Welcome to Court Watch #131. Our editor is in the Big Easy this week at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference hanging out with 1,499 of his closest reporter friends and one guy who took our reporting last year and never cited us. But as we Second Line our way through the hotel bar trying to avoid awkward moments, the federal court dockets kept doing their thing. In this week’s roundup, we have a shrimp scandal, two Antifa cases, cryptocurrency scams, money laundering operations, so many threats against public officials, and we find the absolutely worst court filing of the year. (Readers, leave us a comment about which one you think it is.)
But before all that, let’s do a Court Watch and 404 Media exclusive about the gamification of terrorism.
Roblox ISIS
A Texas man was indicted this week for allegedly threatening an ISIS-inspired attack against a Christian music concert. The FBI says eighteen-year-old James Wesley Burger made the threats while playing the popular online multiplayer game Roblox, leading investigators to uncover more ominous online activity about his desire to commit an ISIS-inspired terror attack.
Another Roblox user, identified in the criminal complaint as a witness, reportedly turned “Crazz3pain” in to law enforcement for making threats by using Roblox’s in-game chat feature, in which players can text each other through moderated comments. The witness said Crazz3pain expressed a desire on January 21, 2025, to “kill Shia Muslims at their mosque” and commit martyrdom at a Christian-affiliated concert.
The FBI executed a search warrant on Burger’s residence roughly a month after the alleged threat that revealed another purported statement by Crazz3pain on Roblox in which he discussed wanting to attain martyrdom and “deal a grevious wound upon the followers of the Cross” (SIC). According to the complaint, the search also unearthed more sinister behavior online by Burger than comments in a video game chat, such as Google searches for “Lone wolf terrorists isis,” “are suicide attacks haram in islam,” “ginger isis member,” and “Festivals happening near me.” The FBI says Burger’s email was used to sign up for Crazz3pain’s account, and that agents found cookie data from Burger’s phone matching the time the witness said the threat was made.
In an interrogation with FBI agents, Burger reportedly admitted the account was his and that he had made similar statements on Roblox. The complaint states he told agents, “[A]t the time it was mostly a heightened emotional response… but it certainly doesn’t take away from the fact that you know that [] is . . . the concept of what would have occurred . . . the deaths of, of Christians . . . that’s not something that’s going . . . be shunned or, or shied away from . . . the details definitely . . . became exaggerated which . . . the end, end goal it’s still the same . . . it hasn’t shifted a bit. . . . [T]o obey and… submit and live under the banner and laws of God or . . . to literally die trying. . . . So that’s the end goal. … [G]et the hell out of the US and... if I can’t... . then, martyrdom or bust.”
When agents asked about his intentions behind Crazz3pain’s comments on Roblox, Burger allegedly said, “[T]he intention . . . and the action is something that is meant to or will cause terror. . . . I cannot agree with the term terrorist, you know, I definitely agree that it serves the same means that a terrorist would be seeking.” Asked whether he was a terrorist, BURGER said: “I mean, yeah, yeah. By, by the sense and . . . by my very own definition, yes, I guess, you know, I would be a terrorist.”
Burger also reportedly told agents that being banned from Roblox was a “familiar occurrence.”
When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Roblox told Court Watch, “The safety of our community is among our highest priorities. In this case, we moved swiftly to assist law enforcement’s investigation before any real-world harm could occur and investigated and took action in accordance with our policies. We have a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to help swiftly detect and remove content that violates our policies. Our Community Standards explicitly prohibit any content or behavior that depicts, supports, glorifies, or promotes terrorist or extremist organizations in any way. We have dedicated teams focused on proactively identifying and swiftly removing such content, as well as supporting requests from and providing assistance to law enforcement. We also work closely with other platforms and in close collaboration with safety organizations to keep content that violates our policies off our platform, and will continue to diligently enforce our policies.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas, which is prosecuting the case, did not respond to a request for comment. Burger’s attorney was equally unresponsive.
(Editor’s note: We’re publishing our version of this story simultaneously with our friends at 404 Media. Because we like fun social experiments, we didn’t share a draft of 404 Media’s version with Peter as he wrote our piece up. You get to see how two reporters tackle the same filing.)
The Docket Roundup
The FBI says it arrested a man who spray painted “KILL ICE” on an office building in Nebraska used by Homeland Security Investigations and ICE.
We got one of our first BlueSky threat cases this week.
An ex-foreign service member who says she suffers from Havana Syndrome is suing the State Department and Secretary Marco Rubio.
Here’s a bribery scoop from the Buckeye state involving the post office.
A stockholder is suing the executives of Reddit, claiming they misled investors about how much traffic the social media site gets.
A man from Georgia was indicted for allegedly threatening U.S. senators Ted Cruz and Deb Fischer.
Twitter/X/Elon filed a lawsuit against New York’s Attorney General over a state law that requires social media companies to disclose their terms of service over hate speech.
There’s a big shrimp scandal brewing in South Carolina.
One dollar bond anyone?
Here’s your weekly MrBeast civil case update.
A Florida man allegedly behind a Facebook account named “SnakeWhip WhipMike” was arrested for purportedly posting threats against a Pride event.
Two of the most disturbing types of cases to read about are the ones that involve animal cruelty and the online cult 764, so naturally they had to overlap this week.
Beyond Karen Read, the defense team in South Carolina’s oldest murder case, which several true crime podcasters dubbed “Murdaugh 2.0,” won a dramatic hearing this week to dismiss the case after presenting evidence of a Brady violation and prosecutorial misconduct by the SC Attorney General’s Office (editor’s note: Peter was a paid member of the defense team).
TFW the judge doesn’t like your redactions enough the first time, so you have to do it again.
A search warrant against a Maine woman who claimed to be “a member of Antifa New England” was unsealed. The woman purportedly told cops that she would “slit Trump’s throat” and “If you nazi c**** do anything here like what happened in Worcester, you are going to have some dead ICE agents.”
We’re going to level with you, we put this link in our working draft google document at the beginning of the week because we must have thought it was interesting. But now it’s 7am on a Friday in a hotel in New Orleans as we’re crashing to put out the newsletter in time. The hotel’s wifi for some reason blocks DOJ’s website. We hope it’s worth a click but we can’t be fully sure if early week us was right.
Last Pass is being sued by a man who says he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cryptocurrency when the company was hacked.
“There’s my challenge to Elon,” attorney S. Scott West told The Independent. “Make these vehicles so safe that I don’t have to do this anymore.”
A University of Michigan employee is suing the higher education institution saying he was passed over for a promotion because he is white.
Our song of the week is from a band we saw off Frenchman Street last night.
“FBI was later able to recover the remnants of the flag and lighter fluid at the location Mr. Swinford filmed his Bayat video,” says one fascinating sentencing memo in Oklahoma.
DOJ says it shouldn’t be forced to preserve public records related to DOGE because it’s already been ordered to preserve public records related to DOGE in other lawsuits.
A company named Potato Ventures wants to make sure no one rips off their salt and pepper shaker design. (hattip a Court Watch subscriber who loved the docket name)
Congressman Dan Goldman won his defamation case this week.
Cryptocurrency scams are getting more complicated.
We’re worried about the state of fintech and business reporting that no one noticed this case this week.
Authorities in Virginia are upset that a man who was shot didn’t want to show up at court against his accuser.
Speaking of Virginia, y'all have so many money laundering businesses.
An Illinois federal judge has had enough, “Thereafter, Petitioner alleges that plainclothes officers with no visible law enforcement identification took immediate custody of Petitioner upon his exit from the courtroom. Although Petitioner’s counsel informed the officers that the decision was not final and he was reserving appeal rights on the record, Petitioner was nonetheless detained.”
A Canadian man accused of sexual assault in our future 51st state was arrested in New York
Since the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference is in New Orleans, we went searching the docket this week for any public corruption in the Big Easy. It was almost comically easy to find.
Thanks for reading, we’ll see you next Friday.
A PostScript by Peter Beck, a reporter for Court Watch and lifelong Charlestonian.
Tuesday marked the tenth anniversary of the Mother Emanuel shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, by white supremacist Dylann Roof. I was thirteen years old at the time when a CNN notification flashed on my phone reporting multiple casualties at the church located two miles from my house that I had visited as a child. The massacre rattled Charleston and the state, coming just two months after a high-profile police killing of an unarmed Black man during a traffic stop for a broken headlight. A reckoning happened that forced the community to confront its delicate tiptoe between admiring our home’s beauty and culture and addressing the South’s fraught history of hate and injustice. A bipartisan consensus that included Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond’s son voted to take down the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s statehouse.
The aftermath of the shooting was one of several moments that instilled in me a drive for justice, service, and a hope towards progress–that better angels will win out in the end. In college, that manifested through legal journalism and working with public defenders back home. My hope has waned at times. Yet, I go back to those moments from 2015 of love and empathy unifying a community over hate and extremism. May the memory of the nine victims be a blessing.