In June 2023, a 13-year-old Madison girl for the first time entered a website known for videos and images depicting publicized death, torture and rape. Eighteen months later, she committed the deadliest school shooting in Wisconsin history before taking her own life.
To activate her profile on the website – known among users and researchers as a “gore” or “shock” site – she needed only to claim she was 18 years or older, agree to the legal parameters of the site, and sign up.
She lurked for a month before resharing a post expressing sympathy for the Columbine shooters. Then she “favorited” a picture of Adolf Hitler. Soon after, she followed a page dedicated to Anders Behring Breivik, a Norwegian terrorist and white supremacist who, in 2011, killed 77 people in gun and bomb attacks after writing an anti-Islamic manifesto.
Within a few months, she was engaging daily with people in underground groups obsessed with – and inspired by – mass killings such as True Crime Community, as well as an online sextortion network known as 764, which forces children to perform sexual acts on camera and then blackmails them, according to the Global Network on Extremism and Technology. As a girl in what experts describe as a male-dominated universe, she stood out. And in records reviewed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, she gained heightened credibility through constant engagement on such forums.
The Anti-Defamation League investigated the timeline of the Madison girl’s obsession with the dark online ecosystem, and found it paralleled that of a 17-year-old Nashville school shooter who also killed himself. The two followed each other on social media – and possibly even engaged each other directly – in the months ahead of their shootings, which occurred a little more than a month apart.
In her last public posting, on the day of the shooting, she took a photo of herself in a bathroom stall at Abundant Life Christian School, where she was a freshman, flashing an OK sign, a symbol of white power. From an account tied to the Nashville boy came the suggestion: “Livestream it.”
This caustic underbelly of the internet has never been closer to the surface. Today, the descent into an alternative digital reality in which extreme violence is praised and critiqued, radical thought is normalized, and likeminded – even sympathetic – peers, is just a few keystrokes away.
At the same time, we’ve weakened our methods for understanding why certain children seek out these spaces and find them not just alluring, but, in a twisted way, therapeutic.
What we do know is that there are fewer guardrails on radicalization than ever before. Part of that is the internet’s spread away from communal spaces to ever-deeper ideological niches. The other part is our collective willingness to abandon controls.
“This is a broad spectrum failure on our part to be aware of the risks,” said Matt Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism. “Effectively, we’ve just decided not to care.”
Violence prevention resources decimated
Over the last six months, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel undertook a deep examination of the Abundant Life Christian School shooting in Madison, and how and why children and teenagers become radicalized. The Journal Sentinel also consulted research on extremism, police records on who brought guns to K-12 schools, violence prevention specialists, former white supremacists, and representatives of social media companies.
Experts who study violent extremism describe struggling children who “self-medicate on violence,” as former Department of Homeland Security official William Braniff phrased it, and who turn to the internet as something of an apothecary for their grievances.
Braniff and his former Homeland Security team at the agency’s Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships contend they were on the precipice of a new model of violence prevention, one that focused on understanding the human behind the shooter, someone who lacked social connections, basic needs, a sense of purpose and, importantly, a way out of pain.
The interventions through various Homeland Security programs had proved successful, and Congress received a report in 2024 identifying major risk factors for targeted violence and terrorism: perceived discrimination, sense of superiority, abuse, job loss, family violence and exposure to violent media.
By contrast, the report said, stabilizing factors for this at-risk population can include institutional trust, social support, parental involvement and life satisfaction.
Although the data was for any age, it’s particularly applicable for youths.
Compiled over four years, Braniff’s report showed that in the more than 1,000 cases, just 77, or 6.5%, of people who exhibited behavioral indicators of violence and were provided support ended up posing an imminent threat to others. That support included mental health services, workplace accommodations, conflict resolution strategies, job training, and housing assistance.
That relatively small group was then referred to law enforcement.
Braniff, who now serves as executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, noted that police departments and public health departments alike favor these interventions.
And yet, in less than a year under the second administration of Donald Trump, most of the programs were wiped out – often without congressional input.
Among the canceled grants was one awarded to the Eradicate Hate Global Summit, a nonprofit formed in the wake of the October 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue – the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. The federal government dismissed Eradicate Hate as a “DEI organization focused on silencing ideological opposition.”
In September 2025, two days after the Charlie Kirk murder, the U.S. Justice Department quietly scrubbed a report from the National Institute of Justice called, “What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism.” The research had spanned three decades and asserted, in its first sentence, that “militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States.”
“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the report, published Jan. 4, 2024, read. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
All that data is archived, away from public view. The Justice Department offered no reasons.
“This administration has done away with every single dollar going toward research and programming to prevent (targeted violence) from happening and there’s no explanation for it,” Kriner said.
Curbing extremists vs. honoring First Amendment
The results of these decisions, said Heidi Beirich, have returned the internet to a digital wild west. Beirich is the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an organization focused on shaping policies to combat online extremism and holding tech companies accountable.
Beirich, who previously served as intelligence officer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that since 2007, she and her team had raised alarms about the tech sector’s role in fostering radical extremism and hate. As recently as 2013, she said, if you typed the word “Jew” into Google, the first pages offered a cascade of antisemitic websites. Yet their concerns were ignored.
In 2014, counterterrorism agencies flagged Twitter as a hub for ISIS, the jihadist militant group. ISIS-affiliated users could engage in and recruit people online with seeming ease, and for the first time, the social media platform had to address the balance between public safety and free speech.
A more visible tipping point came when, during the trial of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, it was learned the participating white supremacist groups used Facebook, Discord and Twitter to organize the event and recruit participants.
“That changed the terms of the debate,” Beirich said. Mainstream sites stopped doing business with white supremacists and other hate groups.
“But in reaction to these changes on mainstream sites, we got the Telegrams of the world – whole infrastructures that are totally unmoderated and are the places where kids today are getting radicalized,” Beirich said.
In a sense, Facebook and Twitter spawned Discord, Telegram, LiveLeak and literally dozens of others.
At the same time, the role of the internet has shifted from an occasional pastime to a cultural and subcultural hub and now to an informational body so vast, it “cannot be disentangled from our offline personas,” Kriner said.
To him, the notion of online and offline just doesn’t exist anymore, at least not for young people. And no entity is policing, or accountable for, what is happening, whether it’s one of the exploding number of sextortion cases or a teenage girl welcomed to a site that celebrates school shootings.
“What’s changed in the last three years, even possibly in the last year, is that the town squares and pillars of that digital ecosystem have walked away from their commitments to … democratic principles,” Kriner said. “They’re no longer seeing the pressure from this administration the same way they were from previous administrations.”
Companies claim they do take safety measures
TikTok, for its part, has a page dedicated to youth safety and well-being, where, for children ages 13 to 17, daily screentime defaults to one hour, accounts are set to private, appearance effects are limited and push notifications are disabled at night. After the Journal Sentinel brought a couple of Wisconsin youth extremist accounts to TikTok’s attention, a TikTok USDS Joint Venture spokesperson said it banned the users.
Likewise, Discord said it does not tolerate violent extremist behaviors, and noted how important it is to ensure the safety of young people using the app.
The popular gaming app Roblox has recently come under fire for the ways youth are exposed to adult sexual predators, pedophiles and extremists. Roblox told the Journal Sentinel it has recently unveiled a “Youth Guide to Community Standards” and has put safeguards into place to filter out inappropriate language and behavior.
TikTok, Discord and Roblox said they’ve started working with third-party companies like Robust Open Online Safety Tools and Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism to improve online safety.
Telegram did not respond to similar questions from the Journal Sentinel, despite multiple inquiries.
For Kriner, though, the tech sector’s dedicated pages that emphasize youth safety are the equivalent of fine print on a new product’s terms of service. The only people who pay attention are the extremists themselves who are looking for loopholes around the terms of service.
“Some of the worst perpetrators of nihilist violent extremism, including sextortion, openly brag about their presence on TikTok and Roblox,” he said.
For school safety officials, the fear never ends
The prospect of a school shooting is never far from Trish Kilpin’s mind.
In the last two months of 2024, which included the Abundant Life Christian School shooting, three other school shooting plots happened in Wisconsin, according to data from the Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention dashboard. The Madison shooting ended in three deaths and six injuries. The other three, one in Clinton, and two in Kenosha, were foiled.
During that same two-month period, Illinois, Georgia and Utah also had four incidents. California had six. Florida had seven. None of this was outside the norm.
Kilpin serves as the director of the Wisconsin Office of School Safety and is one of five people in Wisconsin certified in understanding the scientific body of knowledge and standard of care behind behavioral threat assessment management. That’s a process designed to identify, assess and manage those who may pose a risk of targeted violence.
“It’s not sufficient to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ if this child poses a concern or poses a threat,” Kilpin said. You have to manage the situation, find moments to intervene and move the student to a place of safety, she said.
They may not feel they have friends, Kilpin said. They may not engage in activities. They may feel isolated and hopeless.
“These are all things we can change. Dangerousness is not a trait, it’s a state of mind,” she emphasized.
Wisconsin created the school safety office in 2018 in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida. It was tasked with distributing state grants to schools to improve safety practices. One of those practices became Speak Up Speak Out, a tip line where people can report concerns about school-aged youth. The 24/7 call center now has 10 staff positions. In the last five years, more than 21,000 tips have come in, an average of more than 11 tips a day, year over year.
In the last school year alone, the school safety office received nearly 7,000 tips, a nearly 32% increase from the year before. Of those, 970 were listed as potentially lifesaving on the office’s annual impact report.
Kilpin also has developed a program that has trained hundreds of people in all phases of school crisis response and recovery. That could mean anything from the sudden death of a student to a bomb threat to a school shooting.
Since January 2021, the school safety office has provided support and resources to 175 crisis events, including the shooting at Abundant Life and a Mount Horeb incident in May 2024 that left one student dead after he aimed an airsoft rifle at law enforcement and they fatally shot him.
Despite its success, an ongoing source of sustainable funding for all current Office of School Safety functions has yet to be provided.
The desire for behavioral threat assessment management training is there. Between Sept. 1, 2024, and Aug. 31, 2025, Kilpin’s one staff member designated as the behavioral threat assessment specialist conducted 18 training sessions for 1,463 community members. Attendees represented 217 Wisconsin schools, 70 law enforcement agencies and 20 additional organizations.
Having this array of people trained and coordinating efforts is key to understanding warning signs, Kilpin said. “We can’t connect the dots if we’re unable to collect the dots.”
For Abundant Life shooter, were signs missed?
Jeff Schoep, a former neo-Nazi who led the National Socialist Movement for 25 years, said he first joined out of a sense of purpose and mission, although he would understand decades later his motivation was misdirected. His grandfather had fought under Hitler, the knowledge of which burned inside Schoep “like a virus,” he said.
When he joined the movement, recruits were shown videos of farm murders and other atrocities and crimes, with the pitch that this kind of thing could happen to the recruit’s family next, Schoep said. Many recruits joined for a similar reason to Schoep. Others joined out of a desire for belonging and community.
Today, dozens of online apps have chat rooms where the dominant message is that society is going in the wrong direction and the recruit needs to join to become part of something bigger than themselves. For young people who feel isolated, it can feel like the answer to a score of perceived injustices.
“If you’re radicalized, you believe that you’re fighting for this noble, honorable cause,” said Schoep, who has since founded the deradicalization group Beyond Barriers, which coaches people out of violent extremist groups.
A manifesto published by the Madison girl the night before the Abundant Life shootings clearly showed she believed she was part of that kind of cause. It was entitled, “War Against Humanity.”
Where did that begin? In every school shooting, in every violent incident involving youths, that question lingers. Was it an unstable family? Was it a mental health crisis? Was it the internet? Or was it some combination that will never be entirely clear?
We do know the Madison girl came from an unstable family. She was in therapy. She had a history of self-harming. She engaged in online groups obsessed with mass killings. And she had easy access to guns.
The Journal Sentinel also recently obtained records showing that when she was 12, a year before that first online foray into violent extremism, she was sexually assaulted.
It began with a friend-making app for Gen Z youth. She set her age to 17, and started chatting with a boy who said he also was 17. Soon, over Snapchat, the boy sent lewd messages – and a place to meet.
On June 15, 2022, the girl’s father noticed her phone location at the Best Western East Towne Suites in Madison and headed to the scene. In a subsequent police report, officers described a grim hotel room scene.
The male, Christian Szewczul from Illinois, actually was 22 and claimed he didn’t know the girl was underage. The police report, however, said it was immediately obvious she was prepubescent.
In a plea deal, Szewczul was sentenced for child enticement. He spent 12 months in a county jail.
It’s unclear what intervention services, if any, the girl received. Some of that may have had to do with a dearth of resources.
The funding landscape for crime victims in Wisconsin has always been challenging, but the state has seen a steep decline in grant dollars since Trump took office again. And historically, the federal Victims of Crime Act has prioritized criminal justice solutions – not the needs of survivors of sexual assault.
One year after the assault, the girl signed on to the watchpeopledie website. By the time she entered Abundant Life with two handguns, Szewczul was already out of jail.
In the nearly nine months since the shootings, her name has been scrawled on firearms used in other deadly attacks. Those inspired by her take selfies posing as she did: a sideways glance in a mirror, wearing a shirt emblazoned with the industrial rock band largely associated with the Columbine shooters.
Many started online by going to the same shock site, and activating their own profile.
This project was supported by a grant from the Association of Health Care Journalists, with funding from The Joyce Foundation. All the work was done under the guidance of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editors.
If someone you know is exhibiting concerning behaviors related to potential violence, talk to them and connect them with help. If the person has made a specific and credible threat of violence, notify law enforcement. Call 800-MY-SUSO or Text “SUSO” to 738477 to Report a tip to the Speak Up Speak Out tip line operated by the Wisconsin Department of Justice.
Natalie Eilbert covers mental health issues for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. You can reach her at neilbert@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Online universe of hate, gore, death is easy for kids to access. Why?
Reporting by Natalie Eilbert, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
