Online Extremists Influenced Abundant Life Shooter

Crime Scene Tape. (CC0 Public Domain)

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, call the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or text “Hopeline” to 741741.

For hours each night, since her 13-year-old daughter died by suicide just weeks ago, Jaimee Seitz turns to the online world she didn’t know existed before her life turned upside down.

She scrolls through social media accounts looking for the accounts she now knows her daughter Audree had become fascinated with. She watches, reads comments and tries to understand how her artistic, charming, quirky and seemingly happy child was drawn to this dark place.

It’s a world, Seitz said, of teenagers who have become fixated on the Columbine High School shooting. In that 1999 attack, two high school seniors methodically killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher before killing themselves.

Over the last 25 years, a subculture of Columbine fans who look at the two shooters as heroes has developed online. Sometimes called Columbiners and part of the “true crime community” or TCC, they are groupies who obsess about the event and romanticize the teenagers who carried out the attack.

“It wasn’t until I talked to the detective that I learned of all this,” Seitz said. “So of course I took a deep dive down the rabbit hole … I finally put it all together. Like oh my God, these are kids wearing the same clothes, the same outfits, they talk the same. The comments on these videos, they’re basically saying we worship you, we love you, and I am thinking ‘what the actual hell?’”

Seitz believes her daughter’s involvement in the group led her to take her own life.

Fascination with the Columbine shooting has become a common thread among perpetrators of other mass shootings and violent attacks over the last two decades.

Police have yet to reveal a motive for the Abundant Life Christian School school shooting in Madison on Dec. 16, but researchers say shooter Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow had an online history that shows an obsession with violence and extremism. And photographs online show her wearing a t-shirt associated with Columbine.

Seitz, who lives in northern Kentucky, contacted WPR after seeing comments about the Abundant Life shooting on the TCC-related social media accounts she has been monitoring, and reporting to platform administrators, since her daughter’s death. She said she feels the need to draw attention to the movement online.

“I don’t want anybody else to go through this,” she said. “I don’t want any other parents to be so blindsided.”

Audree was found dead in her bedroom on Dec. 3, just a week after her family celebrated her 13th birthday with a party. Seitz said her daughter had hung herself while the rest of her family was sleeping. Audree’s phone was lying on the floor near her body, as if it had fallen from her hand.

At first, Seitz said, she was convinced Audree’s death was accidental.

“Someone mentioned a blackout challenge on TikTok, and somehow I got that in my head, that that’s what it was, that it was an accident,” Seitz said.

But days later she and Audree’s father spoke with investigators who had gone through Audree’s phone,  and read through the journals that, unbeknownst to her parents, she kept in her school locker.

The journals and messages exchanged online showed that Audree had planned her suicide. She had created a countdown to the day she planned to take her own life. And the people she was talking to online did not try to dissuade her.

“The way the detective described it was Audree was part of a group, and that was a group that worshiped serial killers,” Seitz said.

Seitz worries Audree may have been encouraged to hang herself by people online.

“Did they exactly say go kill yourself, I’m not 100 percent positive,” Seitz said. But she said she knows from what investigators have told her that no one tried to stop her.

Seitz is convinced her daughter would never have attempted to hurt anyone else. But she is confident these online communities — focused on romanticizing killers and filled with online comments self-diagnosing mental illness — helped push Audree toward suicide.

Abundant Life shooter tied to online extremism

Carla Hill is senior director of investigative research with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Her team digs into the online activity of extremist groups and people who carry out violent attacks.

Last week, the Center’s researchers studied the online activity of the Abundant Life school shooter and found the 15-year-old girl had dozens of accounts on different platforms espousing racist, violent and extremist views.

Among the researchers’ findings — Rupnow appeared to have been invited into and participated in a chat populated by a small group of people on Telegram on which a neo-Nazi in Turkey posted a manifesto just before a stabbing attack on a mosque in August. The chat included a link to a livestream of the attack. Chat participants, including a person researchers believe was Rupnow, commented on the success of the attack

“Just the sheer number of accounts that seem to be associated with her show how much she was online and being influenced,” Hill said.

Hill said that researchers see young people becoming radicalized by extremism online. In these circles people share links on moderated social media platforms to groups on less moderated platforms, like Telegram. As they move to these groups, users are exposed to ever more extreme and violent content.

Teenagers, she said, are adept at hiding their online activity from their families and circumventing content moderation online.

“Even parents who are trying really hard to help manage what I call this crisis, the kids will have a separate account where (the kids) have more edgy stuff where their parents don’t even realize (exists),” Hill said.

Which means there is no easy or foolproof way to protect kids from accessing harmful information and communities online.

“It would be a lot of regulation and censorship and all that to stop it. I don’t know of a solution,” Hill said. “I think we just try to keep educating parents about what is out there so they can talk to their kids about it and, I don’t know, try to teach them the best they can. And that still may fail, but we have to keep trying.”

Madison parent pushing for social media regulation

Like Seitz, Annie McGrath of Madison also spends hours on social media looking for the type of activity she worries will harm kids and reporting accounts. She said she rarely receives a response from the platforms.

McGrath is driven by the online trend that led to her 13-year-old son’s death.

Griffin “Bubba” McGrath — a “wickedly smart” kid who liked to speed-solve Rubik’s Cube and placed third in a national science bowl — died in 2018 of accidental asphyxiation after participating in an online “blackout challenge.”

In the years since, McGrath has become active in the group Parents for Safe Online Spaces, which pushes for legislation to protect children from harmful material on social media.

If approved, the Kids Online Safety Act or KOSA would establish a “duty of care” for social media companies and require platforms to disable addictive features for minors. It also includes a requirement that platforms respond within 10 days when an account is reported and another that social media companies report their harm data.

Their goal is to protect children from suicide caused by cyberbullying and exploitation, dangerous dares like the blackout challenge, sexual predators and online connections to dangerous drugs.

“We know that kids are dying every day, and it keeps getting worse, the stories keep getting worse,” McGrath said.

The Senate passed KOSA in July. But House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to bring the bill to the floor for a vote this year. McGrath went to Washington D.C. five times this year to push for the legislation.

“Right now I’m feeling pretty defeated, but I know we are going to get back up next year,” McGrath said.

Jaimee Seitz is still struggling to make sense of what happened, and what drew her daughter to focus on Columbine.

When she thinks of Audree, she sees a child who loved to draw and do crafts and make jewelry. Who shared her clothes and makeup. Who loved to pretend to be an animal, to dress up as a bear or wear a furry tail. Who brought cupcakes to the neighbors and who loved her new braces.

Seitz hasn’t read the journals police found in Audree’s locker. She can’t bring herself to do so. But she’s found drawings Audree made that are clearly focused lovingly on the Columbine shooters, in the same way another young teenager might have a crush on a television star.

And she’s realized that bracelets Audree made and kept in a basket in her room included names that were references not to friends at school, as Seitz thought, but to the Columbine shooting.

In one of her most painful discoveries, she’s realized the t-shirts Audree enlisted her to make on a craft printer were decorated with logos associated with the Columbine killers.

Seitz goes back through text messages and memories of conversations, trying to see what she missed, trying to understand what her daughter was thinking. Conversations about the t-shirt logos, band names, seemingly innocuous words.

And every night she goes back online, trying to get into her daughter’s mind and reporting accounts in the hope of keeping other “kids who are confused but for some reason find comfort in this group” from slipping into darkness.

“I think that’s my way of grieving right now, is to try to bring awareness,” Seitz said.

She thinks Audree might be angry at her about that. But she thinks about what Audree would say if she could ask her what happened.

“I want to believe she is okay, but at the same time (I want to ask her) ‘Do you want this to happen any more?’ And I believe in my heart she’d be like ‘no mom, I’d take this all back. I didn’t know.’” Seitz said. “And I don’t know if in heaven you gain knowledge or what not, but I believe in my heart she’d be like ‘no, I don’t want anyone else to go through this.’”

Listen to the WPR report

Online extremists influence kids like the Abundant Life shooter, grieving parents are trying to stop them was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.