The transgender individual responsible for the tragic shooting at a Catholic Church, claiming the lives of two children, was reportedly influenced by a dark network of extremist groups exhibiting nihilistic and terroristic ideologies, according to experts.

Organizations bearing names such as 764, COM, No Lives Matter, and the Order of the Nine Angles have been linked to the incitement of school shootings and similar violent acts over the years. Despite their impact, they remain largely unfamiliar to the wider public, including the families of those who fall victim to their allure.

This collection of groups is often referred to as the ‘764 network,’ encapsulating a disturbing blend of fringe elements. Some are rooted in satanism, others embrace accelerationist ideologies, with many idolizing Nazi figures and mass shooters.

Robin Westman, 23, who came from what has been described as a nice family, displayed the same traits, symbolism and beliefs espoused by the groups.

Targeting predominantly young, transgender, and marginalized individuals, these groups lure them into dangerous acts, encouraging self-harm on camera, animal abuse, and even suicide through live-streaming.

David Riedman, an expert behind the K–12 School Shooting Database and an academic at Idaho State University, shared insights with Daily Mail. He noted that the offender, Westman, exhibited behavior consistent with these disturbing online subcultures, utilizing coded symbols and inscriptions, akin to infamous school shooters and violent extremist factions.

‘There are very clear references in the photos and videos from the shooting,’ said Riedman, a longtime authority on school shooters.

‘It’s almost as if we’re seeing a modern embodiment of a violence template,’ said Riedman. ‘To enact mass violence, there’s a perceived need to draw inspiration from the infamous elements ingrained in this morbid history.’

In a video uploaded to YouTube around the time of the shooting, Westman is heard murmuring ‘I wanna kill myself’ and stabs a drawing of the Annunciation Catholic Church – the chosen target of the attack.

‘I am feeling good about the anticipation,’ Westman wrote in several pages in the Cyrillic alphabet that could be viewed on the video and were later translated by AI. ‘It seems like a good combo of easy tasks for me and devastating tragedy.’

But the shooter also expressed suicidal thoughts and described wanting to die in the video and the writings.

There was also mention of a struggle with Westman’s gender identity, writing on one passage about being ‘tired of being trans’.

‘I wish I never brain-washed myself,’ the killer wrote in a scrawled cryptic message. 

Law enforcement investigators and academics who study the online groups describe them as ‘Satanic neo-Nazi transnational sextortion networks’ or ‘ideological violent extremists’.

The groups cultivate members on private encrypted, invite-only messaging apps like Discord, Telegram or Terrorgram that are stored in servers all over the world and are difficult for law enforcement to monitor.

Both Discord and Telegram told Daily Mail they are deeeply committed to safety and do all they can to remove dangerous content. 

Terrorgram, a loose online ecosystem of violent extremist propaganda channels, operates on Telegram and is a hotbed for these types of extremists, experts told Daily Mail.

Young adults and kids also fall into the groups’ traps via online gaming platforms like Roblox.

764, which traces its roots back to the much older Order of the Nine Angles network as well as to the Columbine shooters, was formed by 15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead of Stephenville, Texas, in 2021.

Police said Cadenhead coerced young vulnerable kids into self-harm, creating and sharing explicit content and even hurting animals, while extorting them with severe psychological distress.

Cadenhead eventually pleaded guilty in 2023 to several counts of possession of child pornography and was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

‘Most people don’t know that there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of very obscure Telegram channels where very disturbed people congregate,’ Shawn Wasson, host of the News Junkie podcast who has researched these groups, said.

‘It never fails that these shooters come from these places. These deranged people hatch in these shadow communities and unleash their nihilistic worldview on convenient victims. 

‘There is a massive generational gap here where those in charge have very little idea what is happening online until the next shooting.’

Riedman also pointed to an ominous global dimension. Westman wrote in Cyrillic script, echoing a trend seen in Eastern Europe.

‘There’s a huge Columbine subculture in Russia and in Eastern Europe,’ Riedman said referring to the 1999 school shooting in Colorado that killed 14. 

‘There have been a number of Columbine-mimic attacks there. Just recently, a Georgian neo-Nazi was arrested who was connected to the Antioch High School shooter. These connections exist online, and they cross borders.’

One student died at Antioch High School in Tennessee in January before the shooter killed himself.

In May, the FBI announced it was opening 250 investigations tied to ‘764’ activities, adding that some victims have been as young as nine. The FBI believes there could be thousands of victims around the world.

The announcement came after two men, Leonidas Varagiannis, 21, a US national living in Greece, and Prasan Nepal, 20, from North Carolina, were arrested in April on charges of leading ‘764 Inferno,’ a subgroup of 764.

The pair allegedly conspired with and directed at least half a dozen other members or prospective members of ‘764 Inferno’ to commit malicious crimes, according to the criminal complaint. They face a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted.

The US Department of Justice classifies 764 and COM as a ‘Tier One’ terrorism threat, the highest priority afforded an extremist group in law enforcement.

‘The more gore, the more violence… that raises their stature within the groups,’ FBI Assistant Director David Scott, the head of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, told ABC News at the time. 

‘So it’s sort of a badge of honor within some of these groups to actually do the most harm to victims.’

Less than a month ago, Logan Seitz, a 20-year-old from Brooklyn Center, just outside Minneapolis, was arrested for following a woman to a park and repeatedly stabbing her. 

Seitz said he left home with plans to ‘find someone to kill’ because he had ‘thought about doing it for a long time’, according to court records.

He was operating under the alias ‘Corrupt’ as a member of 764 and admitted during his arrest that he’d dreamed of killing people since childhood.

Becca Spinks, 40, a Texas-based independent journalist who has spent three years investigating online extremist communities like COM and 764, said Westman’s murderous actions have a lot of the hallmarks of the extreme online groups.

‘They deliberately target vulnerable kids – those who are depressed, self-harming, or confused about their identity,’ she told Daily Mail.

‘They groom them, extract sexual material then extort them into more horrific acts, sometimes even violence on camera.’

One of the best-known branches of the 764-linked groups, according to Spinks, is COM, a cyber-criminal network that operates not on the dark web but on mainstream apps.

Young adults and kids dabble in everything from hacking to child exploitation on COM. 764 grew out of that aesthetic Spinks said, becoming what she termed ‘a satanic pedophile terrorist cult’.

One wing of the network comes from the so-called TCC, or ‘True Crime Communities,’ which are not the stereotypical true crime fans who follow the Murdaugh murders or Ted Bundy, for example, but they are more like ‘mass shooter fan clubs,’ Spinks said.

‘They glorify and sexualize school shooters,’ Spinks said. ‘They run Discord servers where they make video edits, write fanfic and share memes. Think anime fandom – but for mass shooters.

‘It’s sick.’

According to Spinks, shooters who decorate their guns with cryptic scribbles are often linked to this TCC culture.

Westman’s writings echo some of these obsessions, she said.

In the now-removed videos, Westman showed off ammunition, magazines, cartridges, and guns all scrawled in white writing.  

Names of several past school shooters including Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza and Samantha Rupnow – who killed two at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in December – were among the names.

Other unhinged ramblings included ‘For the children’ ‘Take this all of you, and eat!’, ‘Where is your God?’, and ‘Kill Donald Trump’.

Spinks has documented links between the 764 network and school shooters such as Rupnow and Antioch shooter Solomon Henderson. Both showed clear signs of immersion in the network, she said.

A certain kind of Satanic vibe, including upside-down crosses and ‘666’ markings and references to a much older group. The Order of the Nine Angles, or O9A, is present in many of these groups.

O9A itself dates back to the 1970s, founded by British occultist David Myatt. It blended neo-Nazism with Satanism, promoting ‘accelerationism’: pushing chaos and violence to hasten societal collapse.

But Spinks believes Westman’s handwritten manifesto bears more of a resemblance to Audrey Hale, the transgender shooter who shot up Nashville’s Covenant School in 2023. 

Like Hale, Westman produced a detailed handwritten diary rather than an online digital footprint.

Wasson said the groups deliberately obfuscate and confuse people trying to investigate them, making it harder for parents to prevent their children’s downward spirals.

‘Groups like O9A and 764 are unknown basically by design,’ Wasson told Daily Mail.

‘These groups and countless offshoots of them operate in private or invite-only chats. The organization names are constantly changing, and the chats are constantly migrating, making it nearly impossible to track down the nihilistic members of these groups even when they do run foul of actual laws.

‘Even the slogans like No Lives Matter end up getting co-opted by people who aren’t actually involved in these groups – making it ever harder to determine which conversations are useful to monitor or just average trolling on the Internet.

‘It’s about as nebulous or difficult to explain as anything that exists in online culture.

‘At the same time, it’s very real and it’s no coincidence that several of the most disturbing mass shooters come from these communities.’

A spokesperson for Discord said the company is ‘deeply committed to safety’, adding: ‘We use a combination of advanced technology and trained safety teams to proactively find and remove content that violates our policies. 

‘We maintain strong systems to combat 764 and related groups and work together with other technology companies and safety organizations to improve online safety across the internet.’

Telegram said: ‘All groups and channels identified with 764 were removed as soon as they were discovered in February 2024. Moderators have continually monitored since then to ensure 764-related communities cannot reemerge, resulting in the removal of hundreds of groups.

‘Telegram’s terms of service explicitly forbid encouraging violence or child abuse and this content is removed whenever discovered. Telegram’s moderators use custom AI tools to remove millions of pieces of content each day that breach our terms of service.’

A spokesperson for Roblox said they have ‘zero tolerance’ for inappropriate behavior and have teams in place to safeguard their users.