A teen who opened fire in a Colorado high school this week was active on a so-called “violent gore” site months before the attack, the Anti-Defamation League said in a report released Friday.
“We’re talking about thousands of people who are on these spaces,” ADL Senior Vice President of Counter-Extremism and Intelligence, Oren Segal, told CBS News.
The website Holly used was also frequented, the ADL says, by other individuals who have carried out school shootings.
“Many of these online spaces are glorifying these young, violent shooter types, where they’re even referencing one another,” Segal said.
CBS News reached out to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office to see whether the department’s findings were consistent with those in the ADL report.
According to a report issued Friday by the Anti-Defamation League, the teen who opened fire in a high school in Colorado this week was active on a website known as “violent gore” months prior to the incident.
Colorado officials said that 16-year-old Desmond Holly had been “radicalized by an extremist network,” but they did not elaborate. Holly had injured two students at Evergreen High School before killing himself with a gunshot wound.
Holly was one of several school shooters who had been active on the same website in the previous year, according to the ADL report. The website is infamous for displaying graphic violence against people and animals as well as content that supports white supremacist ideologies. A forum on the website WatchPeopleDie allows users to view actual footage of shootings, beheadings, and other violent incidents. Prior to its March 2019 ban, the website was first on Reddit.
“There are thousands of people on these spaces,” Oren Segal, Senior Vice President of Counter-Extremism and Intelligence at the ADL, told CBS News. “Anyone can access it; there is no difficulty. “,”.
According to CBS Colorado, school shooters frequently display similar behaviors and have been known to honor other mass shooters, said Beverly Kingston, director of Colorado University’s Center For The Study and Prevention of Violence. Other people who have committed school shootings, according to the ADL, have also visited the website that Holly used. These include Solomon Henderson, a 17-year-old who carried out a shooting at Antioch High School in Nashville in January that left one person dead and another wounded, and Natalie Rupnow, a 15-year-old who shot and killed a student and a teacher at Abundant Life Christian school in Wisconsin last year.
According to the ADL, Holly appeared to have joined TikTok in December 2024, the month between the shootings in Madison and Nashville, and shared a picture of Rupnow on the platform.
Segal claimed that “many of these online spaces are glorifying these young, violent shooter types, where they’re even referencing one another.”.
Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in California in 2014 and had a history of participating in and posting misogynistic content online, was featured in Holly’s most recent TikTok profile picture, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Two hours before the shooting, the 16-year-old uploaded a picture of himself on his X account, holding a gun next to a box of ammunition. Holly posted pictures of his assortment of tactical gear with extremist symbols on social media. In a since-deleted TikTok post that mentioned the mass shooting at a Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque in 2019, he replied to a comment urging him to “make a move,” according to ADL.
To find out if the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office’s conclusions aligned with the ADL report, CBS News contacted the department. Since the investigation is still ongoing, a spokesperson stated they are unable to comment.
A search of the “whois” registration database reveals that Watchpeopledie’s domain is registered by proxy, concealing the owners’ identities. According to Segal at the ADL, Cloudflare serves as the registrar for their primary domain and employs Cloudflare-owned IP addresses, so WPD is either hosted on Cloudflare or makes use of their passthrough services.
Segal claimed that Cloudflare lets it continue, essentially acting as a service provider and “permitting the site’s hosting.”. “..”.
The website is not hosted by Cloudflare, a representative for the company told CBS News, adding that it “usually does not host websites and doesn’t have the capacity to remove content that is hosted by others.”. “,”.
According to Segal, ADL notifies law enforcement organizations nationwide of their findings. He did not name the particular report or the agency. According to Segal, recognizing acts committed by individuals influenced by pessimistic online forums as part of a larger pattern rather than isolated instances could help stop violence.
Segal stated, “We need to see that there’s a connection there, there’s a through line.”. These online platforms are a recurring theme and thread. “.
