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