Crimo made rap music below the identify Awake The Rapper. In a single video, he wears a helmet and vest inside an empty classroom and scatters bullets throughout the ground.
Screenshot by NPR/AwakeTheRapper
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Screenshot by NPR/AwakeTheRapper
Crimo made rap music below the identify Awake The Rapper. In a single video, he wears a helmet and vest inside an empty classroom and scatters bullets throughout the ground.
Screenshot by NPR/AwakeTheRapper
Within the 1000’s of messages, pictures, movies and songs posted on-line by Robert Crimo III, the 21-year-old suspected of opening fireplace on a Fourth of July parade in suburban Illinois, one conclusion is obvious: Crimo was unusually concerned with violence.
A minimum of two of his music movies depicted some sort of capturing. On Discord, he shared a photograph of Budd Dwyer, a politician who killed himself throughout a reside press convention. And he apparently posted 1000’s of occasions to a web-based discussion board devoted to sharing violent pictures and movies of individuals dying.
“It was fairly clear that this suspect had a historical past on-line of glorifying and fantasizing about violence, and to me that sends a pink flag on high of a pink flag,” mentioned Jared Holt, a fellow on the Atlantic Council who researches home extremism.
Officers are reviewing Crimo’s on-line exercise, mentioned Chris Covelli from the Lake County Sheriff’s Workplace at a Tuesday press convention. Requested if anybody had ever known as native police with considerations about Crimo’s on-line content material, Covelli mentioned no.
Underneath variations on the identify “Awake” – the identical phrase tattooed above his left eye – Crimo posted often to YouTube.
On Spotify, Crimo’s rap music had been listened to thousands and thousands of occasions earlier than the service eliminated it after the capturing. For followers of his music, he hosted a Discord server, the place followers shared memes and hyperlinks to his songs.
Holt described Crimo’s on-line footprint as in step with actions that strive “to make themselves appear very intense and really violent to build up a specific amount of perverted clout amongst different individuals in the identical on-line areas.”
“There are parts of the web that pleasure themselves on this fetishization of violence, of being as offensive as humanly potential,” he mentioned.
Among the many most annoying is what seems to be Crimo’s exercise on a discussion board known as Documenting Actuality, the place individuals share graphic pictures and movies that present the aftermath of violence.
There, a consumer named “Awake47” shared pictures of Crimo and posted a twenty first birthday message that matches data launched by the FBI. The consumer often handed footage of shootings and different real-life violence.
He posted there so typically that different discussion board customers acknowledged his face when police printed a photograph through the manhunt on Monday. “I at all times knew there was at the very least one assassin on this web site, and I am not satisfied he is the one one. However Awake? Wow,” wrote one consumer.
One other of Crimo’s music movies reveals a crudely animated faculty shooter who’s in the end apprehended and shot by police.
Screenshot by NPR/AwakeTheRapper
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Screenshot by NPR/AwakeTheRapper
One other of Crimo’s music movies reveals a crudely animated faculty shooter who’s in the end apprehended and shot by police.
Screenshot by NPR/AwakeTheRapper
Crimo’s fascination with violence additionally appeared in his music, which he printed on Spotify and YouTube below the identify Awake the Rapper.
One crudely animated video depicts a younger man with tactical gear and an assault-style rifle capturing individuals earlier than police seem to apprehend and shoot him – all whereas a chorus is repeated: “Dwelling the dream, nothing’s actual. I simply need to scream ‘fuck this world.'”
And one other music video opens with Crimo sitting alone in a classroom. Midway via the music, he reaches right into a backpack – then the video cuts to Crimo sporting a helmet and tactical vest.
One factor that’s tough to determine from Crimo’s on-line footprint is whether or not the capturing could have been ideologically motivated. Authorities say they haven’t any indication that the capturing was racially or religiously motivated.
After the capturing Monday, some pictures of Crimo unfold quickly on social media, together with a photograph during which he wore a Trump flag throughout his shoulders and one other at a Trump rally. A video posted by Crimo reveals him amongst a crowd ready exterior an airport for Trump to land close by in Air Pressure One.
However Holt says a handful of pictures should not sufficient to point some type of political leaning or right-wing extremism. “I have never seen something that basically definitively locations this within the politically motivated violence bucket simply but,” he mentioned.
