July 17, 2025 • 56 mins
When FBI agents started combing through the digital footprint of a dead school shooter, they found more than the usual missed warning signs.
Sources:
https://www.maargentino.com/narrative-examination-of-the-antioch-high-school-shooters-manifesto-and-diary/
https://www.maargentino.com/digital-dystopia-the-dark-nexus-of-violent-extremism-and-sexual-exploitation-a-case-study/
https://www.maargentino.com/examining-the-soyjak-attacker-video-fandom-part-i/
https://www.propublica.org/article/madison-nashville-school-shooters-online-extremism
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trump-assassionation-plot-nikita-casap-terrorgram-wisconsin-propublica/
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/solomon-henderson-natalie-rupnow/
https://www.accresearch.org/accreports/inside-terrorgram-a-strategic-look-at-the-collectives-history
https://gnet-research.org/2024/08/16/dead-society-tracing-the-online-dimension-of-a-militant-accelerationist-inspired-attack-in-turkey/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/terrorgram-collective-bratislava-murders/
https://www.wsmv.com/2025/05/02/antioch-school-shooter-signed-paperwork-not-have-gun-morning-shooting-juvenile-criminal-records-show/
https://wpln.org/post/first-came-the-warning-signs-then-a-teen-opened-fire-on-a-nashville-school/
https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/court-bars-carlsbad-man-linked-to-wisconsin-school-shooter-from-obtaining-firearms/
https://therighting.com/original/meet-the-radical-feminists-who-stoked-the-biggest-olympics-gender-controversy/
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ishmaeldaro/the-baron-nsclrp
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. On March thirty first, twenty twenty five,
FBI agents in Wisconsin received records in response to a
search warrant. TikTok had turned over a mountain of data
that would take weeks to comb through. The owner of
(00:23):
the accounts in question had been dead for months, which
you might assume would mean there was no real reason
to rush. The crime they were investigating was already solved
and there was no perpetrator to prosecute. But in the
time that it had taken to get these records, they'd
already missed something big. The digital footprint of a school
(00:46):
shooter is always full of red flags, that's no surprise.
But these red flags weren't just missed warning signs of
a shooting that it was too late to prevent. By
the time that search warrant was served, another shooting had
already happened, and they were worried it wouldn't be the last.
(01:08):
As they began sifting through the records, they found exactly
what they were looking for, Another mass shooter in the making.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird. Little guys, this
(01:41):
story is awful in every way. It's complicated. There are
too many moving parts and sealed documents and ongoing court
cases and investigations that will never yield any court records.
Because the perpetrator is dead. It's impossible to really nail
(02:02):
down the truth in any way that I'm at all
comfortable with. I'm not going to get to the bottom
of anything here, and it's uglier than usual. Even I am,
for better or worse, pretty good at tuning out my
own emotions when I read and write about terrible things.
(02:26):
I try not to let my heart get hard, of course,
but when I'm working, I'm working not feeling. It's easier
that way, and I've had a lot of practice at it.
I can get through the day reading page after page
of old neo Nazi forum posts without letting it in.
(02:46):
I close my laptop at the end of the day,
have dinner, watch a little TV, and I don't think
about it when I'm lying in bed at night. That's
not working This week, the story of this tangled network
of online mass murder enthusiasts contained some of the darkest
(03:07):
shit I've ever seen, But it is unfortunately time to
update the story of Terogram. I did an episode way
back in September of twenty twenty four. Very early on
in the show's existence, an episode called White Terror. When
(03:27):
I wrote that episode, the FBI had recently arrested Matthew
Allison and Dallas Humber, two of the leaders of the
online community known as the Terogram Collective. What had started
out as a sort of loose collection of informal online
spaces started to coalesce around twenty nineteen into something more organized.
(03:50):
By twenty twenty two, the Tterogram Collective was pushing out
slick propaganda manuals for acts of terrorism. Their online chats
were centered on the idea of militant accelerationism, a violent
worldview bent on forcing the collapse of civilization as we
know it, triggering a race war that ends with the
(04:11):
creation of a white ethno state. As part of their
plan to bring all of that about, Trogram encourages mass
shootings by celebrating the acts of prior shooters, elevating them
to a kind of sainthood. Saint Tarrant, Saint Rufe, Saint McVay,
(04:33):
Saint Bravic, canonizing the men who would bathe the world
in blood. There are scores of saints, depending on who
you ask, but those four are always fan favorites. Brenton
Arrant killed fifty one people at mosques in christ Church,
New Zealand in twenty nineteen. Dylan Rufe killed nine people
(04:56):
in a black church in South Carolina in twenty fifteen.
Jamith McVeigh killed one hundred and sixty nine people when
he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in
nineteen ninety five. Unders Brave It killed seventy seven people
in Norway in twenty eleven, most of whom were teenagers
at a summer camp. These saints aren't just revered figures
(05:18):
though their role models. The goal of Saint culture is
not just to talk about what they did. It's to
encourage others to join their ranks. Alison and Humber are
still in custody with no date set for trial. Their
(05:39):
cases haven't really budged at all. None of the updates
to this story come from documents produced in those cases.
I wish they had, because the updates we do have
are more attacks, more murders linked to the Terogram collective.
There have been a few more arrests, a few more
(05:59):
foil plots, and a few more manifestos. There are more
than a few episodes worth of updates to this story.
Adamoffin founder Brandon Russell and his girlfriend Sarah Beth Clendaniel
have both been convicted for conspiring to blow up the
Power Grind in Baltimore. A man in Tennessee was arrested
(06:19):
mere moments before launching a drone armed with a bomb
that he planned to drop on an electrical substation. A
teenager in Australia tried to stab a member of parliament.
A man in Washington was convicted for possession of a
machine gun. A man in Pennsylvania was arrested for possession
of child sexual abuse material. A teenager in Wisconsin murdered
(06:40):
both of his parents because he needed to empty their
bank accounts to fund his plan to overthrow the government.
Both the United States and Australia have joined the United
Kingdom in officially designating Terogram as an international terrorist organization,
and just this month, the FBI arrested a man in
California who they allege was the primary author of the List,
(07:04):
which was trogram's collection of personal information about people they
deemed high value assassination targets. All of these crimes are connected,
not directly necessarily, these people didn't all know each other.
But they all consumed the same content, they traveled in
(07:25):
the same digital spaces, they had friends in common, and
they all wanted to destroy society as we know it.
Many of those are stories that we'll get to eventually.
I've been kicking the can on writing about Brandon Russell
all year, but some of the others will take time
(07:46):
to wind their way through the courts to some kind
of conclusion. No, today we're talking about Damien Blade Allen.
Kind of his story isn't quite over yet either, but
to start telling it, we have to start so far
before the beginning that we might as well get a
(08:08):
head start. Damian Allen was arrested in April of twenty
twenty five in Palm Beach County, Florida. He's been charged
with written threats to conduct a mass shooting, unlawful use
of a badge, and unlawful use of a two way
communications device. That third charge is something you see pretty
(08:31):
often in felony cases in Florida. It just means you
used a phone or a computer to facilitate the commission
of a felony. It kind of just feels like a
way to add five years to any underlying felony, But
Florida's criminal code isn't the point here. The point is
Damian Allen didn't actually shoot anyone, He just talked about it.
(08:57):
But to understand how he ended up facing the charges,
we have to talk about who he was talking to
when he made those plans, and we have to go
back in time to talk about several people who did
carry out their attacks. Urai Krajik in Slovakia, Arda Kasukia
(09:17):
Team in Turkey, Samantha Upnow in Wisconsin, and Solomon Henderson
in Tennessee. Uri Krazik and Arta Kasukia Team we've already
talked about in the Tarogram episode last fall. Krajik was
Tterogram's first saint. He was the first member of the
(09:38):
group to heed the call and add himself to the pantheon.
He was in direct personal contact with the group's leaders
for months leading up to his death in October of
twenty twenty two. He shot himself after killing two people
outside of a gay bar and brought us lava, and
after he died, Dallas humber Broke orded an audiobook of
(10:01):
his manifesto. Arda Kosukia Team was discussed briefly in that
episode two. In August of twenty twenty four, the eighteen
year old stabbed five men outside of a mosque in
his Kishehir, Turkey. Thankfully, none of his victims died and
he was taken into custody alive. His manifesto explicitly credits
(10:24):
several Tarogram publications for inspiring the attack, and Terogram channels
praised the attack. Writing in one Terogram chat, Dallas Humber
noted that despite his obvious commitment to the cause, he
couldn't be added to the list of saints worshiped by
the group because he wasn't white. When Terogram leaders Dallas
(10:49):
Humber and Matthew Allison were indicted a month after Kosukia
Team's attack, his attack was one of three acts of
terror that the Department of Justice alleged they can concretely
connect the pair two, charging them with directly soliciting it.
Another of those three attacks was the brodest Lava shooting.
(11:09):
After arta Kosukia Team was arrested, he told Turkish authorities
that he'd been assisted and encouraged throughout the process of
planning the attack over a period of months by someone
he'd met online. He said they communicated in English, and
he believed this person was a teenager living in Eastern Europe.
(11:30):
His online friend used the name fyotulf Hansen, which you
might think sounds like a clue, but it really isn't.
It's just another homage to the mass shooters these young
men idolize. Fiotulf Hansen was from twenty seventeen until twenty
twenty five the legal name of Norwegian mass murderer under Bravik.
(11:52):
Bravik has since made yet another legal name change, and
he is now going by far Skalde Grimmer RAUSKYI older
of north Riki. I haven't pronounced that right, and that's okay.
It is apparently an entirely made up name, loosely based
in Old Norse. This Hanson, though the one chatting with
(12:14):
Arta Kaskia team about how to most sufficiently carry out
mass murders, was not actually Andres Bravic. Obviously, he's just
a fan. And on the day of Kasukia team's attack
August twelfth, twenty twenty four, mis Hanson served as a
sort of public relations agent for these attempted murders. Kasuka
(12:39):
team had prepared an array of photographs and documents ahead
of time, to be shared online, which Hanson appears to
have spent the day doing on a variety of platforms.
Marc Andre Argentino, a senior research fellow at the Accelerationism
Research Consortium, notes this trend. In this and similar attacks,
(13:00):
it a sort of press kit. Kazukia team had taken
selfies posing in his gear and photos of all the
gear laid out neatly on the floor. He uploaded his
own manifesto, along with more than a dozen other documents,
including meinkomf, James Mason's Siege, several Terogram publications, and a
(13:22):
publication by a group called the Maniac Murder Cult. Also
in that folder were the manifestos of several mass shooters
who inspired him, including the one that Jurai Krazik had
sent directly to the leaders of the Tterogram collective before
he murdered two people and brought us lava in twenty
twenty two. But once Kazukia Team was out there trying
(13:43):
to commit mass murder, he couldn't really be posting. He
couldn't be checking his phone. That was Hanson's job. He
created a Twitter account to post links to the live
stream in the files. He posted links and images on
forums devoted to gore videos, and around the same time,
someone probably Hanson, posted those same links on four Chan,
(14:10):
and he also invited a small handful of users to
a private group chat on Telegram. Before the attack began,
(14:33):
Kasuki Team sent Hanson a message on Telegram announcing that
it would begin soon. The message had the links to
the photos, the documents, the manifesto, and the live stream.
Hanson forwarded that message to the private chat just before
the stream went live. There were nine people in the chat.
(14:55):
They dissembled ahead of time with fore knowledge of this
impending attack. This was a watch party. The stream was short.
The longest version of the video that I could find,
which does seem to be the entirety of the original stream,
is less than three minutes long. The opening frames show
(15:18):
the attacker's face. He's staring directly into the camera. It's
like he's looking at you. He's wearing a helmet, goggles,
and a half faced skull mask, and the shot lingers
there on his face for a little too long before
he affixes the camera to the front of his tactical
(15:39):
vest and starts walking outside of the mosque. A dozen
or so older men were sitting in a cafe area
after evening prayer, and they seem to ignore this oddly
dressed teenager until he approaches a man from behind and
stabs him. But then, instead of attacking any of the
(16:02):
other men in the immediate area, most of whom are
in their seventies and sitting down, he takes off running.
It's an odd scene. Remember, he's wearing safety goggles, a helmet,
a skull mask, a black tactical vest, and camo pants.
(16:22):
He looks weird and he's just stabbed a man, but
the reactions from most of the people around him are
pretty subdued. He lunges towards another man, who cries out
and does try to run from him, but an older
man smoking a cigarette a few feet away watches this
(16:42):
happen and just says, what are you doing in a
tone that I can only describe as disinterested. As Kosuki
team runs off down the street and through a nearby park,
he stabs several more people at random. An old man
on a bench in the park yells at him to
go away, but a lot of the people don't react
(17:04):
to him at all. He was tackled by police less
than a minute and a half after the attack began,
and the video ends with the camera pointed up towards
the sky with faces peering down at it. He's lying
on his back in a parking lot, surrounded by a
handful of police officers and a crowd of curious onlookers.
(17:28):
In the chat, the group was disappointed he had stabbed
several people, but in the video you can't actually see much.
There's no blood, there's barely any screaming, there's no corpses.
Nobody died. It was just a lot of shaky footage
(17:49):
of the path in a park and audio of a
nervous teen breathing heavily. A user known only as Nitro
wrote a for effort. Hansen said at least he did it,
and a third user replied credit for that at least.
(18:13):
That third message posted in that invite only private watch
party for what they hoped would be a mass murderer,
was written by a fourteen year old girl in Madison, Wisconsin.
Four months later, not long after her fifteenth birthday, she
murdered two people before taking her own life. Natalie Rucknow,
(18:37):
who preferred to go by Samantha, didn't live stream her attack,
which was a great disappointment to her followers. In the
final few minutes before she opened fire in a classroom
at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, on December sixteenth,
twenty twenty four, she was sitting in a bathroom stall
(18:57):
making her last posts, a photo of her own hand
making the okay symbol commonly used to mean white power,
and a link to her manifesto that Boase garnered significant
attention later in the day, but at first, before it
was big news, only a few people saw it. She
(19:21):
only had a handful of followers. One of those followers
replied to the post, writing quote live stream it. He
quoted her post too, adding the same message live stream it.
He seemed to know what it was, despite the fact
(19:44):
that the link to the manifesto she posted didn't work.
He could only see the photo, a photo posted without
a caption of a hand held out over a bathroom
floor live stream it. He understood, or perhaps knew, that
this was her final post before an attack. There's no
(20:08):
concrete evidence, at least none that's been made public, that
this user had communicated directly with Roupnow about the specifics
of what was about to happen, but they were mutuals.
They followed each other's Twitter accounts. Screenshots of her account
taken before the attack hit the News showed that she
(20:30):
followed nineteen accounts. I can only tell you for sure
who two of them belonged to. She followed two accounts
that both belonged to a seventeen year old boy in Antioch, Tennessee.
A month after Rupnow's death, he was dead too. Solomon
(20:51):
Henderson shot and killed a student in his high school
cafeteria before taking his own life. It's like a virus.
It's like the ring. These kids are watching people die online.
They're consuming online media about mass murder, and then within
(21:12):
weeks they're dead too, and they've taken other people with them.
Samantha up Now killed two people, Aaron West, a teacher,
and a fourteen year old student named Ruby Vergara. Aaron
loved camping in Disney World and her husband of twenty
(21:33):
years and their three daughters. Ruby loved art, her pets,
and playing keyboard in her family worship band. They weren't targeted.
Their deaths were random, a meaningless, nihilist act of violence.
(21:55):
Solomon Henderson killed sixteen year old Joscelyn Correa Escalante Joscelyn
came to the United States from Guatemala when she was nine.
She was on the soccer team and she hoped to
become a doctor. The photo in her obituary is from
hur Quine Sanieira. They were so much more than that.
(22:19):
Of course, those few small details don't capture the depth
of what was lost. But I only know as much
about these victims as their families shared with the media
or wrote in their obituaries. I had to try to
learn something about who they were. They were real people,
(22:40):
people who were loved, people who had passions and struggles
and dreams, people with so much life left to live,
and that can't be allowed to get lost in this
story of contagious, hateful violence, violence seemingly for the sake
of violence alone. The way they died was meaningless, but
(23:04):
their deaths weren't, and their lives weren't. And selfishly, I
had to see their faces, smiling and alive. It's the
only way to push out the images of things I
wish I hadn't seen. After Solomon Henderson carried out his
(23:28):
attack at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, two documents surfaced.
One was a manifesto fifty one pages long. The other
was nearly three hundred pages of his online diary covering
the months leading up to the attack. Both documents are
(23:48):
full of links, screenshots, memes, selfies, copied sections of other texts,
and any truth they hold is buried in so many
layers of irony and inside jokes from incredibly insular online
communities that it's hard to take much away from them.
It is a manifesto and a diary, That's what the
(24:12):
documents are. But reading those documents it felt like I
spent most of the day reading a child's suicide note,
because that's really what they are. Like Arta Kasukia Team,
like Urai Krazik, like Samantha Rupnow Solomon Henderson was struggling
(24:33):
with thoughts of suicide. His diary starts in October of
twenty twenty four, three months before he died. It opens
with quote, I'm burning with hate. Hate will change the world.
An entry later in the evening that same day includes
(24:54):
the line quote the only good nd word is a
dead end word, and that includes me, Solomon Henderson. It
may surprise you to hear was black. He knew this
meant he couldn't be made a Saint pterogram. Saints have
(25:15):
to be white, but he wanted to do it anyway.
He wanted to be like his heroes, and he wanted
to inspire more violence. Andy wanted to be dead. A
few days later, he wrote, I'm perfect for this. I
have no faith in humanity. He doesn't say yet what
(25:39):
this is, but it's the same it he meant when
he told Samantha up now to live stream it. It's
clear that he was already planning a shooting, and that
he had been for months. The same week he started
keeping the diary, he pulled a box cutter on another
student at school and was spended for two days. He
(26:03):
was charged with attempted reckless endangerment, but was placed in
a diversion program instead of being prosecuted. On December sixteenth,
twenty twenty four, at two am, he wrote in the diary,
when I think about what I'm going to do, I
get sad seeing and reading kids and adults before who
(26:24):
did similar attacks. The loneliness, the fact we had no
other choice, no help, just nothing. So like I said,
it's clear that he'd already been planning to do something.
He'd had the idea in his head long before what
happened later that day, but after Samantha Upnow's attack, he
(26:47):
became fixated on her, and his resolve to carry out
his attack intensified significantly. Later that evening, he wrote in
the diary, holy shit, the New School shooter followed me,
and he pasted in screenshots of her account before it
was deleted, showing that they did indeed follow each other.
(27:11):
On December eighteenth, two days after she died, he wrote,
She's stuck in my head. The next day, he created
a new Discord server. The portions of that server that
I've been able to view don't show very many messages
prior to the day he died, but based on the
reactions from the other users, it appears they all understood
(27:33):
when he invited them to the server that its purpose
was for them to be able to access the live
stream on the day he decided to do it. Creating
the server was a concrete step taken toward the attack,
and it was directly motivated by his new obsession with Repnow,
who he refers to as Saint Tris Repnow in both
(27:56):
his diary and his manifesto. At the end of the manifesto,
in a section titled final remarks, Henderson wrote, I was
so miserable I wanted to kill myself. I just couldn't
take it anymore. I'm a worthless subhuman, a living, breathing disgrace.
(28:17):
That all changed once I read Urikraje's manifesto and the
English edition Mass Cleaner Handbook. He's referring to the Bradoslava
shooter's manifesto and the document written by Arta Kasukia Team Mack.
When I originally read Kasukya Team's manifesto in August, I
(28:38):
had to copy and paste the Turkish text and to
Google translate one paragraph at a time. The English edition
he's talking about was posted online by that mysterious user
calling himself Hansen. Henderson's manifesto ends with this quote, I
take great pride in the fact that the people before
(29:01):
and after me will commit similar acts, not only in
the USA, but all over the world. I hope you
all enjoyed the broadcast After the shooting at Antioch High
School on January twenty second, twenty twenty five, people on
Twitter noticed something. They found his account. He'd been mutual
(29:26):
followers with rupp Now and interacted with her on the
day of the shooting. Several users had said back in
December that the authorities should follow up with him specifically
based on those posts. In January, at least one person
posted that they'd gone to the trouble of submitting an
official FBI tip the month prior. It's not clear if
(29:48):
the tip was even made, or if anyone followed up
on it, or if the authorities had Henderson on their
radar at all. Well, it's not clear if he on
their radar in January of twenty twenty five, because the
authorities had been in contact with Solomon Henderson several times.
(30:09):
He was arrested in twenty twenty when he was just thirteen,
after his mother called the police to report that he'd
run away after punching her in the face and hitting
her with a chair. In November of twenty twenty three,
he was charged with aggravated sexual exploitation of a miner
after downloading child sexual abuse material. There aren't any more
(30:31):
details provided in the reporting on this. He was a
miner himself, just sixteen at the time, but child sexual
abuse material is always illegal for anyone to have for
any reason, and it's also rampant in the same online communities.
The traffic and gore videos and mass shooting warship as
(30:54):
a miner. His court record is not open for public inspection,
but news outlets report that he was court ordered to
have no access to the internet except for as needed
for schoolwork, but it's not clear what the duration of
that sentence would have been. At some point in twenty
twenty three, the Nashville Police took two guns away from
(31:14):
the home, but police will only say that the guns
belonged to an adult, but they can't release any more
details about why they were called to the house in
the first place because it involved a minor. And then
in October of twenty twenty four, he was arrested for
pulling a knife on a girl at school on the
(31:35):
day of the shooting. In January, he was dropped off
at school late. He'd spent all morning at court with
his mother. As part of the diversion program he'd been
put into for that charge, he had to sign paperwork
acknowledging that he was court ordered not to possess any
guns or ammunition, so there were warning signs they knew
(32:01):
who he was. He wasn't allowed online, and he wasn't
allowed to touch a gun, and the cops had previously
removed all of the guns from his home. Doesn't seem
to have made a difference, and while the cops may
have missed some of the red flags in Solomon Henderson's
final days, they did show some initiative. The day after
(32:24):
Repnew's death, authorities in California detained a twenty year old
man named Alexander Paffendorf. It would take months to get
records from the various platforms where Repnow had been posting
and messaging in order to see the full scope of
her online communications, but her messages with Paffendorf were seen
by agents immediately, and those messages were very concerning. Apparently
(32:50):
the pair had been messaging in the days leading up
to the attack. It isn't entirely clear to me, based
on the reporting that I could find, if Pafendorf had
specific prior knowledge of the shooting, like an actual time, date,
and place, but they had been exchanging fairly explicit messages
about their shared intent to carry out a mass shooting
(33:12):
in the near future. His messages to her contained details
of a plan to attack a federal building using guns
and explosives. The FBI acted quickly, and they arrived at
his home with guns drawn. The very next day, when
he was interviewed by FBI agents, he admitted to exchanging
(33:34):
messages with Rupnow, but he wasn't charged with a crime. Instead,
the Carlsbad, California Police Department filed an application for a
gun violence emergency protective Order, and they placed him on
a psychiatric hold. It turned out that Alexander Paffendorf didn't
own any guns. He had no guns or bomb making
(33:57):
materials at all. He'd just been trying to impress a
teenage girl online. The two talked online quite a bit,
chatting about their suicidal thoughts, their white supremacist beliefs, and
their plans to murder as many people as possible, but
he claims he didn't mean it. He apologized in court,
(34:20):
saying he'd been attempting to pursue a romantic relationship with
the girl and never had any intention of purchasing any
weapons or following through on the things they talked about.
Maybe he assumed she didn't mean it either. No criminal
charges were filed against Paffendorff, and a judge in San
Diego ruled in April that he will be legally barred
(34:42):
from owning a gun until at least twenty twenty eight
It's not entirely clear if he knew she was only fifteen,
but given the nature of the online spaces they were in,
I would bet that he did, and Alexander Paffendorff was
(35:14):
knocked Samantha Rupnow's only online boyfriend. That six page document
she posted just before the shooting was locked. It was
a link to a Google doc that she'd forgotten to
make publicly accessible. Unlike Artikazu Yeteam, she hadn't prepared a
mass shooter's press kit and left it with a co conspirator,
(35:36):
so at first it seemed like no one would ever
know what was in the manifesto. Within hours, though, a
Canadian woman named Anna Slats claimed to have made contact
with the shooter's boyfriend. Slats is a journalist, I guess.
(35:57):
In twenty eighteen, she was the editor of her college
newspaper until she was forced to step down after making
the editorial decision to publish a racist screed from a
no neo Nazi. She worked briefly for the far right,
virulently islamophobic outlet Rebel News, and sometimes wrote for The
Post Millennial. In twenty twenty two, she founded her own
(36:19):
outlet that focuses almost exclusively on stirring a hatred towards
trans women, and that may have been what sparked Slats's
initial interest in the story. There were rumors in the
immediate aftermath of the shooting that Repnow was transgender. She
wasn't by all accounts, she was a heterosexual cisgender female.
(36:44):
But regardless of what drew Slats to the story, she
managed to convince a user who claimed to be Repnow's
long distance boyfriend to share a copy of the manifesto
with her. She then proceeded to water mark each page
of the manifesto with her own name before posting the
images to Twitter. Now, as a journalist, I understand the
(37:08):
frustration at having your work stolen and your research used
without credit. I do. It's happened to me too many
times to count. But I can't, for the life of me,
even begin to imagine these series of thoughts and ideas
that would have to pass through your head to lead
you to a place where you were watermarking your name
(37:32):
onto the pages of a manifesto of a dead child
hours after the author shot up a school. That makes
me nauseous but like I said, journalist is kind of
a loose term here. The boyfriend, who's never been named publicly,
(37:53):
says Repno sent him the manifesto on WhatsApp about an
hour before the shooting, but that he didn't see it
until hours later. A classmate says Repnow had talked about
having an internet boyfriend who lived in Germany, and that
appears to be the same individual who provided the manifesto.
We don't know if he's actually a teenager or actually
(38:17):
in Germany, but these are the elements of his identity
that he claims, and that she was telling people in
her life. The unnamed Twitter user slat spoke to said
they'd been talking for about two years and he did
seem to know a significant amount of information about Repnow's
home life. So she sent the manifesto to her German boyfriend.
(38:40):
She exchanged murder fantasies with Alexander Paffendorff, but there was
at least one more internet boyfriend chatting about mass shootings
with Samantha Repnow. The first two internet boyfriends came to
light on the day of the shooting. FBI agents saw
the messages between Repno and Paffendorf as soon as they
took custody of her phone, and the unnamed German boyfriend
(39:03):
outed himself in a series of tweets and ultimately shared
the manifesto with Anna Slats. The third man's existence didn't
come to light until he was arrested at the end
of April twenty twenty five, four months after Repnow's death.
It took that long for the very slow wheels of
the justice system to turn. According to the charging documents
(39:27):
in Damian Allen's case, the FBI searched Repnow's cell phone
and home almost immediately, but they didn't even apply for
the search warrants for her TikTok accounts until over a
month later, on January thirtieth, twenty twenty five. It's useless
to speculate about why that might be. Maybe that's just
(39:48):
how long it took to get around to the paperwork.
Maybe that's how long it took for them to figure
out which accounts belonged to her. It's common for people
active in online extremist communities to cycle through a ca
counts pretty quickly, getting banned for posting something hideous, making
a new account, reconnecting with old followers, getting banned again,
and so on forever. So maybe it took a little
(40:11):
bit of legwork to know what to even ask for
when drafting them warrant. I'm willing to bet that played
a role here, But the timing does raise an uncomfortable question.
Had they not planned on looking at everything, they'd gone
in guns blazing to grab Alexander Paffendorff right away, and
(40:35):
that turned out to be a situation that was admittedly gross,
but not life threatening. There was no mass murder in
the making there. He was just a guy with violent
fantasies who wanted to date a child. Again disgusting, abhorrent,
but he was lying about planning a mass shooting. He
(40:58):
didn't even own a gun. So maybe it took the
entire six weeks between December sixteenth, when the shooting occurred
in January thirtieth and the war it was signed. Maybe
it took six weeks to identify all the TikTok accounts
connected to rupnow. But maybe Solomon Henderson's attack on January
(41:19):
twenty second played a part in that timeline. Paffendorf was bluffing,
But after the shooting in Tennessee, it was all too
clear that not everyone shed talked to online was some
of them were deadly serious. Either way, we'll never know,
(41:39):
and it took TikTok two months to respond to the
court order to produce those records. So it wasn't until
April of twenty twenty five that FBI agents in Milwaukee
made an urgent call to the FBI Field office in Miami.
They needed to get in touch with the Palm Beach
County Sheriff's Office as soon as possible. One of the
(42:00):
men who'd spent all summer chatting with Rough now appeared
to be one of their deputies. After what must have
been a very tense call between the FBI and the
Internal Affairs Bureau in Palm Beach, it was determined that
the accounts did belong to Damian Allen, But despite the
(42:22):
scores of photos of Allan posing in his apparently very
real Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office uniform, he'd never been
employed there or by any law enforcement agency. When police
searched his home, they found eighteen guns, twelve thousand rounds
of ammunition, and a variety of authentic or realistic replicas
(42:45):
of uniforms for various law enforcement agencies and branches of
the military. According to the charging documents, Damian Allen communicated
with Samantha upp Now regularly between May and September of
twenty twenty four. The documents only contain excerpts of their
conversations over TikTok DM, but they exchanged usernames for a
(43:06):
variety of other platforms, including Snapchat and discord. In one
message in May of twenty twenty four, Repnow tells Alan quote,
I wanted to do a black church that was near me,
but you know. He responded by telling her about his gear,
describing his bulletproof best, his collection of high capacity magazines,
(43:28):
and stockpile of flash banks and smoke grenades. Repnow, who
was at the time just fourteen years old, says she
only had access to her dad's handguns. In the middle
of this conversation about guns, Alan wrote quote, once you
get to a point, there's no going back. And he
(43:49):
said he had a plan to strike seven different locations.
Two weeks later, in another late night conversation about their
plans to carry out mass shootings, Alan wrote, quote, we
go down together. Twitch. Rup Now replied correct, I love you.
(44:10):
I love you more, Alan wrote. In July, Repnow scolded
Alan for a post he'd made. The post isn't described
in the affidavit, and his accounts are gone for the
most part, but it sounds like he'd probably posted one
of those fan edit videos of cut together clips and
(44:30):
photos of different murderers. It's a popular style of content
in these communities. But Repnow's message admonishes him. She wrote, quote,
Dylan Cleebold was a Jew, Adam Landsa was a gay pedophile,
Nick was also a pedophile. The Trump shooter also a Jew.
Peyton Gendron was in de furryborn which all of that
(44:52):
is disgraceful and disgusting. Looks stuff up before posting it.
Apparently she thought his taste in my lass shooters was lowbrow.
By September of twenty twenty four, they seem to have
broken up. The charging documents only contained snippets, so there's
no context, But on September twenty third, rub Now wrote quote,
(45:16):
I know I unadded you, and I apologize. I love
you and I'm so sorry about all this. I hope
all goes well for you and I don't do what
I did again. A few minutes later, she followed up,
writing I will always care and love you, even if
I'm not right for you. As much as I want
to talk to you every day and hour of my time,
(45:38):
I can't because I don't want to harm you in
any way. A few days later, Alan messaged her to
say his other account had been banned and asked her
to Adam on Snapchat. It is possible they continued chatting
on another platform. The Palm Beach Sheriff's Detectives affidavit only
describes the communication he reviewed from the direct messages on TikTok,
(46:01):
and there's no allegation made in the affidavit that they
believe Alan had specific prior knowledge of the shooting that
Rucknow carried out in December, and all mention of communications
between the two of them stops after September of twenty
twenty four, three months before the shooting. The latter half
of the affidavit is just dedicated to describing the hundreds
(46:25):
of Instagram, TikTok and discord posts he made pretending to
be a sheriff's deputy, which again he was not. But
there is one rather cryptic line at the end of
the affidavit quote. It should be noted that it appears
Alan stopped communicating in his chat before Rucknow executed her
plan and has not communicated again since. Alan was talking
(46:49):
to numerous members prior to the attack almost daily, so
he stopped posting in his own discord channel right before
Rupp now carried out her attack. He'd been posting in
that discord constantly, and then suddenly he stopped. He went
(47:12):
dark online. There's no mention of anything he posted anywhere
after December of twenty twenty four. I found a handful
of posts made in January February of this year on
TikTok and Instagram accounts that he used for posting pictures
of his cop role play server in Grand Theft Auto.
But his real accounts, his personal accounts, his accounts where
(47:35):
he expressed himself politically, those went away. Was Damian Allen
actually preparing to carry out a mass shooting of his
own or was he just another grown man telling a
fourteen year old girl he loved her while encouraging her
to kill the difference between Damian Allen and Alexander Paffendorff
(47:56):
is the guns. Pafendorf was talking and shit, he didn't
actually have so much as a bullet in his possession. Alan, however,
had so much ammunition in his home that the initial
reports just listed it as three hundred pounds of bullets
because it was easier to weigh them than to count them.
(48:17):
He also had a closet full of police and military
uniforms that were so realistic the FBI thought he was
a real cop. It's impossible to know what might have happened,
but his fascination with both mass shootings and fourteen year
old girls seems to date back at least a couple
of years. In October of twenty twenty one, when Alan
(48:41):
was a nineteen year old high school senior, he was
charged with lewde and lascivious molestation of a victim under sixteen.
I will note for the record that he was not
actually convicted on this charge. He was placed in a
pre trial diversion program that required him to complete a
mental health evaluation and prohibited him from possessing firearms for
(49:02):
a period of time. The case was dismissed after he
successfully completed the diversion program in twenty twenty three, which
is weird because he was posting videos of himself all
over social media throughout twenty twenty two and twenty twenty
three of himself handling firearms, so I guess this one
(49:23):
just slipped through the cracks. So to be clear, Technically,
he was not convicted of groping a fourteen year old
girl's breast, but the affidavit is interesting either way. The
victim told police she'd noticed Alan watching her during gym class.
(49:43):
After jim class, he followed her as she walked to lunch.
At some point, she asked him what sort of vibe
he was going for with his outfit, and he responded
that he was trying to achieve a quote nineteen ninety nine,
Columbine Vine like a black trench coat with stuff strapped
to me. This obviously made the girl a little uncomfortable,
(50:07):
so she turned to walk away. He followed her, then
grabbed her by the shoulder and slid his hand down
her chest, grabbing her breast. Alan told the responding officer
that the girl was making up the stuff about him
touching her because she'd been scared of what he said
about Columbine. So he does admit that he told a
(50:32):
much younger student that he was costplaying as a school shooter.
He just denies that he touched her. Damian Allen is
currently being held without bond in Palm Beach County. I'm
interested to see if his case turns up any new
evidence about the online spaces where he may have first
met rap Now. I seriously doubt he just messaged her
(50:53):
on TikTok at random. They overlapped somewhere. He's an indictment
of a man named Anna Ruth Koposwami in Pennsylvania offers
a hint that only raises more questions. Kapasami was an
avid consumer of Terogram content, but he was arrested for
(51:15):
the possession of child sexual abuse material, material that he'd
solicited from a teenage girl that he was grooming online.
The victim in this case lived in Georgia. Kawasami lived
in Pennsylvania, and in filings in his case, the government
notes that the victim posted on Instagram that she'd been
(51:35):
friends with Robnow, and while his charges are related to
the allegations that he coerced a minor into sending him
sexual photographs, their conversations weren't just about sex. He was
also talking to her about how to commit and get
away with murders. I couldn't tell you exactly how many
(51:57):
men are online right now trying to convince a teen
to commit random, unprovoked acts of lethal violence. But it
doesn't feel like a coincidence that these girls encountered each
other online before it turns out, this wasn't really a
story about Damian Allen at all, was it. I could
(52:18):
have written a few thousand words about Alan's tragic backstory.
I certainly wasted enough time digging it up, trying to
fill in the blanks and court records and old Facebook statuses.
His parents seemed to have had a pretty violent relationship.
His father was charged several times with things like domestic
violence and child neglect, but it never seemed to stick.
(52:43):
His mom left him with his father, taking his baby
brother with her when she moved in with a new
boyfriend and had another son. His mom was in and
out of rehab a few times before ending up in
prison in twenty seventeen for sex trafficking a friend's teenage daughter.
Seems to be when he started pretending to be a
cop online. But none of that really matters, does it.
(53:07):
I don't know when he started fantasizing about mass murder
or how he met the murderer he said he loved.
I don't know if he was lying to impress a child,
or if he really was going to do something with
all those guns, maybe he was all talk, or maybe
he was going to be the next link in the
chain reaction of violence that started in an online chat room.
(53:32):
But if not him, who will it be. You're right,
Grayjake is dead. Samantha up Now is dead. Solomon Henderson
is dead. All three teenagers took their own lives after
carrying out a shooting at the urging of people they
met online. Between the three of them, they killed five people,
(53:59):
but Ta Graham killed eight. They were sucked into online
communities steeped in gore, communities that celebrated death and made
them believe that the only way their lives would have
any meaning is if they died doing something too horrible
to forget. Bartika Sukia Team was arrested before he could
(54:20):
attempt to take his own life, and he now faces
over one hundred years in prison. Dallas Humber and Matthew
Allison are awaiting trial for their role in encouraging these attacks.
Terrogram has been designated as a terrorist organization. At least
a dozen people associated with the group have been arrested
around the world. Terogram is dead. Kind of but it's
(54:47):
not really something you can kill. It can kill you,
but you can't kill an idea. This particular network operating
under this name and with these particulars leaders, that's gone.
The virus is still spreading in the dark corners of
(55:07):
the Internet. People are posting fan adits of mass shooting
live streams and egging each other on, asking each other
who is going to be the one to get the
next high score. Weird Little Guys see production of Cool
(55:38):
Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by
me while I hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtterman
and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdle Guys podcast at gmail
dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably
won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy
(56:00):
theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird
Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
make you one of my red little guys. This episode
contained discussion of suicide and child sexual abuse material. If
you're experiencing thoughts of suicide, you can dial nine to
eight eight in the United States and Canada to reach
the Suicide and Crisis Helpline. If you have encountered child
(56:23):
sexual abuse material online, believe someone may be coercing minors
into producing sexually explicit images, or believe a child is
being sexually abused, report it to the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children at Report dot cyber tip dot org.
That's report dot C y B e R tip dot org.
Cool Zone Media. On March thirty first, twenty twenty five,
FBI agents in Wisconsin received records in response to a
search warrant. TikTok had turned over a mountain of data
that would take weeks to comb through. The owner of
(00:23):
the accounts in question had been dead for months, which
you might assume would mean there was no real reason
to rush. The crime they were investigating was already solved
and there was no perpetrator to prosecute. But in the
time that it had taken to get these records, they'd
already missed something big. The digital footprint of a school
(00:46):
shooter is always full of red flags, that's no surprise.
But these red flags weren't just missed warning signs of
a shooting that it was too late to prevent. By
the time that search warrant was served, another shooting had
already happened, and they were worried it wouldn't be the last.
(01:08):
As they began sifting through the records, they found exactly
what they were looking for, Another mass shooter in the making.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird. Little guys, this
(01:41):
story is awful in every way. It's complicated. There are
too many moving parts and sealed documents and ongoing court
cases and investigations that will never yield any court records.
Because the perpetrator is dead. It's impossible to really nail
(02:02):
down the truth in any way that I'm at all
comfortable with. I'm not going to get to the bottom
of anything here, and it's uglier than usual. Even I am,
for better or worse, pretty good at tuning out my
own emotions when I read and write about terrible things.
(02:26):
I try not to let my heart get hard, of course,
but when I'm working, I'm working not feeling. It's easier
that way, and I've had a lot of practice at it.
I can get through the day reading page after page
of old neo Nazi forum posts without letting it in.
(02:46):
I close my laptop at the end of the day,
have dinner, watch a little TV, and I don't think
about it when I'm lying in bed at night. That's
not working This week, the story of this tangled network
of online mass murder enthusiasts contained some of the darkest
(03:07):
shit I've ever seen, But it is unfortunately time to
update the story of Terogram. I did an episode way
back in September of twenty twenty four. Very early on
in the show's existence, an episode called White Terror. When
(03:27):
I wrote that episode, the FBI had recently arrested Matthew
Allison and Dallas Humber, two of the leaders of the
online community known as the Terogram Collective. What had started
out as a sort of loose collection of informal online
spaces started to coalesce around twenty nineteen into something more organized.
(03:50):
By twenty twenty two, the Tterogram Collective was pushing out
slick propaganda manuals for acts of terrorism. Their online chats
were centered on the idea of militant accelerationism, a violent
worldview bent on forcing the collapse of civilization as we
know it, triggering a race war that ends with the
(04:11):
creation of a white ethno state. As part of their
plan to bring all of that about, Trogram encourages mass
shootings by celebrating the acts of prior shooters, elevating them
to a kind of sainthood. Saint Tarrant, Saint Rufe, Saint McVay,
(04:33):
Saint Bravic, canonizing the men who would bathe the world
in blood. There are scores of saints, depending on who
you ask, but those four are always fan favorites. Brenton
Arrant killed fifty one people at mosques in christ Church,
New Zealand in twenty nineteen. Dylan Rufe killed nine people
(04:56):
in a black church in South Carolina in twenty fifteen.
Jamith McVeigh killed one hundred and sixty nine people when
he blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City in
nineteen ninety five. Unders Brave It killed seventy seven people
in Norway in twenty eleven, most of whom were teenagers
at a summer camp. These saints aren't just revered figures
(05:18):
though their role models. The goal of Saint culture is
not just to talk about what they did. It's to
encourage others to join their ranks. Alison and Humber are
still in custody with no date set for trial. Their
(05:39):
cases haven't really budged at all. None of the updates
to this story come from documents produced in those cases.
I wish they had, because the updates we do have
are more attacks, more murders linked to the Terogram collective.
There have been a few more arrests, a few more
(05:59):
foil plots, and a few more manifestos. There are more
than a few episodes worth of updates to this story.
Adamoffin founder Brandon Russell and his girlfriend Sarah Beth Clendaniel
have both been convicted for conspiring to blow up the
Power Grind in Baltimore. A man in Tennessee was arrested
(06:19):
mere moments before launching a drone armed with a bomb
that he planned to drop on an electrical substation. A
teenager in Australia tried to stab a member of parliament.
A man in Washington was convicted for possession of a
machine gun. A man in Pennsylvania was arrested for possession
of child sexual abuse material. A teenager in Wisconsin murdered
(06:40):
both of his parents because he needed to empty their
bank accounts to fund his plan to overthrow the government.
Both the United States and Australia have joined the United
Kingdom in officially designating Terogram as an international terrorist organization,
and just this month, the FBI arrested a man in
California who they allege was the primary author of the List,
(07:04):
which was trogram's collection of personal information about people they
deemed high value assassination targets. All of these crimes are connected,
not directly necessarily, these people didn't all know each other.
But they all consumed the same content, they traveled in
(07:25):
the same digital spaces, they had friends in common, and
they all wanted to destroy society as we know it.
Many of those are stories that we'll get to eventually.
I've been kicking the can on writing about Brandon Russell
all year, but some of the others will take time
(07:46):
to wind their way through the courts to some kind
of conclusion. No, today we're talking about Damien Blade Allen.
Kind of his story isn't quite over yet either, but
to start telling it, we have to start so far
before the beginning that we might as well get a
(08:08):
head start. Damian Allen was arrested in April of twenty
twenty five in Palm Beach County, Florida. He's been charged
with written threats to conduct a mass shooting, unlawful use
of a badge, and unlawful use of a two way
communications device. That third charge is something you see pretty
(08:31):
often in felony cases in Florida. It just means you
used a phone or a computer to facilitate the commission
of a felony. It kind of just feels like a
way to add five years to any underlying felony, But
Florida's criminal code isn't the point here. The point is
Damian Allen didn't actually shoot anyone, He just talked about it.
(08:57):
But to understand how he ended up facing the charges,
we have to talk about who he was talking to
when he made those plans, and we have to go
back in time to talk about several people who did
carry out their attacks. Urai Krajik in Slovakia, Arda Kasukia
(09:17):
Team in Turkey, Samantha Upnow in Wisconsin, and Solomon Henderson
in Tennessee. Uri Krazik and Arta Kasukia Team we've already
talked about in the Tarogram episode last fall. Krajik was
Tterogram's first saint. He was the first member of the
(09:38):
group to heed the call and add himself to the pantheon.
He was in direct personal contact with the group's leaders
for months leading up to his death in October of
twenty twenty two. He shot himself after killing two people
outside of a gay bar and brought us lava, and
after he died, Dallas humber Broke orded an audiobook of
(10:01):
his manifesto. Arda Kosukia Team was discussed briefly in that
episode two. In August of twenty twenty four, the eighteen
year old stabbed five men outside of a mosque in
his Kishehir, Turkey. Thankfully, none of his victims died and
he was taken into custody alive. His manifesto explicitly credits
(10:24):
several Tarogram publications for inspiring the attack, and Terogram channels
praised the attack. Writing in one Terogram chat, Dallas Humber
noted that despite his obvious commitment to the cause, he
couldn't be added to the list of saints worshiped by
the group because he wasn't white. When Terogram leaders Dallas
(10:49):
Humber and Matthew Allison were indicted a month after Kosukia
Team's attack, his attack was one of three acts of
terror that the Department of Justice alleged they can concretely
connect the pair two, charging them with directly soliciting it.
Another of those three attacks was the brodest Lava shooting.
(11:09):
After arta Kosukia Team was arrested, he told Turkish authorities
that he'd been assisted and encouraged throughout the process of
planning the attack over a period of months by someone
he'd met online. He said they communicated in English, and
he believed this person was a teenager living in Eastern Europe.
(11:30):
His online friend used the name fyotulf Hansen, which you
might think sounds like a clue, but it really isn't.
It's just another homage to the mass shooters these young
men idolize. Fiotulf Hansen was from twenty seventeen until twenty
twenty five the legal name of Norwegian mass murderer under Bravik.
(11:52):
Bravik has since made yet another legal name change, and
he is now going by far Skalde Grimmer RAUSKYI older
of north Riki. I haven't pronounced that right, and that's okay.
It is apparently an entirely made up name, loosely based
in Old Norse. This Hanson, though the one chatting with
(12:14):
Arta Kaskia team about how to most sufficiently carry out
mass murders, was not actually Andres Bravic. Obviously, he's just
a fan. And on the day of Kasukia team's attack
August twelfth, twenty twenty four, mis Hanson served as a
sort of public relations agent for these attempted murders. Kasuka
(12:39):
team had prepared an array of photographs and documents ahead
of time, to be shared online, which Hanson appears to
have spent the day doing on a variety of platforms.
Marc Andre Argentino, a senior research fellow at the Accelerationism
Research Consortium, notes this trend. In this and similar attacks,
(13:00):
it a sort of press kit. Kazukia team had taken
selfies posing in his gear and photos of all the
gear laid out neatly on the floor. He uploaded his
own manifesto, along with more than a dozen other documents,
including meinkomf, James Mason's Siege, several Terogram publications, and a
(13:22):
publication by a group called the Maniac Murder Cult. Also
in that folder were the manifestos of several mass shooters
who inspired him, including the one that Jurai Krazik had
sent directly to the leaders of the Tterogram collective before
he murdered two people and brought us lava in twenty
twenty two. But once Kazukia Team was out there trying
(13:43):
to commit mass murder, he couldn't really be posting. He
couldn't be checking his phone. That was Hanson's job. He
created a Twitter account to post links to the live
stream in the files. He posted links and images on
forums devoted to gore videos, and around the same time,
someone probably Hanson, posted those same links on four Chan,
(14:10):
and he also invited a small handful of users to
a private group chat on Telegram. Before the attack began,
(14:33):
Kasuki Team sent Hanson a message on Telegram announcing that
it would begin soon. The message had the links to
the photos, the documents, the manifesto, and the live stream.
Hanson forwarded that message to the private chat just before
the stream went live. There were nine people in the chat.
(14:55):
They dissembled ahead of time with fore knowledge of this
impending attack. This was a watch party. The stream was short.
The longest version of the video that I could find,
which does seem to be the entirety of the original stream,
is less than three minutes long. The opening frames show
(15:18):
the attacker's face. He's staring directly into the camera. It's
like he's looking at you. He's wearing a helmet, goggles,
and a half faced skull mask, and the shot lingers
there on his face for a little too long before
he affixes the camera to the front of his tactical
(15:39):
vest and starts walking outside of the mosque. A dozen
or so older men were sitting in a cafe area
after evening prayer, and they seem to ignore this oddly
dressed teenager until he approaches a man from behind and
stabs him. But then, instead of attacking any of the
(16:02):
other men in the immediate area, most of whom are
in their seventies and sitting down, he takes off running.
It's an odd scene. Remember, he's wearing safety goggles, a helmet,
a skull mask, a black tactical vest, and camo pants.
(16:22):
He looks weird and he's just stabbed a man, but
the reactions from most of the people around him are
pretty subdued. He lunges towards another man, who cries out
and does try to run from him, but an older
man smoking a cigarette a few feet away watches this
(16:42):
happen and just says, what are you doing in a
tone that I can only describe as disinterested. As Kosuki
team runs off down the street and through a nearby park,
he stabs several more people at random. An old man
on a bench in the park yells at him to
go away, but a lot of the people don't react
(17:04):
to him at all. He was tackled by police less
than a minute and a half after the attack began,
and the video ends with the camera pointed up towards
the sky with faces peering down at it. He's lying
on his back in a parking lot, surrounded by a
handful of police officers and a crowd of curious onlookers.
(17:28):
In the chat, the group was disappointed he had stabbed
several people, but in the video you can't actually see much.
There's no blood, there's barely any screaming, there's no corpses.
Nobody died. It was just a lot of shaky footage
(17:49):
of the path in a park and audio of a
nervous teen breathing heavily. A user known only as Nitro
wrote a for effort. Hansen said at least he did it,
and a third user replied credit for that at least.
(18:13):
That third message posted in that invite only private watch
party for what they hoped would be a mass murderer,
was written by a fourteen year old girl in Madison, Wisconsin.
Four months later, not long after her fifteenth birthday, she
murdered two people before taking her own life. Natalie Rucknow,
(18:37):
who preferred to go by Samantha, didn't live stream her attack,
which was a great disappointment to her followers. In the
final few minutes before she opened fire in a classroom
at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, on December sixteenth,
twenty twenty four, she was sitting in a bathroom stall
(18:57):
making her last posts, a photo of her own hand
making the okay symbol commonly used to mean white power,
and a link to her manifesto that Boase garnered significant
attention later in the day, but at first, before it
was big news, only a few people saw it. She
(19:21):
only had a handful of followers. One of those followers
replied to the post, writing quote live stream it. He
quoted her post too, adding the same message live stream it.
He seemed to know what it was, despite the fact
(19:44):
that the link to the manifesto she posted didn't work.
He could only see the photo, a photo posted without
a caption of a hand held out over a bathroom
floor live stream it. He understood, or perhaps knew, that
this was her final post before an attack. There's no
(20:08):
concrete evidence, at least none that's been made public, that
this user had communicated directly with Roupnow about the specifics
of what was about to happen, but they were mutuals.
They followed each other's Twitter accounts. Screenshots of her account
taken before the attack hit the News showed that she
(20:30):
followed nineteen accounts. I can only tell you for sure
who two of them belonged to. She followed two accounts
that both belonged to a seventeen year old boy in Antioch, Tennessee.
A month after Rupnow's death, he was dead too. Solomon
(20:51):
Henderson shot and killed a student in his high school
cafeteria before taking his own life. It's like a virus.
It's like the ring. These kids are watching people die online.
They're consuming online media about mass murder, and then within
(21:12):
weeks they're dead too, and they've taken other people with them.
Samantha up Now killed two people, Aaron West, a teacher,
and a fourteen year old student named Ruby Vergara. Aaron
loved camping in Disney World and her husband of twenty
(21:33):
years and their three daughters. Ruby loved art, her pets,
and playing keyboard in her family worship band. They weren't targeted.
Their deaths were random, a meaningless, nihilist act of violence.
(21:55):
Solomon Henderson killed sixteen year old Joscelyn Correa Escalante Joscelyn
came to the United States from Guatemala when she was nine.
She was on the soccer team and she hoped to
become a doctor. The photo in her obituary is from
hur Quine Sanieira. They were so much more than that.
(22:19):
Of course, those few small details don't capture the depth
of what was lost. But I only know as much
about these victims as their families shared with the media
or wrote in their obituaries. I had to try to
learn something about who they were. They were real people,
(22:40):
people who were loved, people who had passions and struggles
and dreams, people with so much life left to live,
and that can't be allowed to get lost in this
story of contagious, hateful violence, violence seemingly for the sake
of violence alone. The way they died was meaningless, but
(23:04):
their deaths weren't, and their lives weren't. And selfishly, I
had to see their faces, smiling and alive. It's the
only way to push out the images of things I
wish I hadn't seen. After Solomon Henderson carried out his
(23:28):
attack at Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, two documents surfaced.
One was a manifesto fifty one pages long. The other
was nearly three hundred pages of his online diary covering
the months leading up to the attack. Both documents are
(23:48):
full of links, screenshots, memes, selfies, copied sections of other texts,
and any truth they hold is buried in so many
layers of irony and inside jokes from incredibly insular online
communities that it's hard to take much away from them.
It is a manifesto and a diary, That's what the
(24:12):
documents are. But reading those documents it felt like I
spent most of the day reading a child's suicide note,
because that's really what they are. Like Arta Kasukia Team,
like Urai Krazik, like Samantha Rupnow Solomon Henderson was struggling
(24:33):
with thoughts of suicide. His diary starts in October of
twenty twenty four, three months before he died. It opens
with quote, I'm burning with hate. Hate will change the world.
An entry later in the evening that same day includes
(24:54):
the line quote the only good nd word is a
dead end word, and that includes me, Solomon Henderson. It
may surprise you to hear was black. He knew this
meant he couldn't be made a Saint pterogram. Saints have
(25:15):
to be white, but he wanted to do it anyway.
He wanted to be like his heroes, and he wanted
to inspire more violence. Andy wanted to be dead. A
few days later, he wrote, I'm perfect for this. I
have no faith in humanity. He doesn't say yet what
(25:39):
this is, but it's the same it he meant when
he told Samantha up now to live stream it. It's
clear that he was already planning a shooting, and that
he had been for months. The same week he started
keeping the diary, he pulled a box cutter on another
student at school and was spended for two days. He
(26:03):
was charged with attempted reckless endangerment, but was placed in
a diversion program instead of being prosecuted. On December sixteenth,
twenty twenty four, at two am, he wrote in the diary,
when I think about what I'm going to do, I
get sad seeing and reading kids and adults before who
(26:24):
did similar attacks. The loneliness, the fact we had no
other choice, no help, just nothing. So like I said,
it's clear that he'd already been planning to do something.
He'd had the idea in his head long before what
happened later that day, but after Samantha Upnow's attack, he
(26:47):
became fixated on her, and his resolve to carry out
his attack intensified significantly. Later that evening, he wrote in
the diary, holy shit, the New School shooter followed me,
and he pasted in screenshots of her account before it
was deleted, showing that they did indeed follow each other.
(27:11):
On December eighteenth, two days after she died, he wrote,
She's stuck in my head. The next day, he created
a new Discord server. The portions of that server that
I've been able to view don't show very many messages
prior to the day he died, but based on the
reactions from the other users, it appears they all understood
(27:33):
when he invited them to the server that its purpose
was for them to be able to access the live
stream on the day he decided to do it. Creating
the server was a concrete step taken toward the attack,
and it was directly motivated by his new obsession with Repnow,
who he refers to as Saint Tris Repnow in both
(27:56):
his diary and his manifesto. At the end of the manifesto,
in a section titled final remarks, Henderson wrote, I was
so miserable I wanted to kill myself. I just couldn't
take it anymore. I'm a worthless subhuman, a living, breathing disgrace.
(28:17):
That all changed once I read Urikraje's manifesto and the
English edition Mass Cleaner Handbook. He's referring to the Bradoslava
shooter's manifesto and the document written by Arta Kasukia Team Mack.
When I originally read Kasukya Team's manifesto in August, I
(28:38):
had to copy and paste the Turkish text and to
Google translate one paragraph at a time. The English edition
he's talking about was posted online by that mysterious user
calling himself Hansen. Henderson's manifesto ends with this quote, I
take great pride in the fact that the people before
(29:01):
and after me will commit similar acts, not only in
the USA, but all over the world. I hope you
all enjoyed the broadcast After the shooting at Antioch High
School on January twenty second, twenty twenty five, people on
Twitter noticed something. They found his account. He'd been mutual
(29:26):
followers with rupp Now and interacted with her on the
day of the shooting. Several users had said back in
December that the authorities should follow up with him specifically
based on those posts. In January, at least one person
posted that they'd gone to the trouble of submitting an
official FBI tip the month prior. It's not clear if
(29:48):
the tip was even made, or if anyone followed up
on it, or if the authorities had Henderson on their
radar at all. Well, it's not clear if he on
their radar in January of twenty twenty five, because the
authorities had been in contact with Solomon Henderson several times.
(30:09):
He was arrested in twenty twenty when he was just thirteen,
after his mother called the police to report that he'd
run away after punching her in the face and hitting
her with a chair. In November of twenty twenty three,
he was charged with aggravated sexual exploitation of a miner
after downloading child sexual abuse material. There aren't any more
(30:31):
details provided in the reporting on this. He was a
miner himself, just sixteen at the time, but child sexual
abuse material is always illegal for anyone to have for
any reason, and it's also rampant in the same online communities.
The traffic and gore videos and mass shooting warship as
(30:54):
a miner. His court record is not open for public inspection,
but news outlets report that he was court ordered to
have no access to the internet except for as needed
for schoolwork, but it's not clear what the duration of
that sentence would have been. At some point in twenty
twenty three, the Nashville Police took two guns away from
(31:14):
the home, but police will only say that the guns
belonged to an adult, but they can't release any more
details about why they were called to the house in
the first place because it involved a minor. And then
in October of twenty twenty four, he was arrested for
pulling a knife on a girl at school on the
(31:35):
day of the shooting. In January, he was dropped off
at school late. He'd spent all morning at court with
his mother. As part of the diversion program he'd been
put into for that charge, he had to sign paperwork
acknowledging that he was court ordered not to possess any
guns or ammunition, so there were warning signs they knew
(32:01):
who he was. He wasn't allowed online, and he wasn't
allowed to touch a gun, and the cops had previously
removed all of the guns from his home. Doesn't seem
to have made a difference, and while the cops may
have missed some of the red flags in Solomon Henderson's
final days, they did show some initiative. The day after
(32:24):
Repnew's death, authorities in California detained a twenty year old
man named Alexander Paffendorf. It would take months to get
records from the various platforms where Repnow had been posting
and messaging in order to see the full scope of
her online communications, but her messages with Paffendorf were seen
by agents immediately, and those messages were very concerning. Apparently
(32:50):
the pair had been messaging in the days leading up
to the attack. It isn't entirely clear to me, based
on the reporting that I could find, if Pafendorf had
specific prior knowledge of the shooting, like an actual time, date,
and place, but they had been exchanging fairly explicit messages
about their shared intent to carry out a mass shooting
(33:12):
in the near future. His messages to her contained details
of a plan to attack a federal building using guns
and explosives. The FBI acted quickly, and they arrived at
his home with guns drawn. The very next day, when
he was interviewed by FBI agents, he admitted to exchanging
(33:34):
messages with Rupnow, but he wasn't charged with a crime. Instead,
the Carlsbad, California Police Department filed an application for a
gun violence emergency protective Order, and they placed him on
a psychiatric hold. It turned out that Alexander Paffendorf didn't
own any guns. He had no guns or bomb making
(33:57):
materials at all. He'd just been trying to impress a
teenage girl online. The two talked online quite a bit,
chatting about their suicidal thoughts, their white supremacist beliefs, and
their plans to murder as many people as possible, but
he claims he didn't mean it. He apologized in court,
(34:20):
saying he'd been attempting to pursue a romantic relationship with
the girl and never had any intention of purchasing any
weapons or following through on the things they talked about.
Maybe he assumed she didn't mean it either. No criminal
charges were filed against Paffendorff, and a judge in San
Diego ruled in April that he will be legally barred
(34:42):
from owning a gun until at least twenty twenty eight
It's not entirely clear if he knew she was only fifteen,
but given the nature of the online spaces they were in,
I would bet that he did, and Alexander Paffendorff was
(35:14):
knocked Samantha Rupnow's only online boyfriend. That six page document
she posted just before the shooting was locked. It was
a link to a Google doc that she'd forgotten to
make publicly accessible. Unlike Artikazu Yeteam, she hadn't prepared a
mass shooter's press kit and left it with a co conspirator,
(35:36):
so at first it seemed like no one would ever
know what was in the manifesto. Within hours, though, a
Canadian woman named Anna Slats claimed to have made contact
with the shooter's boyfriend. Slats is a journalist, I guess.
(35:57):
In twenty eighteen, she was the editor of her college
newspaper until she was forced to step down after making
the editorial decision to publish a racist screed from a
no neo Nazi. She worked briefly for the far right,
virulently islamophobic outlet Rebel News, and sometimes wrote for The
Post Millennial. In twenty twenty two, she founded her own
(36:19):
outlet that focuses almost exclusively on stirring a hatred towards
trans women, and that may have been what sparked Slats's
initial interest in the story. There were rumors in the
immediate aftermath of the shooting that Repnow was transgender. She
wasn't by all accounts, she was a heterosexual cisgender female.
(36:44):
But regardless of what drew Slats to the story, she
managed to convince a user who claimed to be Repnow's
long distance boyfriend to share a copy of the manifesto
with her. She then proceeded to water mark each page
of the manifesto with her own name before posting the
images to Twitter. Now, as a journalist, I understand the
(37:08):
frustration at having your work stolen and your research used
without credit. I do. It's happened to me too many
times to count. But I can't, for the life of me,
even begin to imagine these series of thoughts and ideas
that would have to pass through your head to lead
you to a place where you were watermarking your name
(37:32):
onto the pages of a manifesto of a dead child
hours after the author shot up a school. That makes
me nauseous but like I said, journalist is kind of
a loose term here. The boyfriend, who's never been named publicly,
(37:53):
says Repno sent him the manifesto on WhatsApp about an
hour before the shooting, but that he didn't see it
until hours later. A classmate says Repnow had talked about
having an internet boyfriend who lived in Germany, and that
appears to be the same individual who provided the manifesto.
We don't know if he's actually a teenager or actually
(38:17):
in Germany, but these are the elements of his identity
that he claims, and that she was telling people in
her life. The unnamed Twitter user slat spoke to said
they'd been talking for about two years and he did
seem to know a significant amount of information about Repnow's
home life. So she sent the manifesto to her German boyfriend.
(38:40):
She exchanged murder fantasies with Alexander Paffendorff, but there was
at least one more internet boyfriend chatting about mass shootings
with Samantha Repnow. The first two internet boyfriends came to
light on the day of the shooting. FBI agents saw
the messages between Repno and Paffendorf as soon as they
took custody of her phone, and the unnamed German boyfriend
(39:03):
outed himself in a series of tweets and ultimately shared
the manifesto with Anna Slats. The third man's existence didn't
come to light until he was arrested at the end
of April twenty twenty five, four months after Repnow's death.
It took that long for the very slow wheels of
the justice system to turn. According to the charging documents
(39:27):
in Damian Allen's case, the FBI searched Repnow's cell phone
and home almost immediately, but they didn't even apply for
the search warrants for her TikTok accounts until over a
month later, on January thirtieth, twenty twenty five. It's useless
to speculate about why that might be. Maybe that's just
(39:48):
how long it took to get around to the paperwork.
Maybe that's how long it took for them to figure
out which accounts belonged to her. It's common for people
active in online extremist communities to cycle through a ca
counts pretty quickly, getting banned for posting something hideous, making
a new account, reconnecting with old followers, getting banned again,
and so on forever. So maybe it took a little
(40:11):
bit of legwork to know what to even ask for
when drafting them warrant. I'm willing to bet that played
a role here, But the timing does raise an uncomfortable question.
Had they not planned on looking at everything, they'd gone
in guns blazing to grab Alexander Paffendorff right away, and
(40:35):
that turned out to be a situation that was admittedly gross,
but not life threatening. There was no mass murder in
the making there. He was just a guy with violent
fantasies who wanted to date a child. Again disgusting, abhorrent,
but he was lying about planning a mass shooting. He
(40:58):
didn't even own a gun. So maybe it took the
entire six weeks between December sixteenth, when the shooting occurred
in January thirtieth and the war it was signed. Maybe
it took six weeks to identify all the TikTok accounts
connected to rupnow. But maybe Solomon Henderson's attack on January
(41:19):
twenty second played a part in that timeline. Paffendorf was bluffing,
But after the shooting in Tennessee, it was all too
clear that not everyone shed talked to online was some
of them were deadly serious. Either way, we'll never know,
(41:39):
and it took TikTok two months to respond to the
court order to produce those records. So it wasn't until
April of twenty twenty five that FBI agents in Milwaukee
made an urgent call to the FBI Field office in Miami.
They needed to get in touch with the Palm Beach
County Sheriff's Office as soon as possible. One of the
(42:00):
men who'd spent all summer chatting with Rough now appeared
to be one of their deputies. After what must have
been a very tense call between the FBI and the
Internal Affairs Bureau in Palm Beach, it was determined that
the accounts did belong to Damian Allen, But despite the
(42:22):
scores of photos of Allan posing in his apparently very
real Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office uniform, he'd never been
employed there or by any law enforcement agency. When police
searched his home, they found eighteen guns, twelve thousand rounds
of ammunition, and a variety of authentic or realistic replicas
(42:45):
of uniforms for various law enforcement agencies and branches of
the military. According to the charging documents, Damian Allen communicated
with Samantha upp Now regularly between May and September of
twenty twenty four. The documents only contain excerpts of their
conversations over TikTok DM, but they exchanged usernames for a
(43:06):
variety of other platforms, including Snapchat and discord. In one
message in May of twenty twenty four, Repnow tells Alan quote,
I wanted to do a black church that was near me,
but you know. He responded by telling her about his gear,
describing his bulletproof best, his collection of high capacity magazines,
(43:28):
and stockpile of flash banks and smoke grenades. Repnow, who
was at the time just fourteen years old, says she
only had access to her dad's handguns. In the middle
of this conversation about guns, Alan wrote quote, once you
get to a point, there's no going back. And he
(43:49):
said he had a plan to strike seven different locations.
Two weeks later, in another late night conversation about their
plans to carry out mass shootings, Alan wrote, quote, we
go down together. Twitch. Rup Now replied correct, I love you.
(44:10):
I love you more, Alan wrote. In July, Repnow scolded
Alan for a post he'd made. The post isn't described
in the affidavit, and his accounts are gone for the
most part, but it sounds like he'd probably posted one
of those fan edit videos of cut together clips and
(44:30):
photos of different murderers. It's a popular style of content
in these communities. But Repnow's message admonishes him. She wrote, quote,
Dylan Cleebold was a Jew, Adam Landsa was a gay pedophile,
Nick was also a pedophile. The Trump shooter also a Jew.
Peyton Gendron was in de furryborn which all of that
(44:52):
is disgraceful and disgusting. Looks stuff up before posting it.
Apparently she thought his taste in my lass shooters was lowbrow.
By September of twenty twenty four, they seem to have
broken up. The charging documents only contained snippets, so there's
no context, But on September twenty third, rub Now wrote quote,
(45:16):
I know I unadded you, and I apologize. I love
you and I'm so sorry about all this. I hope
all goes well for you and I don't do what
I did again. A few minutes later, she followed up,
writing I will always care and love you, even if
I'm not right for you. As much as I want
to talk to you every day and hour of my time,
(45:38):
I can't because I don't want to harm you in
any way. A few days later, Alan messaged her to
say his other account had been banned and asked her
to Adam on Snapchat. It is possible they continued chatting
on another platform. The Palm Beach Sheriff's Detectives affidavit only
describes the communication he reviewed from the direct messages on TikTok,
(46:01):
and there's no allegation made in the affidavit that they
believe Alan had specific prior knowledge of the shooting that
Rucknow carried out in December, and all mention of communications
between the two of them stops after September of twenty
twenty four, three months before the shooting. The latter half
of the affidavit is just dedicated to describing the hundreds
(46:25):
of Instagram, TikTok and discord posts he made pretending to
be a sheriff's deputy, which again he was not. But
there is one rather cryptic line at the end of
the affidavit quote. It should be noted that it appears
Alan stopped communicating in his chat before Rucknow executed her
plan and has not communicated again since. Alan was talking
(46:49):
to numerous members prior to the attack almost daily, so
he stopped posting in his own discord channel right before
Rupp now carried out her attack. He'd been posting in
that discord constantly, and then suddenly he stopped. He went
(47:12):
dark online. There's no mention of anything he posted anywhere
after December of twenty twenty four. I found a handful
of posts made in January February of this year on
TikTok and Instagram accounts that he used for posting pictures
of his cop role play server in Grand Theft Auto.
But his real accounts, his personal accounts, his accounts where
(47:35):
he expressed himself politically, those went away. Was Damian Allen
actually preparing to carry out a mass shooting of his
own or was he just another grown man telling a
fourteen year old girl he loved her while encouraging her
to kill the difference between Damian Allen and Alexander Paffendorff
(47:56):
is the guns. Pafendorf was talking and shit, he didn't
actually have so much as a bullet in his possession. Alan, however,
had so much ammunition in his home that the initial
reports just listed it as three hundred pounds of bullets
because it was easier to weigh them than to count them.
(48:17):
He also had a closet full of police and military
uniforms that were so realistic the FBI thought he was
a real cop. It's impossible to know what might have happened,
but his fascination with both mass shootings and fourteen year
old girls seems to date back at least a couple
of years. In October of twenty twenty one, when Alan
(48:41):
was a nineteen year old high school senior, he was
charged with lewde and lascivious molestation of a victim under sixteen.
I will note for the record that he was not
actually convicted on this charge. He was placed in a
pre trial diversion program that required him to complete a
mental health evaluation and prohibited him from possessing firearms for
(49:02):
a period of time. The case was dismissed after he
successfully completed the diversion program in twenty twenty three, which
is weird because he was posting videos of himself all
over social media throughout twenty twenty two and twenty twenty
three of himself handling firearms, so I guess this one
(49:23):
just slipped through the cracks. So to be clear, Technically,
he was not convicted of groping a fourteen year old
girl's breast, but the affidavit is interesting either way. The
victim told police she'd noticed Alan watching her during gym class.
(49:43):
After jim class, he followed her as she walked to lunch.
At some point, she asked him what sort of vibe
he was going for with his outfit, and he responded
that he was trying to achieve a quote nineteen ninety nine,
Columbine Vine like a black trench coat with stuff strapped
to me. This obviously made the girl a little uncomfortable,
(50:07):
so she turned to walk away. He followed her, then
grabbed her by the shoulder and slid his hand down
her chest, grabbing her breast. Alan told the responding officer
that the girl was making up the stuff about him
touching her because she'd been scared of what he said
about Columbine. So he does admit that he told a
(50:32):
much younger student that he was costplaying as a school shooter.
He just denies that he touched her. Damian Allen is
currently being held without bond in Palm Beach County. I'm
interested to see if his case turns up any new
evidence about the online spaces where he may have first
met rap Now. I seriously doubt he just messaged her
(50:53):
on TikTok at random. They overlapped somewhere. He's an indictment
of a man named Anna Ruth Koposwami in Pennsylvania offers
a hint that only raises more questions. Kapasami was an
avid consumer of Terogram content, but he was arrested for
(51:15):
the possession of child sexual abuse material, material that he'd
solicited from a teenage girl that he was grooming online.
The victim in this case lived in Georgia. Kawasami lived
in Pennsylvania, and in filings in his case, the government
notes that the victim posted on Instagram that she'd been
(51:35):
friends with Robnow, and while his charges are related to
the allegations that he coerced a minor into sending him
sexual photographs, their conversations weren't just about sex. He was
also talking to her about how to commit and get
away with murders. I couldn't tell you exactly how many
(51:57):
men are online right now trying to convince a teen
to commit random, unprovoked acts of lethal violence. But it
doesn't feel like a coincidence that these girls encountered each
other online before it turns out, this wasn't really a
story about Damian Allen at all, was it. I could
(52:18):
have written a few thousand words about Alan's tragic backstory.
I certainly wasted enough time digging it up, trying to
fill in the blanks and court records and old Facebook statuses.
His parents seemed to have had a pretty violent relationship.
His father was charged several times with things like domestic
violence and child neglect, but it never seemed to stick.
(52:43):
His mom left him with his father, taking his baby
brother with her when she moved in with a new
boyfriend and had another son. His mom was in and
out of rehab a few times before ending up in
prison in twenty seventeen for sex trafficking a friend's teenage daughter.
Seems to be when he started pretending to be a
cop online. But none of that really matters, does it.
(53:07):
I don't know when he started fantasizing about mass murder
or how he met the murderer he said he loved.
I don't know if he was lying to impress a child,
or if he really was going to do something with
all those guns, maybe he was all talk, or maybe
he was going to be the next link in the
chain reaction of violence that started in an online chat room.
(53:32):
But if not him, who will it be. You're right,
Grayjake is dead. Samantha up Now is dead. Solomon Henderson
is dead. All three teenagers took their own lives after
carrying out a shooting at the urging of people they
met online. Between the three of them, they killed five people,
(53:59):
but Ta Graham killed eight. They were sucked into online
communities steeped in gore, communities that celebrated death and made
them believe that the only way their lives would have
any meaning is if they died doing something too horrible
to forget. Bartika Sukia Team was arrested before he could
(54:20):
attempt to take his own life, and he now faces
over one hundred years in prison. Dallas Humber and Matthew
Allison are awaiting trial for their role in encouraging these attacks.
Terrogram has been designated as a terrorist organization. At least
a dozen people associated with the group have been arrested
around the world. Terogram is dead. Kind of but it's
(54:47):
not really something you can kill. It can kill you,
but you can't kill an idea. This particular network operating
under this name and with these particulars leaders, that's gone.
The virus is still spreading in the dark corners of
(55:07):
the Internet. People are posting fan adits of mass shooting
live streams and egging each other on, asking each other
who is going to be the one to get the
next high score. Weird Little Guys see production of Cool
(55:38):
Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by
me while I hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtterman
and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly
talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at weirdle Guys podcast at gmail
dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably
won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy
(56:00):
theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird
Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to
make you one of my red little guys. This episode
contained discussion of suicide and child sexual abuse material. If
you're experiencing thoughts of suicide, you can dial nine to
eight eight in the United States and Canada to reach
the Suicide and Crisis Helpline. If you have encountered child
(56:23):
sexual abuse material online, believe someone may be coercing minors
into producing sexually explicit images, or believe a child is
being sexually abused, report it to the National Center for
Missing and Exploited Children at Report dot cyber tip dot org.
That's report dot C y B e R tip dot org.
Host
Molly Conger
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