The Rabbit Hole: Terrorist or Terminally Online?

Editor’s Note: This is the second edition of The Rabbit Hole, a new weekly Sunday series helmed by Court Watch’s Reporting Fellow, Peter Beck. We’re offering the first several weeks for free before the series will be behind a paywall. This reporting was made possible only because of Court Watch’s subscribers. You can support our reporting here. In this week’s issue, Beck dives deep into a case we touched on quickly in the past. Using a combination of new court filings and spending time in the same online world as a man charged with threatening a terror attack, Beck shines light on the ever-blurring the line between edgy gamer language and real-world threats. - Seamus

On Friday, February 28th, 2025, as James Burger and his uncle left their house in suburban Round Rock, Texas, to begin their early morning commute to high school and work, twenty-four FBI employees in tactical gear with assault rifles drawn descended on them. The agents were acting on a tip that the slender, eighteen-year-old James was planning an imminent attack on a Christian music festival as an act of Islamist terrorism. The tip had not come from a confidential human source or an undercover agent, but from two players on the multiplayer video game Roblox. Now, federal prosecutors and defense attorneys are clashing over whether the threats on the incredibly popular online game can be taken seriously.

A month before the agents arrived at Burger’s house, screenshots sent to the FBI captured several Lego-esque avatars standing clustered in a group, wearing customizable in-game clothes reminiscent of a Hollywood film set in the Middle East. In the center was a user named “Crazz3pain,” whose avatar was dressed in all white with a blonde beard and a keffiyeh. The screenshots, which would later appear in federal court records, caught a discussion between Crazz3pain and the other players using Roblox’s in-game chat feature. Crazz3pain told the players that he would “deal a grevious wound upon the followers of the Cross” and that he “cannot confirm anything aloud at the moment” but that “things are in motion.” 

From there, FBI agents reportedly made quick work tracing Crazz3pain to Burger: his name, address, and Gmail were allegedly on the Roblox account’s billing information. At the house, agents took Burger’s electronics into custody for analysis. Meanwhile, a group of agents took turns grilling the teenage Burger about the purported threats and his beliefs. Over eleven hours of interrogation, they reportedly gained several partial admissions from him in which he expressed a desire to become a “martyr or bust,” according to a transcript in the case. This story was based on dozens of court records filed in the last year.

The initial review of Burger’s electronic devices also proved fruitful for the investigation. Agents allegedly found internet searches for “Lone wolf terrorists isis,” “Festivals happening near me,” “are suicide attacks haram in islam,” “ginger isis member” (Burger has red hair), and “what is the punishment for the one who insults allah or his messenger,” among other concerning searches logged by software that Burger’s uncle installed after worrying about his nephew’s online activity. The uncle had also reportedly grown so uneasy over Burger that he removed all of his firearms from the family’s house.

At 9 PM, twelve hours after the FBI swarmed Burger in his uncle’s driveway, local Texas police took Burger into custody on a state charge of making terroristic threats. He was held in a county jail until three months later, when the FBI federally charged Burger with making interstate threatening communications and transferred him to federal custody. Burger has been waiting for his trial in federal detention ever since. He missed his final semester of high school.

Imagine an online universe with a seemingly endless array of experiences and games that users can choose from while playing alongside roughly a hundred million users around the globe on any given day. That’s Roblox. In other popular multiplayer games, such as Fortnite and Minecraft, users typically play on a standard map created by game developers with little variability. However, on Roblox, the players build and code the worlds where the games take place themselves, leading to incredible creativity and a wide choice of games that users can select to play, with no limits to how realistic the games are.

You can play as a vampire, build your own putt-putt course, climb Mount Everest, and fight in the Napoleonic Wars all within the same hour, and if grand strategy is your thing, Roblox’s got that, too. You can even roleplay as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and argue realistic cases in front of another user playing a District Court Judge. Meanwhile, with Roblox’s in-game chat, which appears as cartoonish text bubbles that the company moderates through artificial intelligence, players from all over the world can engage with each other on any topic they wish, so long as Roblox’s internal censor isn’t triggered to ‘hash out’ the text with hashmarks.

Unsurprisingly, Roblox universe offers a number of games that center on violence, where threats between players are common and the lines between roleplay and real-life gamer rage can blur. For instance, in a murder mystery-style game that has over twenty-two billion total visits, players sometimes threaten to get revenge by ‘killing’ their competitors in a game round. In the teenage Burger’s case, court records say the alleged threats occurred in a game called “Church,” which some gamers have called the most toxic game on Roblox.

In a motion filed on November 3rd, Burger’s federal defenders argued that prosecuting him violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause because the purported threats were “non-serious expressions” while “in the context of playing a virtual character in a video game.” According to the federal defenders, for threats to be criminally punishable, they have to convey and take place in a setting that implies a real possibility that violence will follow, writing, “Nothing was real about its context. It could not have been intended to be real nor expected to be perceived as real. It was made by a Robloxian character in a virtual 3-D space called Church. The character, Crazz3pain, was portraying a fundamentalist Muslim. He espoused extremist views that included martyrdom. He expressed them playing a game about arguing over religious matters. Provocation and trolling were part of the game.” 

In an additional motion, the defense asked a judge to suppress Burger’s eleven-hour interrogation, arguing that the FBI agents had failed to Mirandize Burger and make it adequately clear to the eighteen-year-old that he was free to leave or decline to answer their questions. A defense attorney for Burger did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Federal prosecutors responded late last week through a series of motions that revealed disturbing new details about Burger’s alleged behavior and extreme beliefs, including that Burger gave bomb-making instructions to a player on Roblox who said they were in Russia, that he had sent ISIS beheading videos online and pledged allegiance to its leader, posted on 4chan about his “highest ambition” to become a serial killer, and once tried to bring a gun to school as a freshman in high school before his grandmother stopped him. While in jail, Burger also allegedly created plans to build a bomb that were discovered by U.S. Marshals, and told his aunt on a jail call that it would be a “red line” for him if she insulted the Prophet Mohammad. In a win for the defense, prosecutors agreed not to introduce Burger’s statements from the FBI interrogation into evidence unless as material for cross-examination if Burger decided to testify.

Pushing back against the defenders’ motion to dismiss on First Amendment grounds, prosecutors described in a reply brief how two separate high school seniors, who both happen to be Muslim, were disturbed enough by Burger’s alleged threats on “Church” that the teenagers independently reported the messages to the FBI. By the prosecutors’ logic, the two high school students must have believed the threats were legitimate enough to report to the FBI. Addressing Roblox, the prosecutors wrote, “There is no ‘avatar’ exception to the First Amendment prohibition of making true threats. The fact the Defendant used Lego-style avatars to remain anonymous to communicate on these platforms does nothing to negate his true threats directed to Christians and a Christian concert and the Defendant’s intent to make such threats.” 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.

Roblox is no stranger to legal controversy. In 2025 alone, the company is facing dozens of lawsuits, including three brought by the states of Kentucky, Texas, and Louisiana, which say Roblox hasn’t done enough to protect underage users from child exploitation on the game. Some contain grim accounts of predators taking advantage of Roblox’s chat feature to groom and abuse children. Others document inappropriate content that exists on the site, such as games for “Diddy parties,” school shootings, and “Escape from Epstein’s island.” Almost all the lawsuits claim that Roblox’s lack of adequate content moderation allows obscene materials to remain on its platform for extended periods. It’s a complaint common among online platforms, but especially acute for Roblox, given its younger user base.

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Roblox said, “Safety is foundational to everything we do and we're always investing in safety. 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.” 

As part of reporting this story, Court Watch spent several hours on the Roblox game “Church,” where Burger made his alleged threats. The game is a 3-D model of a church and was reportedly taken down by Roblox after Burger’s arrest until last week, when Roblox apparently unbanned it. A permanent sign in the game’s lobby, left by the developer, incredulously reads, “Somehow we’re back?”

Within the first twenty minutes of playing “Church,” Court Watch observed Roblox users dressed as skinheads arguing about race, members of the Irish Republican Army (with a balaklava and all), German World War II Schutzstaffel, and, yes, avatars intended to look like terrorists from the Middle East who were debating the Qur’an and violent jihadism. One of several players in a German SS uniform used Roblox’s chat to quote Goebbels and deny the Holocaust. Two others encouraged their Lego-shaped peers to read Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Ahmad ibn Umar al-Hazimi, Islamic theologians that have resonance with Islamic State supporters. Even more concerning were the dozens of well-meaning Roblox players who were being exposed to the internet’s fringes while playing a game innocently named “Church.”

Later, users argued about the appropriate age of consent, the October 7th attack, ISIS terrorist “Jihadi John,” the online terror network 764, and talked about Burger’s case. Another player, who self-identified as a Salafist, repeatedly joked that “things are in motion,” a direct quote from Burger’s criminal complaint. None of those comments were stopped by Roblox’s content moderation policies.

It seemed much closer to the alt-right site 4chan than a children’s game. The edgy and what’s real become blurred. Burger’s purported messages and threatening language by other players felt normalized, regardless of the intentions behind them. Roughly a hundred users filled the virtual church and its adjoining courtyard around the clock. 

More than twenty-one million Roblox users have played “Church” in the last six years. On Tuesday, a Texas federal judge will decide whether Burger’s alleged threats were a product of an online fantasy world that would stay confined to the internet or a troubled teen’s genuine signal of what was to come in the real-world.