By Editor,Luke Kenton

Copyright dailymail

Gruesome death videos, neo-Nazi slogans, and tributes to the Columbine killers – this was the online world that 16-year-old Desmond Holly inhabited before opening fire on his classmates in Colorado last week.

Holly critically wounded two students at Evergreen High School before turning the gun on himself during the lunch recess on Wednesday, September 10. He was the only fatality, but it marked the 47th school shooting recorded in the US this year.

In the aftermath, officials with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said Holly appeared to have been ‘radicalized’ by an unspecified online group of ‘extremists’ but declined to elaborate.

A forensic review of Holly’s digital footprint by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) revealed his involvement in extremist spaces – including a gore-sharing forum and a social media subculture known as the True Crime Community (TCC), which deifies school shooters and fetishizes mass murder.

According to the ADL, Holly’s morbid interests are not unique. The same forums and circles have been linked to at least three other school shootings in the past 10 months, exposing a disturbing online underground that is radicalizing teenagers and providing a blueprint for bloodshed.

‘We can’t know for certain what exactly motivated each of these individuals, but there is a through-line between these shootings that is incredibly concerning,’ an expert from the ADL Center on Extremism told the Daily Mail.

‘These shooters seem to be feeding off one another and influencing one another… They’re emulating their predecessors and getting egged on by the promise of glorification in these spaces.’

Social media accounts believed to be linked to Holly were littered with references to other mass shootings and anti-Semitic views. He also appeared to be a frequent visitor to the controversial gore-sharing website WatchPeopleDie, where users exchange graphic images and videos of shootings, suicides, and mass killings.

Before his death, Holly interacted with posts about the 2018 Parkland school shooting in Florida, the 2022 Tops supermarket massacre in Buffalo, and the 2017 Quebec City mosque attack.

According to the ADL, Holly joined WatchPeopleDie on December 26, 2024 – just days after the mass shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, where 15-year-old Natalie ‘Samantha’ Rupnow killed two people and injured six others.

Rupnow herself was active on the site, regularly commenting on suicide videos and referencing the Columbine massacre.

In one Facebook post, Rupnow posed in a T-shirt featuring a band favored by Columbine gunman Eric Harris, fueling speculation her attack was directly inspired by the 1999 shooting.

The ADL’s findings suggest Holly may have drawn inspiration from both Rupnow and Columbine, which unfolded just 20 miles from his hometown of Evergreen.

Days before the attack, Holly posted a TikTok image wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘Wrath’ – nearly identical to one worn by Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold. In the same post, he mimicked a pose adopted by Rupnow and included her photo alongside his own.

The website WatchPeopleDie was linked to another tragedy in January of this year – the Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, in which 17-year-old Solomon Henderson opened fire inside the cafeteria, killing one student and injuring another before taking his own life.

Henderson was a frequent visitor to the site and, like Holly and Rupnow, increasingly engaged with extremist ideologies.

The gore-sharing forum first emerged on Reddit, where users would post graphic videos and GIFs of real deaths – suicides, kill-shots, accidents, execution-style killings. By 2018, the page had garnered over 400,000 subscribers.

It was banned by Reddit the following year under a chorus of outrage after a series of graphic videos depicting a massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, were repeatedly shared on the site.

WatchPeopleDie now operates on its own server and can easily be accessed by anyone after completing two steps: promising you’re over 18, and consenting to the site’s terms and conditions.

In addition to graphic videos and photos, users can also access other mass shooters’ unredacted manifestos.

Criminal profiler John Kelly, of STALK Inc., told the Daily Mail that exposure to such violent content, in addition to extremist views and glorification of killers’ actions, can have a profound effect on young, impressionable teens.

While there is no singular effect, Kelly said the primary concern is how these online spaces can create echo chambers that gradually normalize violence and potentially inspire copycat behaviors.

The most dangerous scenario is when vulnerable individuals are repeatedly exposed to such content without critical guidance or real-world social interactions to provide perspective, he said.

The ADL agrees, stressing that the overlap of gore and extremist glorification is what makes these spaces uniquely dangerous – numbing young users to violence while presenting mass shooters as icons.

‘This Gore part seems to be overlapping every single time,’ the ADL spokesperson told Daily Mail. ‘It softens how they view violence, and layered on top of that is the glorification of the perpetrators.

‘There’s a social currency in these groups that rewards and gives some of these users what they’re seeking. For instance, if you upload a pretty picture of a sunset, you want your friends to comment, ‘Wow, that is pretty!’ to reaffirm your view.

‘But when you’re measuring who you are based on those interactions, and seeking that validation in extremist spaces… that’s what we’re worried about, that kind of influence – and that’s what’s happening online now.’

That search for validation was evident in Holly’s own TikTok activity.

According to ADL, Holly was also active within the ‘True Crime Community’, or TCC, a sprawling network of forums and social media groups where mass murderers and serial killers are idolized – particularly Columbine gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Columbine remains at the heart of TCC due to the mythology that sprang up in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 attack. Early news reports falsely cast Harris and Klebold as bullied loners who snapped and sought revenge on their tormentors.

As author Dave Cullen wrote in The Atlantic in 2022, the truth – that Harris was a sadistic psychopath and Klebold was suicidally depressed – was far more complex. But the simpler legend of two outcasts striking back at bullies stuck, and it has proved enduring.

That myth turned Harris and Klebold into folk heroes for alienated teens, and it continues to fuel the TCC decades later. Memes describe the killers as martyrs, posts fawn over their looks, and tributes mourn them as the real victims.

Like Holly, Rupnow and Solomon were both active members of TCC, according to ADL.

Last month’s shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church and School in Minnesota, carried out by shooter Robin Westman, also bears the hallmarks of TCC, the ADL said.

Westman killed two children and wounded 18 others on August 27 when she opened fire on worshippers during morning mass in Minneapolis.

She scrawled dozens of slogans across the weapons used in the attack, one of which included Rupnow’s name.

Another read ‘Rip & Tear’, a reference to the ’90s video game Doom, which was repeatedly referenced by Harris and Klebold before Columbine.

Holly’s own TikTok posts echoed that same Columbine iconography, with his post showing him in a recreation of Klebold’s ‘Wrath’ shirt and his explicit reference to Rupnow.

Other posts included nods to other high-profile mass shooters and Neo-Nazi ideology.

Holly’s most recent profile photo on TikTok was of Elliot Rodger, an incel who killed six people in California in 2014 and had a history of spewing misogynistic content online.

In numerous posts, Holly showed off his collection of tactical gear, which was decorated with extremist symbols and inspired by equipment used by previous mass shooters.

Holly’s TikTok accounts were ‘filled with white supremacist symbolism,’ the ADL said, noting that his most recent account’s username included a reference to a popular white supremacist slogan.

Another TikTok post shared by the ADL showed that in June of this year, Holly had liked a comment from another user who asked him about becoming a ‘hero,’ a term used by some white supremacists to refer to successful ideologically motivated attackers.

He also liked a post encouraging him to ‘make a move’, and another telling him he needed to buy a GoPro for a ‘cool’ point of view for whatever he had planned.

Some of Holly’s anonymous social media accounts were flagged by the FBI in July due to the concerning nature of his posts. However, a spokesperson said the agency was still working to identify him at the time of last week’s shooting.

‘We continued to work this assessment investigation to identify the name and location of the user up until September 10, 2025,’ a statement from the bureau read.

‘During the assessment investigation, the identity of the account user remained unknown, and thus there was no probable cause for arrest or additional law enforcement action at the federal level.’

For the ADL, Holly’s digital trail shows how these morbid online communities are doing more than glorifying past killers – they are actively shaping and influencing the next generation of school shooters.

By numbing teenagers to gore and offering validation through likes, shares, and comments, the result, the ADL warns, is a dark corner of the internet where each new shooting becomes both inspiration and instruction for the next.

The threat posed by the social groups and forums visited by Holly to other vulnerable teens is profound, the ADL says. Even more troubling is how difficult it is to prevent teens from accessing such violent and extremist content.

‘I think it’s extremely difficult to stop. We know this kind of violence is glorified in online spaces that kids frequent, and kids know better than anyone else how to find it because they’re tech savvy,’ said the spokesperson.

‘We want to help understand this crisis, and there is a responsibility for everyone to come together here – from the social media platforms to the school leaders to our policy makers to law enforcement – and work on this to try to push back on what we’re seeing happening.’

Failure to turn the tide on the growing trend will be catastrophic, the ADL warned.

‘If we don’t act, there will be another one in a few days, and then again in a few weeks.

‘There’s nothing we have right now to stop what’s happening. It’s too vast and there are too many issues that are adding to the crisis… we need to act now.’

The shooting at Evergreen High unfolded the same day that political activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated during a university event in Utah.

Holly opened fire on his classmates inside Evergreen High’s cafeteria on Sept. 10. The teen, who was armed with a revolver, wounded two of his classmates before turning the gun on himself in the school yard.

In a news conference the next day, officials said Holly brought a cache of ammo with him and continuously fired at his schoolmates.

‘He would fire and reload, fire and reload, fire and reload. This went on and on. And as he did that, he tried to find new targets,’ said Jacki Kelley, a spokesperson for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office

Authorities have not released a possible motive in the shooting, saying that the investigation remains ongoing.