Highland Park Mass Shooting Mystery - Part 2
My investigation leads me closer to the shadowy figures surrounding Bobby Crimo in the year before the shooting, and a crime scene recreation reveals some unsettling anomalies.
Before you begin, make sure to read Part 1!
Sometime after the fiasco with Jamie in mid-2023, I had to push Highland Park to the side to work on something even more urgent and daunting – My research into the Satanic child exploitation and extortion network 764. I still talked to Bobby’s dad, Bob Sr., on the phone occasionally, mainly to get updates on the pending court cases. In November of 2023, Bob pleaded guilty to seven misdemeanor counts of reckless conduct, one for each person killed in the Highland Park mass shooting on July 4, 2022. He served 27 days in the Lake County Jail before being released for good behavior in December (Watch a detailed video about why Bob’s court case was a completely unconstitutional political stunt here.)
By September of 2022, I had already seen enough from Jamie to realize she was lying about various aspects of her relationship with Bobby, and I knew not to trust her. That said, she really was in contact with Bobby at the jail, and keeping on good terms with her meant that I could keep getting updates on the case to benefit my own investigation. So, I let her talk. In October of 2022, Jamie mentioned journalist and podcaster Trevor Aaronson for the first time. She excitedly told me that she’d found his work and thought he might be able to help. Even more impressive, she had already contacted him, and he’d agreed to have a phone call with her the following Tuesday.
Trevor is most well-known for his book titled, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism which he turned into a TED Talk and then into a semi-successful podcast called Alphabet Boys. I thought Trevor, who’d had some unique perspectives on mass shootings in the past, might actually be a good resource on this topic, but I was suspicious of Jamie’s motivations for contacting him, and I was even more concerned that she would twist the narrative and poison the well. So, I decided to contact Trevor on my own via Twitter DM. I didn’t mention Jamie, I simply asked for his input and alluded to a potential collaboration. I figured if Trevor were willing to talk to Jamie, certainly he would be willing to talk to somebody with a more public presence. But Trevor didn’t respond.
As time passed, my investigation and my conversations with Bob led me to the website Documenting Reality, which I believed would be the key to unraveling Bobby’s descent into madness. Jamie was still in the picture, but she was appearing more unstable and unreliable with every passing moment. She would go missing from the Internet for weeks or even months at a time, then come back claiming to have had a mental breakdown or been institutionalized. At times, Jamie’s behavior became so unstable and alarming that I wondered if she might commit a violent attack of her own. She was desperate to get vengeance against those who she perceived wronged Bobby.
Bob Sr. was starting to have some doubts about Jamie, as well. He told me that she had been grilling him in an effort to get information about Bobby’s legal case. The state prosecutors had amassed a whopping 10,000 pages of Discovery against Bobby, the entirety of which was under a strict gag order. But the contents of that Discovery had also been made available exclusively to Bob, since it was ruled that it pertained directly to his own, related criminal case. Jamie was certainly well aware of this. I warned Bob against talking to anyone about the nature of those materials and he assured me that he wouldn’t do so.
Bob mentioned other alarming things about Jamie during our conversations. For example, Jamie had asked him to find the floor plan of the Lake County Jail and send it to her. I still haven’t wrapped my mind around this bizarre request. Why would Bob have that information to begin with? And what possible motive could Jamie have had for needing the floor plan of the jail? In another instance, Jamie attempted to use a social engineering technique called pretexting to get access to Bobby’s confidential medical records. She had also gotten her hands on certain documents related to Bobby’s case, which she claimed she obtained via FOIA requests. This is an impressive feat when you consider that FOIAs are usually denied during active investigations. For an emotionally unstable woman in her late 20s to early 30s who had just finished nursing school, Jamie was suspiciously skilled at investigative work.
In July of 2023, Jamie discovered a conversation on Twitter between members of Documenting Reality in which a man named Reed Wade pointed out a YouTube livestream where other members were discussing the shooting. Reed believed a Documenting Reality user called Aphid Lip was a bad actor who had been close to Bobby, and accused him of being somehow involved in the shooting. Jamie immediately saw this as a slam dunk, despite the flimsiness of the evidence. From my perspective, it just seemed like more hearsay and shit-flinging from the notoriously melodramatic Water Cooler Club.
As Jamie’s confidence in her newly found evidence grew, she began to publicly flaunt her relationship with Trevor, tweeting an image that showed several incoming and outgoing calls between the two of them and hinting at a future collaboration. I had forgotten all about Trevor in the months that had passed and decided it was time to send him another DM, once again hoping to get the right information into his hands. I was starting to think he might actually be taking Jamie seriously. After all, they had obviously been talking on the phone quite a bit. Once again, Trevor did not respond.
The Final Year
During one of our early conversations, Bob shared with me a detailed timeline of the last few years of his son’s free life. Starting in 2017, a vulnerable 17-year-old Bobby experienced several life-changing events in relatively short succession. In early 2017, Bobby suffered his first broken heart when his long-time girlfriend “Rose” broke up with him and moved to Florida. A few months later, Bobby’s best friend, Anthony Laporte, died of a drug overdose. Bobby spoke at Anthony’s funeral. People who were close with both boys said that Bobby and Anthony were inseparable, and that after Anthony’s death, Bobby began to spiral. In 2018, Bobby’s grandfather, (another) Robert Crimo Senior, also passed away. 2019 marked a tumultuous time period for Bobby where he experienced periods of depression, though Bob said that overall, Bobby held himself together and never took any medication for it.
In June of 2020, Bobby joined Documenting Reality and was quickly consumed by the site and all of its quirky members, who slowly began to replace Bobby’s real-life friends. Bob watched as Bobby spent more and more time online, often sitting on a Skype call with other members. He called this Skype group the “Motley Crue”. Bobby was also becoming more active in advancing his music career as Awake the Rapper. Though it may come as a surprise, Bobby actually had a modestly sized fanbase. He also had friends in the Soundcloud rapper community. Together, they formed an informal rapping collective called “Sleepy Squad”. In early 2021, Bobby published three key music videos full of clues, followed by his 27-page encrypted book of numbers, Arcturus. His ARG was complete.
Despite the fact that Bobby was spending almost all of his free time on Documenting Reality, Bob says he noticed a positive change in Bobby’s general attitude. In June of that year, Bobby informed his dad that he was moving temporarily to Jacksonville, FL to live at an “estate” with an FAA mechanic named Archie who he’d met on Documenting Reality. Bobby seemed hesitant to give Bob the address, though he eventually did so. Bob looked up the address of the so-called estate to find a garage-shop unit with boats parked in the front. Skeptical, Bob asked Bobby for Archie’s full name. “Dad,” Bobby replied, “they’ll know if you're looking them up, they’re good at that stuff.”
It took Bob a few days to dig up the address, but he eventually found it and sent it to me. From there, we were able to identify the owner of the shop as a 57-year-old man named Todd Rhodes. Todd’s Facebook page was full of oddities. He was a huge proponent of the Q-Anon conspiracy theory, and his posts indicated a potential interest in the occult. Bobby took photos of himself in Todd’s garage which he posted online or sent to his dad. In one photo, Bobby stood on a chair draped in a Trump flag. Bobby would later explain that this photo, used by many in the media to paint him as a Trump supporter, was actually him imitating Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt who was shot to death by Capitol Police during the January 6th Capitol riot. Bobby also took several photos of himself wearing an FBI hat, which he claimed he bought at a shop in Florida and wore around “just to troll people.” This makes sense considering that Documenting Reality members often accuse each other of being feds.
But Bobby’s time in Florida seemed to have brought out a darker side of him, as well. A Crimo family friend told me that Bobby had become more hostile and emotional during exchanges with his parents while he was there. In a phone conversation with Bob Sr., Bobby told his dad, “Hearing your voice hurts me, reminds me of my own mortality… You have to stop caring so much, I know how this ends. You are either going to love me or hate me.”
Bobby only spent a few weeks living with Rhodes in Jacksonville. He soon hit the road again to visit another Documenting Reality member, a criminologist, in South Carolina. Bobby also made a road trip to Texas to visit Dealey Plaza, the site of the JFK assassination. He was on a Skype call with the Motley Crue during the tour. From there, Bobby traveled to Oregon to visit several other members of Documenting Reality.
And this is where my interest really peaked.
Bobby texted Bob several photos of himself in Oregon. One photo showed a red truck with its bed full of various firearms and a sticker with Awake the Rapper’s logo on the back windshield. In another photo, Bobby is standing in front of the same wooded backdrop firing a shotgun while two unidentified men lounge idly in the background.
Identifying these individuals was more difficult than it may have seemed. An unusual number of Documenting Reality users lived in Oregon. One of them was a former high school threat assessor, in charge of conducting evaluations on troubled teens and staging interventions with those who were deemed at-risk of committing acts of violence at school. According to Bob, this threat assessor had “evaluated” Bobby at one point, performing the same type of evaluation he gave to potential school shooters and declaring Bobby to be low risk. Bobby shared this anecdote with Bob, who was perplexed. “Of course you’re low risk,” Bob said, “why would he even need to say that?”
The Threat Assessor
More time passed. Bob Sr.’s trial came and went, as did his brief stay in jail. 2024 snuck up on all of us. On a cold night in January, I was once again spending my evening scrolling through The Water Cooler forum on Documenting Reality looking for clues. I wondered if I could figure out the owner of the red truck from the photo of Bobby’s shooting trip in Oregon. My team and I used the picture to figure out the make and model of the truck - a late 2010s model Dodge Ram. I got to work on Documenting Reality, using targeted searches of the Water Cooler to find mentions of a Dodge Ram. It turned out that a member named LERK, who we had already flagged as a key individual in connection with Bobby, had mentioned owning a 2017 Dodge Ram. What’s more, we determined that LERK lived in Eugene, Oregon and that he had once claimed to have met Bobby.
As we continued to dig, we found LERK’s name, Fletcher Stiles, and a LinkedIn page that said he was formerly a mental health professional, which raised the possibility that he was the threat assessor Bobby had mentioned to his dad. In the photo of Bobby shooting the shotgun, the man to the far right of the photo looks similar to photos of Fletcher Stiles.
As I scrolled through the pages and pages of comments made by LERK on Documenting Reality, I kept finding myself shaking my head in disbelief. On a post titled, “USA - Female Addict’s Suicide,” LERK commented, “Stupid Bitch. Good Riddance.” There were also many posts where LERK had encouraged other users of the site to commit suicide. In another post, titled, “Sneaky Shot To Death By Police,” LERK schemed up ways to find the police bodycam footage of a forum member who had recently committed suicide by cop.
Michael Tristan Paone, who went by the username SneakySniper169 on Documenting Reality, had a long, troubled history on the site. He frequently used the forum to complain about his mental health issues and contemplate suicide. Some of the members were sympathetic and tried to help him, while others, like LERK, urged him to go through with ending his life. Bobby and SneakySniper169 were close on the forum, and both were members of the Motley Crue Skype call. SneakySniper169 also allegedly met the Documenting Reality site owner, Chris Wilson, who had taken him to Disney World, and he had also gone on at least one trip to Oregon to meet the rest of the Motley Crue.
On August 3, 2021, while Bobby was busy traveling to Oregon and shooting guns with his Documenting Reality friends, Michael Paone was breathing his last breath. Michael, in the throes of a psychiatric episode, stabbed his mother multiple times on the arms, prompting his sister to call 911. When police arrived at the scene, they found Michael standing outside of their apartment building holding what appeared to be a firearm. The police yelled at him to drop the weapon, so he did. Then, as police advanced, Michael suddenly lurched back towards the object on the ground, prompting the officers to fire 4 shots at Michael, killing him. As the officers moved in, they were able to identify the object lying next to Michael Paone’s lifeless body. It was a toy gun.
Digging back even further on the forum, I ran into several disturbing exchanges between LERK, a former mental health counselor, and SneakySniper169. On July 29, 2021, just a few days before his death, SneakySniper169 made a post titled, “My Life”:
My Life.
Has been extremely mundane and totally depressing on a societally acceptable way for it to be in such disarray. I haven't had a proper room in about 5 years. That shits behind me but it's still depressing. Y'all shit on me but still with no prospects I'm going to make an amazing life for myself.
The reason is, is the fact that there is no [experience] I am not open to. I have spent countless years on a forum watching the end of what, a life. That's what my life could be and that is what life is for other people.
Most people I meet in this motel room are good decent people for the most part. Way more entertaining than the people I have met before this. Whenever this place ends, [it’s] the end. Enjoy your lives and stop waiting for them to be over.
I'm going to do everything. I'm a jack of all trades, I'm going to go everywhere and I am going to see what I want when I want it. The only thing I am going to do have have been doing in Pennsylvania is waiting to die.
Complacency is death.
In response to his post, several members, including LERK, commented insinuating, or even outright telling him to end his own life, to which SneakySniper169 responded, “I’m taking some people out with me if I go down that route. Fuck some people in here.” LERK replied, “Please die before you hurt anyone… Please just kill yourself and don’t take anyone with you.”
Then, on August 1, 2021, SneakySniper169 made his final post to the forum:
I Am a God Now.
I just created cartoon world. Suck my dick. It's got all your mickey mouse pals faggots. You'll never be this cool. Your not welcome. No faggots allowed.
Several months passed before the forum learned of SneakySniper169’s passing from a post referencing the news article about Michael Paone’s death and the family’s eventual lawsuit against the police department. LERK humored the idea of trying to get the police bodycam footage to post to the forum, “I’d really like to watch sneaky get shot,” LERK commented, “I’d even pay a few bucks. :shrug.” On another thread, LERK said, “I like the dead sneaky thread. Dead sneaky threads are funny.” Farther down the thread, Bobby, under his username Awake47, commented, “RIP Comrade.”
It’s bad enough to think that someone as awful as Fletcher Stiles, aka LERK, could have been a mental health professional. Could he have been the threat assessor Bobby mentioned as well? This was a mind-blowing discovery. It felt like we were finally putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Even if the members of Documenting Reality didn’t directly participate in the shooting at Highland Park, their influence was certainly heavy on Bobby. This would explain Bobby’s sudden behavior change, as noticed by family and friends, which corresponded with his sudden interest in traveling the country to hang out with his new friends. Friends from a repulsive gore website, who spent all their free time in the Water Cooler urging suicidal people to go through with it, take people out with them, film it, create new content for the site. Could this be what motivated Bobby?
I felt vindicated. I sent a message to my colleague, Ken Silva, who was equally intrigued at the barrage of new information. Then, I drew a bubble bath, looking forward to spending a relaxing night celebrating the end of a chapter. But the celebration would have to wait. Right before I stepped into my bath, I received a message that would catapult me immediately into the next chapter. I’d just been alerted to the death, and possible murder, of 764 member Kyle Spitze’s mother.
My investigation into Highland Park took a backseat as I pursued the much more urgent matter of the 764 network. In this new venture, there were children to save and predators to arrest. Those same predators would soon begin flooding my DMs with credible threats to my life. Bob called me again in February of 2024 – just a quick update about Bobby’s next hearing. But Bob also mentioned that he’d been contacted by Trevor Aaronson. Trevor said he was making a podcast about Bobby for Audible and wanted to interview Bob. Bob’s lawyer was hesitant to advise this, and I was on the fence, myself. I had made several attempts to contact Trevor but he’d ignored me and pursued a collaboration with Jamie instead. A suspicious turn of events, to be sure.
Bob wondered if Trevor may talk to me if I offered to convey information in his place, so he forwarded an email from Trevor to me, and I used this to make the introduction. Unsurprisingly, I still wouldn’t receive an answer. I mentioned the situation to journalist Ken Silva, a friend and close colleague of mine who had been looped in to the Highland Park matter nearly as long as I had. Through all the ups and downs, Ken had been the only journalist willing to run stories about my investigation. He was also already looped into the matter of Jamie and her conversations with Bobby from jail. When I first brought this up to Ken, he said it reminded him of a similar situation with one of the men involved in the Whitmer kidnapping plot who had been approached by two women while incarcerated and “honeypotted” for information.
Ken told me that Trevor was a contact of his who he’d worked with reliably in the past, and he agreed to arrange an introduction. He copied me in an email to Trevor. I seized on the opportunity to introduce myself and mention my willingness to share information and act as a mouthpiece for Bob. I decided against mentioning my concerns about Jamie right off the bat because I worried it would turn him off from speaking with me further. This compelled Trevor to finally respond to me, if for no other reason, as a simple cordiality to Ken. He told me it was a long-term project, and that more urgent projects were taking up his attention, then prompted me to summarize the information I had. I didn’t really know how to respond to that. To be honest, it rubbed me the wrong way, partly because I had already told him my intentions, and partly because the information I had to share was far too voluminous to send in an email. Besides, I was sure he already knew who I was, if from nowhere else than from Jamie, and I know he’d seen the messages I’d sent him on Twitter.
I decided to sit on it.
Anomalies
Several months went by, during which my investigation into the 764 network almost completely prevented me from further researching the Highland Park shooting. I felt like there wasn’t much more that we could do, anyways. We had succeeded in establishing the identities and potential motives of Bobby’s online contacts, which was the original request from Bobby’s family back in 2022.
We had also conducted an extensive analysis of the crime scene using a combination of crime scene photos, live aerial footage, Google maps and in-person trips to photograph and reconstruct the scene. Our investigation determined that it would have been virtually impossible for a single shooter, crouched atop Ross cosmetics, to kill all of those people. The two victims at the far back of Port Clinton Square were completely obscured by the side of Walker Bros. Both victims were grievously injured and covered in massive quantities of blood, indicating they died on the spot. This theory was further supported by the absence of blood trails that might indicate they were dragged.
One thing is for sure, Bobby was certainly at the scene of the crime and almost definitely near Ross Cosmetics, dressed as a woman and armed with an AR-15 which he dropped as he fled to his mother’s house. Far less publicly available evidence exists to prove that Bobby actually pulled the trigger, resulting in the deaths of all seven victims. Such was the intrigue of this particular mass shooting compared to nearly all others like it. I had never encountered another mass shooting where the shooter was not positively identified by a single eyewitness.
In this case, the eyewitness reports were all over the place. Some saw a person dressed in black on top of Ross Cosmetics, some saw a person dressed in white wearing a hat. More than one witness described a man with a yellow backpack running away from the scene (Bobby was not carrying, nor did he even possess, a yellow backpack.) Some eyewitnesses were clearly wrong about their descriptions of the shooter and at least one seemed to be purposefully lying.
Then there was Michael Schwartz. Schwartz gave by far the most detailed report of the shooter that day. He claimed the shooter was on the ground, crouched behind the stop sign in front of Gearhead’s, which was across 2nd street from Ross Cosmetics and directly in front of Port Clinton Square. When the reporter tried to interject and ask him if he meant the rooftop, Schwartz cut her off, “That’s absolutely false. I saw this guy shooting, I saw where he was, I saw his eyes, and there was no question this was the only shooter and he was on the ground. I don’t know where they’re getting this roof stuff.” Schwartz went on to describe an athletic man positioned in a “true military crouch” and whose demeanor was “military style methodical.” Schwartz was standing far back in the plaza, to the East of Walker Bros restaurant. Just six feet to the left of him, a woman was shot and immediately fell dead in a pool of blood. All of this matches up to the photos of the bodies at the rear of Port Clinton Square.
Mr. Schwartz was also interrogated the next day at his home, having had 24 hours to calm himself and reflect on the events of the previous day. To the surprise of the reporters, and despite having obviously been ”corrected” after his first report, he didn’t budge on his original statement, attempting to explain the discrepancy by suggesting the gunman must have jumped from the roof to the ground in between strings of fire. This scenario isn’t possible. The gunman on top of Ross Cosmetic’s would have had to run down a staircase, through an alley full of panicked people and all the way across the street, assume a crouched position and reload his rifle, all in the span of under 8 seconds. Schwartz added that the gunman was wearing dark clothing, and when the shooter turned to flee down 2nd Street, he said, “I believe I could recognize his gait from anywhere.”
Mr. Schwartz is a uniquely reliable witness because of the amount of detail included in his testimonyStudies have shown that eyewitnesses who include the most detail are usually the most reliable. Strengthening his credibility even further was his refusal to adjust his memory of the incident, even under the influence of external suggestion. But there’s another reason that his memory of the event felt like the most important one - it made the most sense. A shooter standing at the corner of 2nd Street and Central Avenue, directly in front of Port Clinton Square, would have had a direct line of sight to the two victims laying at the back of the plaza next to Walker Bros, a position that was completely obscured from Ross Cosmetics.
As much as I was itching to go public with the evidence we had uncovered, there were several legitimate reasons I decided not to do so. For one, much of my information was non-public and had come from Bob Sr., who had asked me to keep things private until his own legal troubles were out of the way. But even after Bob was released from jail, the timing simply didn’t feel right. There were still 10,000 pages of Discovery that we did not have access to and that would presumably be revealed during Bobby’s trial. I acknowledged the possibility that evidence revealed for the first time at the trial may explain the anomalies we had uncovered, and I wanted to make sure I had all of the information before I made up my mind on the matter, and certainly before I put anything out publicly. To a good investigator, accuracy matters.
I also worried about the possibility that releasing new evidence might compromise the trial in some way. There was really no pressing need to take this risk. Anything that wasn’t explained in the trial could always be used during an appeal, or even to open a case against a co-conspirator, assuming the information remained relevant. I couldn’t have predicted that as the trial inched closer, new developments would force my hand.
***
While the realization that I didn’t need to act on our information right away was reassuring, there was still the matter of Trevor Aaronson’s Audible series. I was concerned that Jamie may jump the gun and give up all of our research, possibly compromising its integrity in the process. My worries were somewhat allayed during a later conversation with Bob, when he informed me that he had decided to agree to a sit-down interview with Trevor. Bob reassured me that the podcast would be more of a human-interest piece, a profile on Bobby Crimo and Jamie, the woman who loved him. I found this to be odd and out of character for Trevor. But, I’d done all I could, and I was still barely treading water in my 764 investigation. There wasn’t much room in my mind for additional worry. Besides, Bobby’s trial still seemed light years away. I would have plenty of time to reorient myself as the date inched closer.
And then, I blinked.
Up Next: Part 3 – Into the Madness. Trevor Aaronson releases a shocking Audible series a mere 4 days before Bobby’s trial. But why?
