“Generally, mass shooters spend a period of time prior to their action steeped in studying previous shooters. They study the aftermath of these individuals. They have a great deal of esteem or respect for others who have done the same,” said Lenz.
“Add in the ideology, in this case these forums—it compounds the severity and the rate of radicalization.”
Lenz said the cocktail of violent rhetoric, mental illness, and economic despair is what leads to “mobilization,” the word experts use for the shift from radicalized online rhetoric to real-life behavior.
“What we’ve found with these ideologies is that they repeatedly lead to violence. There’s a dual line of radicalization happening,” said Lenz. “To steep yourself in Daily Stormer rhetoric and the sites like it is to put yourself in the headspace of where the violence is when not if.”
In his final days, Atchison used “Sam Hyde” as his display name, the name alt-right users on websites like ***** and Twitter employ in an effort to dupe the media into sharing false information after mass shootings.
“The internet has changed a lot of things. Make it much easier for an alienated, isolated kid to find communities where they feel they belong,” said Lenz. “And it sometimes goes unchecked because of how the alt-right has presented itself: It’s just irony. It’s for the lulz.”
On EncyclopediaDramatica, Atchison also appears on the entry for Bob8466, or Carter Boyles of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, a 15-year-old who shot and killed himself at his high school on Sept. 11, 2016. Atchison, who called himself a friend of Boyles on YouTube and the video game site Steam, wrote the Bob8466 EncyclopediaDramatica entry after the Iowa teen’s suicide.
“It is believed that [Boyles] was calmly talked down from going postal, instead unfortunately choosing to take his own life and becoming an [sic] hero to us all,” Atchison wrote under the username AlGore.
Like Atchison,
Boyles was active on Steam and on YouTube, where he posted videos of simulated school shootings. In Boyle’s final video, a first-person walkthrough of the school where he shot himself, online acquaintances gathered to post comments in memoriam.
“Suicides are ignored,” Atchinson wrote, under the name Vance Stone. “Suicidal people who commit mass murder, however, get the entire world’s attention, garner thousands of fans / fangirls, become a household name and become celebrities.
“His action of suicide was tragic and it’s a shame he had to go out like that, because he was pretty damn cool when I chatted to him.”
Boyle wasn’t Atchison’s only school-shooter friend, according to “Smith,” a YouTuber from Texas who considered Atchison a friend. Smith’s channel, “Aesthetic Autism,” features mostly footage of war synced to music, and he recorded but has not released a podcast with the New Mexico murderer.
Smith told The Daily Beast that Ali Sonboly, the teenager who shot and killed nine people in a Munich McDonald’s last year, was also a member of the Steam group that he and Atchison started, called the Anti-Refugee Club. (Smith claims the group—which was taken down two months ago—wasn’t racist but “mostly satire.”)
“[Atchison] wasn’t alt-right. He wasn’t a neo-Nazi,” Smith said in a direct message. “Bill hated both sides... His emotions mixed with his politics.
“He was edgy, he was offensive, and he was shocking. He said a lot out of pure shock, but I didn’t think he’d be so moronic enough to do what he did,” Smith said.
That shocking content brought the FBI to Atchison’s door in 2016.
Acting on a tip that Atchison had posted a comment on a gaming forum asking users where he could get “a cheap assault rifle” for a mass shooting, the FBI interviewed him and his family, and ultimately determined that no crime had been committed and closed the investigation.
“He was cooperative,” Albuquerque FBI Special Agent Terry Wade said at a press conference last week. “He told us that he enjoyed trolling on the internet.
“The agents specifically asked him if he had plans about conducting attacks and expressed the seriousness that we take these type of things. He assured us that he had no such plans,” Wade said.
Atchison described the visit on his YouTube channel, writing in a comment, “I was part of the trolling and lulz... the feds investigated me cus some faq reported my profile to troll me... they said they didn’t think I was a serious threat and understood the satire…”
The Daily Beast reached out to Agent Wade about Atchison’s online behavior. Wade’s spokesperson referred a reporter to the San Juan County sheriff and said the FBI wouldn’t have further comment on the case at this time.
Brice Current, a captain at San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, said they were just beginning to process the crime scene and Atchison’s home, at which they confiscated his computer and Xbox 360. As for a motive, Current could only speculate.
“We don’t have a motive other than it was planned,” Current said. “He obviously did something in his life where he came up with this plan and idea and went through with it. Online gaming, or the people he associated with, or what. This was his plan and I don’t know, I don’t know. I really don’t think he had a motive other than to be famous in that world, whatever world that is.”
Despite building up a reputation for trolling on forums like EncyclopediaDramatica, Atchison took to other platforms like LiveJournal in a sincere search for someone who would hear his cries for help.
On the website Think Atheist, Atchison titled his sole post “Stuck in a Rural Redneck Town” in September 2014. “I don’t want to be lame or anything but I should probably come out about all this,” he wrote.
Under the name Demetrius Alcala, Atchison outlines his floundering career and social life in rural New Mexico. He applied to fast-food restaurants and dollar stores and was rejected. He hadn’t had friends since childhood, when two people took advantage of him after he loaned them video-game consoles that were sold or weren’t given back.
He had a 3.5 GPA, he said, but dropped out in 10th grade because of anxiety and the “backwards as hell” culture at school. He says he tried to go back but dropped out again, citing his abusive family.
He called his father a “fat lazy idiot who watches fox news all day” and his mother “a psycho hillbilly drunk from florida who’s really mentally ill.”
Two years before the FBI visited his home, and three years before he killed two people in a New Mexico high school, Atchison pleaded for advice on how to fix his life.
“Look, I’m sorry if I’m rude and hateful or anything, but I don’t know what to do. I’ve lived no life for nearly 19 years, most of which was in the miserable ass sun-belt. Did you know new mexico has the fourth highest suicide rate?” Atchison wrote.
“Should I escape this dump or deal with it? How can I become polite and make some friends out there in this world?”
Over 230 people viewed the post. No one responded.
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