The Rabbit Hole: Scrolling for Massacres

Editor’s Note: Studies of news consumers routinely find that depressing stories are swiftly ignored. But journalism, in its purest form, is about providing information and context to the public, regardless of how it makes the reader feel or the deft of clicks it may get. 

It’s with that journalistic responsibility in mind, that our reporter Peter Beck spent weeks down a rabbit hole of underage mass shooters sympathizers to understand a community of prepubescent children recruiting, radicalizing, and mobilizing to violence on mainstream platforms like TikTok, Discord, and Roblox. What Peter finds is an online network of violence both equal parts concerning and illuminating, assisted by scattershot moderation efforts which allow it to flourish mostly unobstructed. Consider this editor’s note your trigger warning, but also a humble request to not avoid this story’s uncomfortable truths. -Seamus

Somewhere in Australia, there’s a child who posts on TikTok dressed in army fatigues and a helmet several times a day. 

The child, who appears to be no older than 13, dances in almost all of his 30-second clips to various online trends. His only nondancing post: a snippet from a theater of a high-pitched voice sheepishly interrupting a movie to say “chicken jockey.” 

The preteen seems like an ordinary child at first glance, but his bio says “Kids be scared irl [in real life].” 

In a TikTok with more than 70,000 views, he wears a skull mask and a “KMFDM” band t-shirt worn by multiple school shooters. It’s one of dozens of similar posts. He’s a member of the True Crime Community (or, TCC), an online network of teens and adolescents who idolize mass killers. 

The community reveres killers akin to Harry Potter obsessives—except, instead of flashy edits of Albus Dumbledore, TCC members create TikToks of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter mashed up with ear-worm music. On Roblox, they reconstruct mass shooting locations rather than Hogwarts. And instead of wizardry cosplay or quidditch leagues, TCC adherents go on to commit mass shootings themselves at an astonishing rate.

Since 2024, TCC has been linked to at least 40 school shootings and plots internationally, with attacks occurring in as far-flung places as Scandinavia and Indonesia. In the past two months alone, TCC followers have perpetrated a string of heartwrenching attacks. 

On Sept. 8, a 15-year-old boy allegedly attempted to poison his classmates and teachers at a Portland, Ore., high school with a bag full of toxic chemicals he had mixed. Local police said he was obsessed with “kill-to-death ratios,” a common TCC trait, and had been radicalized through social media. 

The next month, three students and a teacher were killed at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, a roughly three-and-a-half-hour drive away from Portland. Although it’s unclear whether the 16-year-old shooter was an adherent of TCC, some early signs have emerged from the FBI’s investigation, including that the teenager was radicalized online, had a volatile home life, and was infatuated with Nazism.

Internationally, on Oct. 12, a 14-year-old posted on TikTok a picture from a school bathroom stall of him flashing an “ok” symbol before shooting his principal and a teacher at a middle school in Southern France. A day later, a South African 15-year-old wearing a “wrath” t-shirt stabbed a six-year-old multiple times in a classroom. And on Oct. 19, a Romanian 13-year-old posted the same “ok” hand sign and then stabbed a teacher and a classmate. 

Despite its deadliness and open admiration for mass murder, TCC exists in the internet’s mainstream. 

Kids can easily come across its content on TikTok and interact with TCC followers on online applications such as Discord or Roblox. Platforms appear to have little to no success preventing its dissemination, and TCC’s young, hyper-online adherents have become adept at avoiding the few content restrictions in place.

TikTok and Discord say they use a variety of technologies and moderation teams to prevent the spread of TCC content. The representatives from the companies told Court Watch they ban accounts that promote off-platform violence and report threats to law enforcement when necessary. Roblox did not return Court Watch’s request for comment.

Understanding how young people fall into TCC and become obsessed with violence requires briefly disconnecting from reality. TCC exists in a different world, devoid of morals and respect for human life. These are kids who have been socialized and brainwashed through online platforms into believing that perpetrating violence is a goal to be sought and the solution to life’s many struggles. 

To TCC members, TikTok edits of school shootings are real life and mass killers are “saints.”

One of the TCC’s newest “saints” is Jesse Van Rootselaar.

On Feb. 10, the 18-year-old Rootselaar fatally shot her mother and stepbrother after consuming copious amounts of TCC and other violent content online. Rootselaar then moved on to her ultimate purpose: waging the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history. 

But first, she had to figure out how to start her family’s car. According to a criminal complaint filed in the Western District of Washington on Oct. 2 detailing the events leading up to the Rootselaar’s murders, an online acquaintance who lived in Bellingham was there to help, instructing Rootselaar via direct messages on Discord on how to turn the car on. The acquaintance was charged last month as an alleged coconspirator.

Rootselaar, who had never learned to drive, didn’t get far from the murder scene she left in her home before a neighbor observed her crash into a snowbank. But the 18-year-old was able to pull the car back onto the road. Rootselaar then drove to Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, entered the school, and killed a teacher in a stairwell.

She went on to murder five children between the ages of 12 and 13 in the school library. A sixth child suffered catastrophic brain damage from the attack that left her with permanent cognitive and physical disabilities.

In the six months before the shooting, the online friend who helped her start the car, James Cody Bryant, allegedly interacted with Rootselaar daily on Discord. The FBI stated that Bryant, who now faces a murder conspiracy charge, had planned to record a livestream of the attack.

The Discord chats included in the criminal complaint reveal a broken teenager in Rootselaar, who was immersed in online TCC culture and whose empathy had been discarded in favor of glorifying violence. 

In one of their many conversations before the attack, Rootselaar messaged about the 1989 École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal, and the 2020 Nova Scotia killings, reportedly telling Bryant how she hoped to etch her name among the worst of history: “If I managed to cause more than 14 deaths on a school ground like a college or sum it would make it the deadliest school shooting in all of Canadian history even if I didn’t surpass the Nova Scotia killings.” 

She continued, “Getting 14 kills is a lot easier than getting 22, though if I got more than 22 it’d be simply the deadliest shooting in Canadian history period. So if I got over 5 that’d steal that title.” 

During another exchange from the complaint, Rootselaar allegedly talked about having “a higher/better KD/R than others,” referring to kill-death ratios that appear in first person shooter video games such as Call of Duty. (Put another way, the ratio reflects how many “kills” a player achieved in a video game divided by the number of times the player themself was killed in the context of that video game. Simply, a higher ratio equates to a more skilled video game player.) 

A spokesperson for Discord told Court Watch, “Real-world violence of any kind is devastating, when it impacts teens, and content that glorifies or encourages this behavior has no place on Discord. Our teams monitor for and investigate content and communities that center on mass violence, sometimes referred to as ‘true crime communities.’” 

The spokesperson continued, “Given the harm they can cause, we remove content, ban accounts, and shut down servers related to this activity. We continue to strengthen how we detect and disrupt these groups, including when they attempt to return after enforcement.” According to Discord, the platform also proactively reports violent individuals and trains law enforcement how to work with it during investigations.

A month and a half before the school shooting, Rootselaar reportedly asked Bryant if she would have fans who “romanticiz[e] true crime or killers.” The question was from someone who idolized killers.

The chats in the complaint also show Rootselaar was obsessed with leaving footage behind from her attack, as with the Christchurch, New Zealand, and the Buffalo, New York, mass shooters, telling Bryant, “If I don’t livestream it people can be detached from the gravity of how I feel. It’s just another headline. I need people to see it and personally witness the lives be impacted.” 

Rootselaar continued, “Lol I need attention before I die.” Bryant allegedly wrote back, “mhm you do,” and agreed to adjust his sleep schedule in order to be awake to record the livestream of the shooting. Court records indicate Rootselaar sent Bryant pictures of her armed to spread after the attack. 

TCC members commonly circulate the recordings of shooting livestreams, even posting them to TikTok under fake captions to throw content algorithms off. Rootselaar had studied many of these videos in order to make her attack as lethal as possible.

In several exchanges, Bryant appeared to try to offer Rootselaar a way out. Six days before her murders, Rootselaar messaged Bryant on Discord, “Idk I’m just tired of waiting. Keep having to live additional days which I don’t wanna.” “Yeah but you dont really need to do this,” Bryant reportedly replied. Rootselaar responded: “Idc that’s not the point. U don’t need to do this!! Ok. I don’t need to do anything yet I still may.”

Undeterred, Rootselaar prepared for the attack using online tools that increasingly appear in terrorism cases. On Roblox, she created a mass shooting simulator set in a mall, which she had considered targeting before settling on the school (the reason, she reportedly told Bryant, was because targeting a school would lead to a higher body count). Rootselaar also used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to ask detailed questions about guns, how to maximize her harm, and previous school shooters’ methods.

On the day of the shooting, Rootselaar logged into Twitch and started a livestream from her family’s car, briefly showing a rifle in her lap. Bryant’s Twitch account allegedly joined the stream, but the footage cut off 20 seconds later. Bryant reportedly told federal investigators that day was the third time Rootselaar said she was going to carry out her attack.

Rootselaar would have no livestream to memorialize her horrors. After police arrived at the school, Rootselaar retreated to a classroom, where she killed herself. 

One of her final acts before the shooting was reposting a TikTok fan edit of the 2023 Nashville school shooter. Both shooters senselessly killed six people before meeting their end. 

It was enough to make Rootselaar the second deadliest school shooter in Canadian history.

Whenever an attack happens, a ripple effect follows. An entire ecosystem exists online to encourage copy cats.

On TikTok, dozens of TCC videos appear every day. The platform restricts explicit mentions of TCC, but that hasn’t stopped its followers from coming up with alternative ways to connect and glorify killers, including Rootselaar. 

One prominent way is for TCC followers to record videos of themselves dancing to popular songs on TikTok and caption it “#tccdance.” Children as young as eight or nine appear in many of these videos wearing camouflage, skull masks, and shirts that are references to past mass shooters. The teens and adolescents occasionally hold weapons. 

TCC adherents also caption many of these dancing videos “rampage” and “wrath,” alluding to one of the Columbine shooters’ outfits. A third popular caption, “#billionsmustdance,” attempts to white wash the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooter’s motto: “Billions must die.”

The dances themselves often allude to violence. In one TikTok, a teenage girl in an oversized t-shirt and a skull mask makes a motion as if she were slitting her wrists and throat. Her username includes the last name of Natalie Rupnow, the 2024 Abundant Life Christian School shooter. The teenage girl captions the dance video “just do it #tccdance #fyp #dancingapp #truecrime.” 

In another dance trend, teenagers hold up both hands as if their fingers were guns, pointing them first at their head, then left, and right. This trend has caught on beyond the TCC ecosystem, spreading to regular TikTok. Thousands of TikTokers have recreated the dance and shared the associated audio, allowing unsuspecting users to stumble across a torrent of TCC content.

Even the owner of a Minnesota mattress store, whose online marketing strategy involves recreating viral TikTok trends, has posted dancing clips while wearing a “KMFDM” band t-shirt, which multiple school shooters have worn as a tribute to the Columbine shooters. Several comments on the post say “Welcome to the tcc.” The owner did not respond to Court Watch’s inquiry into whether he was familiar with the shirt’s meaning.

Apart from the dancing videos, TCC followers create video edits of mass shooters akin to flashy TikToks of the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen or Ryan Gosling in the Barbie movie. 

One trend uses artificial intelligence to manipulate images of mass murderers to dance in front of pictures of the locations where they killed their victims. As the murderers dance, a red number quickly ticks up in the TikTok, tallying their kills like a video game score. 

It’s easy to tell which accounts align with TCC in part through their denials. To avoid content moderation, the young TCC followers know to skirt the line between outright threatening violence and pretending it’s all a fantasy. 

On TikTok and other platforms, TCC members call themselves “larpers,” an acronym for live action roleplay, and describe their more explicit threats as “larp.”

One TCC account, for example, writes in its bio, “just larp. I don’t support violence.” It also links to a GoFundMe supporting a nonprofit named Sandy Hook’s Promise. Providing a link to the nonprofit has become another cruel way for TCC members to identify each other. 

That account appears to belong to a blonde teenage girl. As the teenager dances in a TikTok post, she wears a black mask, sunglasses, and a tactical vest modeled after one that Colt Gray, a school shooter, wore in Georgia. The dancing video is captioned “larp time,” “#billionsmustdance,” and “#truelarpcommunity.” In the comments, TCC accounts post fan art of Gray.

The kids also know how to impede TikTok’s moderation algorithm for the shooter videos themselves. In a fan edit of the Uvalde school shooter, the TCC creator captioned it, “ai fake people in this not real very not real just ai generated video of my dead bf who im grieving and fake blood.” 

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Another TCC account similarly captioned an edit for the 2019 Pulse Nightclub shooting, “My friend who loves to dance dancing at a nightclub he loves #tcceditstyle #teceecee #nightclub #niche #lgbt.”

Many of these videos and accounts have been active on TikTok for at least several months. Not only do the references to mass shootings stay unmoderated, TCC followers and those curious can also simply search “teeceeecee” for its content.

A spokesperson for TikTok told Court Watch that the platform “has acted on TCC-linked content across dozens of markets, working alongside regulators, law enforcement and independent researchers.” The spokesperson said TikTok took down a series of TCC posts after Court Watch shared them for comment.

There are also explicit threats of violence. 

One TCC account comments on a shooter fan edit “one day I will stream,” referencing mass shooters’ dystopian practice of livestreaming their attacks. Another bio states “I will die next bro” with a peace sign and laughing crying emojis. 

Several TikTok accounts say “accelerate!” in reference to the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooter and accelerationism, a belief among extremists to use violence in order to hasten society’s collapse. 

An account with a profile picture of Gray writes, “You can’t cure somebody who has nothing wrong with them,” quoting one of the Columbine shooters. 

Some of these threats are cries for help from adolescents and teenagers struggling with isolation and mental health. Posting threats may be an attempt to receive attention from the extreme online community they identify with, or perhaps from a bystander with the conscience to intervene, sensing that something is terribly wrong. 

The threats and “larp,” however, turn into real world violence so often that makes it difficult to discount them as simply the misguided statements of angsty teenagers. TCC followers are in their own violent, twisted world.

A pattern plays out where many TCC adherents connect and glorify mass shooters on TikTok, communicate over Discord, and take their violence to real life. 18-year-old Caleb Vazquez and 17-year-old Cain Clark were radicalized in part through that pipeline, as other TCC followers emboldened their violent ideations.

The two teenagers first met online, communicating through neo-Nazi and TCC adjacent channels while Vazquez received in-patient treatment at a mental health facility. His parents had found him help after he said he wanted to commit a school shooting.

Clark, too, was obsessed with school shootings, amassing hundreds of followers on TikTok and Telegram, where he posted school shooting edits. In one post, he held up an “ok” sign.

On May 15, the FBI contacted Vazquez’s parents, warning that he was communicating about school shootings and suicide with people online. His mother reportedly told Vazquez’s therapist and the mental health facility’s program director about the warning.

Three days later, the program director reportedly texted Vazquez’s mother, “Do you have any idea of where Caleb could be?” The mom responded, “Are you saying that he’s missing?” “Yes,” the program director allegedly replied. Vazquez’s parents began driving around San Diego, frantically searching for their son.

But Vazquez was with Clark. After figuring out they both lived in San Diego, the two decided “to do something” and “take the fight to the invaders” themselves. Their 75-page manifesto, which praised dozens of mass murderers as “saints,” alternated between traditional neo-Nazi tropes, TikTok references, and incoherent drivel. It was more a product of teenagers whose brains were melted by hateful slop than thought-out ideologues.

Armed and decked out in fatigues with a neo-Nazi Sonnenrad patch, the two began a livestream on Discord and drove to the Islamic Center of San Diego, the pair’s first of several planned targets. A security guard and two other men heroically sacrificed their lives fighting back, giving the roughly 140 students inside the mosque’s school time to hide and secure their classrooms.

With the livestream still recording, Clark and Vazquez retreated to their car, where Vazquez killed Clark before turning the gun on himself. Across the country in North Carolina, another 17-year-old, Sarah Santiago, allegedly watched the bloodshed. She then reportedly shared a recording of the livestream and published their manifesto.

Prosecutors said Santiago was Vazquez’s online girlfriend. According to the New York Times, the two would never meet in person, but it was enough that they came from the same online “echo chamber of hate.” She allegedly helped plan the attack on the mosque with Clark and Vazquez, and she shipped the Sonnenrad patch Vazquez wore. 

Local authorities charged her in August with three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy. Forsyth District Attorney Jim O’Neill said: “She ran with the pack—she shared in the kill.” 

This week alone, Court Watch identified more than a hundred TikTok fan edits of Santiago, Cain, and Vazquez until the reporter stopped counting. Users had commented on several of the posts about their online interactions with the trio before the mosque shooting.

The TCC accounts had thwarted TikTok’s moderation simply by changing the first ‘z’ in “Vazquez” to “Vasquez.”

One user, who claimed to have interacted with Santiago on TikTok, had another recent post: a screenshot of a news clip about a teenager from the Chicago suburbs who allegedly drove roughly 40 miles to attack a Hindu temple in Aurora, Illinois. His AR-style rifle reportedly jammed, thwarting the attack.

The TikTok post was captioned, “i can just SMELL the edits coming in rn” with three laughing crying emojis. It had almost 2,000 likes. Another user commented, “the oregon perp only got 4 I hope no one edits him.”

A few days later, several fan edits of the Oregon shooter had already appeared. He became their next “saint.” He won’t be the last.

Reporter’s Post-Story Notebook (Peter Beck)

It’s easy to read about these shootings and forget what their perpetrators look like until you spend hours staring at their faces on social media. Despite their best efforts at imitation, TCC followers don’t necessarily look anything like the Columbine shooters or many of the other killers they worship. Today’s generation of school shooters barely has acne.

As I wrote this article, I had an interaction with a student who now participates in a program I attended in high school. The student inquired about my political beliefs. As someone who occasionally helps out at the program, I tried to dodge the question, casually quipping “nihilist.” He replied that he had “seen a lot of that on TikTok.” 

I asked what exactly he had seen. “You know, like ‘accelerate’ to my nearest McDonalds,” the student said. He did not know it mocked the massacre of 23 people. I quickly shifted the conversation to music and asked what his favorite Radiohead album was.

It was a moment of serendipitous reporting and a piece of anecdotal evidence, but it also reaffirmed that there is something dangerous in the water that teenagers and adolescents are consuming online. Its source is clear, and it doesn’t appear that multibillion dollar companies will shut it off before more 11-year-olds in Australia and around the world put on black skull masks.

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