violent acts and the fact that Posey's victims were each shot in the head, which he said is a somewhat unusual target given the smaller head mass.

Thompson said he later learned that deputies found both the Playstation 2 and the "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" game. According to the lawsuit, Posey had "obsessively" played the video game.

Posey, 16, was sentenced as a juvenile and will remain in state custody until he is 21, the maximum available for a juvenile. He was 14 at the time of the killing.