Twisted secret network behind disturbed transgender Minneapolis school shooter
- and they hunt for more teen victims every day
Updated: 23:39 BST, 29 August 2025
The transgender killer who shot up a Catholic Church, killing two children, was inspired by a dark extremist network of nihilistic terror groups that prey on and exploit young people, experts believe.
Groups with names like 764, COM, No Lives Matter and the Order of Nine Angles have been spawning school shooters and other violent actors for years, but are mostly unknown to the general public – especially to the parents of kids drawn into their sinister web.
All the groups are sometimes called part of the '764 network', an umbrella term covering a dark mishmash of fringe communities – some satanic, some accelerationist and many obsessed with Nazis 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.
These groups often target very young kids, transgender people and other marginalized communities by encouraging them to self-harm on camera, abuse animals and even kill themselves while live-streaming.
David Riedman, creator of the K–12 School Shooting Database and a professor at Idaho State University, told the Daily Mail that Westman's use of coded symbols, inscriptions on weapons and disturbing references leading up to the attack align with the online lore surrounding past school shooters and violent extremist communities.
'There are very clear references in the photos and videos from the shooting,' said Riedman, a long-time authority on school shooters. 'It's almost like this is the postmodern representation of a template of violence – if you're going to commit mass violence, you need to draw on all of these other pieces that exist in the lore around it.'
Transgender shooter Robin Westman was entrenched in the sick ideology of insidious online terror groups that operate in private chatrooms to indoctrinate vulnerable young people
Two children were killed, and 17 others injured, when Westman sprayed bullets through the church windows as the young congregants scrambled down in the pews to escape the deadly gunfire
Signs of the shooter's deteriorating mind appeared throughout Westman's TikTok, including one image showing a person with a gun staring into a mirror to see a demon staring back
Signs of the shooter's deteriorating mind appeared throughout Westman's TikTok, including one image showing a person with a gun staring into a mirror to see a demon staring back
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. The writing could be viewed on the video and was 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, and one passage speaks about the shooter 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 the Daily Mail they are deeply 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 the 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 Nine Angles network as well as to the Columbine shooters, was formed by 15-year-old Bradley Cadenhead of Stephenville, Texas, in 2021.