Jaimee Seitz loved to make crafts for her daughter, Audree Heine. So when Audree asked for customized T-shirts, Seitz got out her supplies and went to work. She didn’t recognize the slogans Audree wanted — one shirt was supposed to say “Natural Selection” and the other “Wrath” — and thought it must be slang she didn’t know.
It was only after the death by suicide of Audree, a 13-year-old who did well in school and who loved Eminem, Olivia Rodrigo and dirt bikes, that her mother learned the significance.
“Natural Selection” and “Wrath” were on the shirts worn by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold when they killed 13 people and then themselves at Columbine High School in April 1999, ushering in a new era of the particularly American horror of school massacres. And Audree wanted to honor the shooters.
“I put together the puzzle and it was the final piece of, ‘I can’t believe I made these,’” Seitz told me. “I wanted to vomit.”
She now believes her child was pulled into a disturbing online network known as the true crime community or TCC — a name users have given to the unregulated spaces where children and adults obsess about mass shootings and the killers themselves. Most people in these forums will not go on to violence, but Seitz says the group is full of pressure — to kill others or yourself.
“Somebody should have known,” Seitz says. “I wish it was me because I’m her mother and I should have known and I’ll forever live with that. But I didn’t know.”
How to get help
- Help is available if you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or mental health matters.
- In the US: Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
- Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world.
Heather Dioneff didn’t fully understand what was happening to her daughter either as Lilyanna too dove into the TCC, idolized killers, wrote a hate-filled manifesto and made a long list of those she wanted to kill at her school.
As a mom, she was even a little comforted that Lilyanna had found some friends online, after struggling to fit in in their small town.
“I probably was a little naive to it. I really was,” Dioneff said. “I’m just a normal, everyday mom, just trying to make it through life. The last thing in the world that I ever imagined my kid to be involved with was a crime community that was actually considering committing crimes in the real world.”
Lilyanna told her plans to a therapist who called for help and the teen was hospitalized. She’s now 18 and hoping to help other children see everything that is wrong with the TCC.
Over the last year, I have talked or exchanged messages with more than a dozen people formerly or currently active in the community. Many told me they were lonely or depressed, and the TCC was the only place they felt they belonged. Others said their interest was effectively academic and they loved to research cases. Everyone told me they did not condone violence.
Most said their parents had no idea what they were doing online.
That was the case with Seitz and Dioneff, but both moms say there is more they wish they’d done, and more other adults and corporations could have done too.
Doodling love hearts for a killer
Seitz was a young mom, able and happy to share clothes, cosmetics and girl talk with her daughter. But she was also the kind of mom to delve through Audree’s backpack looking for a missing assignment or to read the notes left out as she cleaned her child’s room.
“I thought I knew everything about my daughter,” she said.
The overwhelming grief of losing a child became even worse when a detective gave her a notebook from Audree’s locker. It was covered in pencil drawings of the Columbine killers surrounded by hearts and doodled phrases like “Eric Harris, you’re my idol” and “Audree Klebold” — her name blended with that of a murderer. Alongside harmless teenage musings like a wish list including gum and pimple patches, Audree had drawn violent images and copied instructions for how to make a pipe bomb.
“It was like … if somebody was to tell you there’s aliens invading the Earth. That’s how it felt,” Seitz said.
Frantically, she started looking up the TCC on social media, where she discovered kids posting similar drawings and wearing the same shirts Audree had requested.
“It was so hard for me to comprehend, not only that she purposely took her life, but that she was a part of some extremist group,” Seitz says.
The TCC is a sprawling network of deeply troubling content that, despite internet companies’ best efforts to ban it, continues to pop up in the darkest corners of most major social media platforms. Users share research, pictures, videos, drawings and memes from major school shootings — with Columbine the dominant obsession — and connect through a series of ever-changing hashtags, adapted to avoid content restrictions.
TelL SOMEONE
- Talking to a trusted person about worrying behavior is a good first step to preventing violence, the FBI says. If you have information that someone is preparing or planning violence, visit your local police or report it at tips.fbi.gov.
“At its core, the true crime community is an online fandom that researches, obsesses over and glorifies mass killers,” explained Cody Zoschak, a senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which monitors the TCC as part of its work on online extremism. “In many cases, this bleeds over into the use of violence and the imitation of these attackers.”
Since January 2024, ISD has linked the TCC to at least 25 attacks or disrupted plots, almost entirely targeting schools. Those include Colt Gray, who authorities say had a shrine to a school shooter in his bedroom before allegedly killing four people at his Georgia high school, Natalie Rupnow who was found dead with an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in an attack in a Wisconsin school that killed two people and injured six more, and Solomon Henderson, who livestreamed himself before he opened fire in his school cafeteria in Tennessee, where one student died.
Zoschak said the stereotypical TCC member was a younger teenage girl, just like Audree, though there were many other people and the gender balance seems to be roughly 50-50. More than any one demographic group, the community is a magnet for those struggling to fit in, Zoschak said.
Seitz guesses this is what drew Audree in. “She was bullied,” she says. “She felt outcasted (and) found her group online.”
She believes what Audree experienced in the TCC was grooming. “It feels like you’re in a cult but there isn’t one leader, they feed off of each other,” she says. “She was sucked into this.”
Forensic psychologist Dr. Rachel Toles described how young people can become seduced by the TCC. “First they’ll just be curious about it, and then they’ll maybe go a little harder,” she said of someone’s interest, then fascination then emulation of a killer. “They think, well, they like that band and they wore that t-shirt. What if I wore that t-shirt? And they started feeling like the world was no good. And maybe the world isn’t any good.”
“What we’re actually talking about is connection,” she added. “These kids are desperate for connection.”
Seitz knew Audree had learned about Columbine, as she learned about 9/11 and other national tragedies. But she warns parents now that any focus on school shootings should be questioned at home and in the classroom. She said Audree’s school posted a picture of her wearing one of her Columbine shirts — a red flag that no one saw.
From fandom to fixation
From what she has pieced together from her daughter’s online history, Seitz believes Audree’s pipeline to the TCC started from the videogame platform Roblox as young as 8 years old. Other users invited her to connect on platforms like TikTok or private chats on Discord, and Seitz thinks Audree consumed this kind of content off and on until her death.
She blames the platforms for not having enough safeguards and has filed a lawsuit against Roblox, Discord, TikTok and its parent company ByteDance. The lawsuit, which is in its early stages, argues, in part, that “Audree was pushed to suicide by an online community dedicated to glorifying violence and emulating notorious mass shooters, a community that can thrive and prey upon young children like Audree.”
The platforms told CNN they have policies against violence and extremism and have teams to monitor this content. Material can be removed, users banned and law enforcement alerted, they said.
A Roblox spokesperson said: “Our multi-layered safety system is designed to help protect users from such content or behavior and includes advanced AI-powered detection, dedicated monitoring teams, 24/7 moderation, and robust user reporting tools.”
Roblox said it was continuing to evolve its systems, as did Discord. A Discord spokesperson said: “Real-world violence of any kind is devastating, especially when it impacts teens, and content that glorifies or encourages this behavior has no place on Discord.”
TikTok’s community guidelines include this sentence in bold: “We don’t allow threats, glorifying violence, or promoting crimes that could harm people, animals, or property.”
Lilyanna found the community at the age of 9 after seeing a video romanticizing Klebold, who she thought was “kind of cute.” She started to read stories about the Columbine killers that painted them as bullied outcasts and began to imagine a kinship. “It was like I had never felt more recognized by someone,” she says. “My anger felt like theirs, my sadness felt like theirs.”
Her mother would sometimes hear some of her online conversations. “There were a couple of times I wanted to bust in there and say, hey, you know, I think you should get off the computer,” Dioneff said. But she never did. “I just wanted to not believe it, that it wasn’t serious,” she said. “I trusted her.”
Dioneff would change that if she could. “You’ve got to know what your kids are doing,” she says. “Be intrusive. Go in there, bust in the door, look at the computer, take it, read it. I gave her too much freedom.”
Lilyanna thinks the TCC should be viewed in the same way as 764, another disturbing online community which has been designated a terrorist organization.
The government has not explicitly named the TCC as an extremist group and the FBI declined our requests for comment. ISD categorizes the TCC under the FBI’s new class of terrorism — nihilistic violent extremism or violence for the sake of violence, not driven by a specific ideology.
Experts like Toles and Zoschak say it would be almost impossible to shut the community down and a more effective strategy to safeguard individuals is real personal engagement. “People are looking for acceptance. They are looking for community. They are looking to be valued,” Zoschak said.
Seitz said parents can have a key role, letting their children know that it’s OK to be different, but it’s dangerous when it leads to self-harm or wanting to hurt others.
That strikes a chord with Lilyanna. “I wish somebody would have looked at me and said, ‘You need help. You need serious help,’” she said.