In an event that has become a frequent American occurrence, a 16–year-old student walked into his high school with a gun. Unloading a revolver through the halls of Evergreen High School in Colorado, the shooting ended with two students injured.
The perpetrator, Desmond Holly, was the only fatality after turning the gun on himself.
Taking place on September 10, 2025, the incident was largely overshadowed by the killing of far-right political leader Charlie Kirk, who died the same day. Many details about the motive and events at Evergreen High School are still unknown, but an examination of Holly’s social media history reveals a boy steeped in extremist symbols and — like at least three other shooters over the past year alone— obsessed with the perpetrators of mass casualty events.
The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) has obtained archives of some of Holly’s social media.
An examination of Holly’s social media history reveals a boy drawn into extremist subcultures. He posted antisemitic conspiracy theories, shared images of weapons and gear, and engaged with online communities trading in gore and violent propaganda. Among his fixations was the April 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Holly went as far as recreating a t-shirt reading “wrath” in red painted letters worn by Dylan Klebold, one of the Columbine perpetrators.
Screen capture of an image posted to Desmond Holly’s TikTok account showing Abundant Life Christian School attacker Natalie Rupnow (left) and Desmond Holly (right). (Source: TikTok)
Comments by Holly suggest one of the accounts is a backup, used in case his primary TikTok account was to be suspended or terminated by the platform. As such, it had little content available before it was removed by the company, but the limited information includes multiple references to the perpetrators of other brutal events.
One account’s profile picture included an edited image of Elliot Rodgers, who killed six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. Claiming it was due to constant romantic rejection by women, Rodgers became a figure of importance in the misogynistic Incel movement. Content shared on the account included a picture of Holly recreating an image of Natalie Rupnow, a teen who killed three people, including herself, at a Wisconsin Christian school on December 16, 2024. Another account used by Holly has also been deleted, but cached images contain pictures of him wearing a half– face skull mask, a symbol and unofficial uniform of neo-Nazi groups. Other screen names he used reference the white nationalist phrase the “14 words” (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”).
According to reporting by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Holly’s social media accounts had previously been flagged as a potential point of concern and reported to law enforcement by the organization, though they did not determine who the account belonged to before the shooting. The ADL’s reporting shows Holly talking with individuals in TikTok comment sections about preparing for his attack. He also commented on videos of other young people who run accounts where they similarly collect gear and practice firearm training.
On the gore-dedicated website Watch People Die (WPD), a since banned account using the same unique screen name as Holly, he commented seven times since its being created on Dec 26, 2024. On a WPD post about a 2017 attack on a Quebec City mosque, where another user mocked the perpetrator, Alexandre Bissonnette, for killing “only six” people, Holly’s account responded in May 2025, “Like you could do any better.”
That same day, Holly also left another comment on a WPD video of the murder of a 74-year-old woman by Nino Luciano, a teenage member of the child exploitation group 764. Luciano live-streamed the killing over a video call on the chat application Discord.
“I’ve seen some horrible things on here but this is the most disturbing,” Holly commented.
By August, he was advising others on the site to read Payton Gendron’s manifesto, a man who killed 10 people in New York, to find out what “gear is good.”
A month after that, Holly was dead.
Connected By Blood
This obsession with killers is not unique to Holly. He is continuing an evolving tradition of performance and replication put on by mass attackers. In the past year alone, there have been at least three other perpetrators of mass casualty attacks that were entrenched in online networks that promote violence and glorify mass killers.
This includes the targeted shooting of the Church of the Annunciation in Minnesota in August 2025. The perpetrator, Robin Westman, left behind a journal allowing for a self-narrated and curated picture into the lead up of the killings. From its earliest pages, Westman’s journal details a person obsessed with not only learning about mass shooters, but consuming graphic footage of these attacks. They demonstrate an extensive knowledge of the lives and crimes of multiple perpetrators of mass casualty events across the world and have created a personal pantheon of what they view as successful shooters.
Before Westman there was Solomon Henderson, who on January 22, 2025, killed a fellow student and himself at a Nashville high school. Henderson had planned the act for months, leaving behind a manifesto and journal detailing his plans to kill as many people as possible. In the documents, Henderson extolled his obsession with various other mass shooters, including posing for pictures in a similar manner as other killers he wished to emulate. His internet history included sites known to share gore material, including at least two accounts on the site Watch People Die (where Rupnow and several other killers allegedly had accounts) and the alternative video streaming site Vidlii.
A screen capture of Solomon Henderson’s Vidlii page. The video to the right shows a cartoon rendering of Buffalo supermarket attacker Payton Gendron. (Source: Archive.is).
All three of these attackers—Holly, Westman, and Henderson—not only cited Rupnow to some degree (Henderson repeatedly mentioned her in his journals and Westman wrote her name onto one of the weapons used to carry out that attack), including a string of niche references, other prominent mass casualty events, and a seemingly endless supply of memes. Holly is not reported to have left a manifesto, but these three other killers also made homages to past shooters.
The references include call backs to the attack on a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 in 2022 and the Christchurch attacks on mosques that killed 51 in 2019. The perpetrators, Payton Gendron and Brenton Tarrant respectively, left manifestos detailing the reasons for their attacks. Both men linked the killings to the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and the carnage and destruction they caused inspired other targeted killings.
Tarrant holds a particularly exalted status among these perpetrators. Having left a tragically high amount of dead in his wake and livestreaming the attack on Facebook, he remains a central figure for imitators, fuelling a culture of brutal replication.
It is clear that one of the reasons for these shootings by those who admire mass killers is to become one of them—and thus infamous for all time.
There is a continuity between the perpetrators of these events that is not always explicitly apparent to the public. Almost all of the attackers mentioned so far are believed to have acted alone—Rupnow had communication with two adult men, one in Florida and another in California, that included alleged discussions of separate attacks.
Image posted by Natalie Rupnow moments before carrying out an attack against her school in December 2024. (Source: X).
Before Rupnow began her attack, she posted an image of herself in a bathroom making the “OK” hand sign, at times used by white supremacists, on the social media platform X. Later, as news of the shooting spread online, an account linked to Henderson commented “livestream it.”
Diffuse and decentralized digital networks can be difficult to map and understand, but online communities that worship at the altar of mass killers have existed online for decades. Observed during the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, obsessive fandoms emerged pouring over the perpetrators, their motivations, and the writing and videos recorded before the attack.
This subculture has grown significantly, now including other attempted and successful murderers.
Perhaps the largest of these networks is the True Crime Community (TCC). The TCC is a network of podcasts, articles, web forums, with a significant presence on most social media platforms including Tumblr, Reddit, and X.
It is dedicated to exploring a variety of crimes and the criminals who perpetrate them. Often this involves the sharing of footage, images, and other media related to notable killers. Parts of this network are deeply focused on amassing gore footage and share graphically violent and disturbing content, particularly of violent criminal activity. Other parts of the network actively encourage others to undertake their own attack.
Understanding the Incomprehensible
The perpetrators of mass casualty attacks are not isolated actors contained in one network. Like many online ecosystems, there is no leader or even official membership. Participants exist in overlapping social groups and these communities may interact with violent content in different ways.
Solomon Henderson, who referenced the TCC in his manifesto, was part of a network of image board users sometimes referred to as Soyjak Attacker Video Fandom (SAVF). Natalie Rupnow had a Telegram invitation to the same chat room where Arda Küçükyetim, a mass stabber in Türkiye who ran into a tea garden in August 2024 dressed in tactical gear and a half-skull mask, had posted his manifesto and links to a live stream of the attack. He injured five people before attempting to flee on foot.
Küçükyetim cited a network of far-right, neo-Nazis called the Terrorgram Collective as partly inspiring his attack in a manifesto, while researchers tied him and an unidentified online accomplice named “Hansen” to the SVAF.
Networks like Terrorgram and SAVF share large amounts of content related to mass casualty attacks, including explicit videos and images of the attacks themselves and the aftermath. While parts of the TCC condemn violence, distinct features of networks like SAVF include encouraging others to carry out their own attacks.
The Terrorgram Collective, a group inside the larger Terrorgram network that was largely dismantled by a series of arrests, produced four manuals intended to serve as inspiration and guides to carrying out attacks. Members also maintained a calendar tracking the date that notable attacks occurred, dubbing the perpetrators “saints.”
These extremely online, macabre, and ultimately suicidal young people display a deep affinity for a variety of killers from different backgrounds and motivations. They may espouse white supremacy, antisemitism, or types of racism—for example, Henderson was Black, but his manifesto was full of anti-Black statements and self-hatred—though this is only part of the picture.
These communities exist often with a language, symbols, rivalries, and influencers that can differ greatly even from social groups inside the same networks. Often juvenile, dark, and incomprehensible to those on the outside, it has nonetheless become a pathway to radicalization and violence for numerous people, notably children. Without steps taken to address an increasingly significant problem, the issue will continue to metastasize and cost lives.
