Police arrived at the gruesome scene Sunday morning, alerted by frantic calls from users on the messaging app Discord. What police heard in those calls was horrifying: Someone had uploaded an image of a bloodied, lifeless young woman to the server, her throat marred by a deep gash.
“You’re gonna have to find somebody else to orbit,” a man wrote, using a term for tracking potential romantic interests online.
Police located 21-year-old Brandon Clark after he called 911. They found him at the end of a dead-end road, on the ground next to a black SUV, officials said. He stabbed himself in the neck with a knife as an officer approached him. Then, police say, Clark moved to a tarp where a teen’s bloodied body was located. He then took a selfie while lying across her body as the officer watched, police say.
Bianca Devins, the victim, was 17.
Prosecutors charged Clark on Monday night with second-degree murder in Devins’s death, after he received emergency surgery at a nearby hospital.
The horrific killing of the teenager in Utica, N.Y., has drawn headlines, its brutality underscored by its broadcast. It has echoes of the massacre at two mosques in New Zealand this year, which the perpetrator live-streamed on Facebook.
Like the New Zealand suspect, the social media user accused in this incident had marked posts about the violence with a winking reference to a popular YouTube star, writing “Subscribe to PewDiePie,” according to images obtained by The Washington Post. And like the bloodshed in New Zealand, the violence in this case was not only broadcast online — its genesis also appears to have been rooted there.
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