Note to readers: The following special report about the July 4, 2022 Highland Park mass shooting was reprinted with the permission of online researcher Becca Spinks, who has contributed to Headline USA investigations in the past (see here).
(Becca Spinks—BX WRITES) It’s finally here. For the past 2 and a half years I have waited patiently for this event, and now, the much-anticipated jury trial of Robert Eugene Crimo III, who I have come to know as “Bobby”, is set to begin Monday. As the trial date inched closer, I expected some turbulence to arise, but nothing could have prepared me for the melodramatic plot twist to come.
Before I get into all of that, let’s take a walk down memory lane, all the way back to July 4, 2022, when a hail of bullets rained down on parade goers enjoying a 4th of July parade in Highland Park, IL, claiming the lives of 7 innocent victims.
The tragic mass shooting has long since been memory-holed for the majority of Americans. This isn’t surprising; mass shootings have become a common and predictable occurrence in modern day America.
But this particular shooting didn’t follow the typical formula. In fact, it was my investigation into this incident that fundamentally changed the way I look at mass shootings. The investigation was challenging, complicated by media misinformation, political circus acts, and a mysterious online puzzle which led both citizen researchers and law enforcement officials on a scavenger hunt across the web, searching for the motive.
This is the story of how everything I thought I knew about mass shootings got flipped upside down. It was time to wake up.
Bobby Crimo's trial is only 3 days away, and the atmosphere reeks of disinformation. Learn the truth about the investigation from the people closest to it. pic.twitter.com/Gnrjumk5vS
— Bx (@bx_on_x) February 22, 2025
The sleepy, Chicago area suburb of Highland Park, IL is an ideal place for families. Kids frequently grow up and leave the nest to explore, only to return later in life to raise families of their own. Bobby Crimo’s family is firmly rooted in this town, and practically everyone knows them.
Bobby’s father, Bob Crimo Sr., owned a local market not far from where the tragic shooting occurred. He had also run for Mayor just a couple of years prior. Bobby’s mother, Denise, lived separate from Bob at the time of the shooting. Their marriage had faced challenges throughout Bobby’s life, but both parents remained cordial and were actively involved in raising Bobby and his two siblings.
On the fateful day of the parade, families set up folding chairs up and down Central Ave. Children relaxed in strollers and wagons, waving American flags. The parade goers included members of Bobby Crimo’s own extended family. Along the parade route were various shops and plazas where Bobby had spent much of his formative years eating ice cream with his family, or recording skateboarding videos with his many friends.
Bobby Crimo was known by most people as a normal, local kid. He wasn’t an outcast, or bullied, or particularly anti-social. Spotting Bobby riding his bike along Central Ave. was nothing out of the ordinary, and there was no reason for local shop owners to raise an eyebrow when they saw him doing exactly that on July 4th, 2022. But at 10:15am, everything would change in a millisecond.
Gunfire rang out. The first volley consisted of 30 rounds fired at a fast clip. The sound signature changed halfway through the volley, as if the shooter moved the gun to a different position, but there was no break in the firing. This first volley of shots landed in front of Walker Bros restaurant, a breakfast staple in Highland Park, shattering the revolving glass doors.
Videos taken by parade goers show a moment of shock and confusion washing over the crowd before panic set in and they began to flee. 8 seconds later, the second volley rang out. This volley had fewer rounds, only around 20. A few more seconds passed as the peaceful crowd transformed into a frantic stampede, with parents clutching their children by legs and arms as they desperately ran for cover. A third volley of gunfire marked the end of the rampage. 83 shots were fired in all.
Bodies littered the parade path. A body of a man laid in the middle of 2nd street, to the right of Walker Bros. Many more victims were scattered along the cobbled sidewalk in front of Walker Bros and the adjacent Port Clinton Square. Several other victims, some which were mortally wounded, were laying all the way at the back of the square, along the path that desperate parade goers were using to flee the area via the exit to the parking garage. Eyewitnesses would later describe passing these bodies as they fled, covering the eyes of their small children to protect them from the traumatic scene.
Ambulances and police vehicles soon swarmed the area, followed by the media. Videos captured EMTs desperately working to save the most critically injured victims and placing white sheets over others who were already deceased. In total, 7 people were killed and 46 were injured, 25 of them from gunshot wounds. Among the victims, an 8-year-old boy whose spinal cord was severed, leaving him paralyzed and in a wheelchair.
And then there was a 2-year-old child, pulled from beneath the bodies of his mom and dad, Irina and Kevin McCarthy. The boy was uninjured, but orphaned by the tragedy. Amid the chaos, police with rifles drawn were seen flocking into nearby buildings in search of the shooter, who had fled the scene, initiating an urgent, state-wide manhunt.
The police announced the suspected gunman’s identity only a few hours later, around 4:50pm, as 21-year-old Robert Eugene Crimo III. According to the official story, Bobby, acting alone, had used an unsecured ladder to gain access to the roof of Ross Cosmetics. Ross was located catty corner to Walker Bros at the corner of Central Ave. and 2nd Street.
The sprawling rooftop, which also had an attached staircase, was surrounded by a short knee wall that would serve as the perfect bracing point for a shooter. Once on the rooftop, police claim Bobby rapidly fired all of his shots, pausing only twice to reload, and then fled the scene in such a hurry that he had left, or dropped his gun. Photos from a nearby security camera captured Bobby fleeing the scene of the crime through a nearby alley, dressed in what appeared to be a wig and women’s clothes.
Bobby then ran to his mother’s house a few blocks away, where he was able to gain access to her car and drive to Madison, WI. In his passenger seat lay a Kel Tec Sub-2000 firearm. He stopped along a street in Madison and buried his cell phone before returning to Highland Park, a 5-hour round-trip drive. Police later stated that Bobby had planned a second attack at a parade in Madison but were unsure why he chose to abandon his plan and return to Highland Park instead.
Police identified Bobby as the suspected shooter based on evidence from the gun which he had left behind. By 4:15pm, the SWAT team had arrived at his mother’s house, followed closely by the media. Bobby’s mother, Denise Pesina, confronted SWAT outside the house, yelling and pacing around the yard. The SWAT team also swarmed the home that Bobby shared with his father, Bob. Bob would later describe his shock, saying that he had just heard of the shooting moments prior.
When the police arrived at his home, he thought they were about to tell him that his son was among the victims. The unbelievable idea that Bobby was, in fact, the perpetrator of this heinous attack on their community is something that Bob and Denise still struggle with to this day.
Police spotted Bobby driving his mother’s vehicle in the direction of the original crime scene and arrested him without resistance around 6:15pm, 8 hours after the shooting had taken place. That same day, a mailbox listed under the name of Denise Pesina’s business was placed under a police seal, and the UPS store where Pesina’s mailbox was located had been locked down entirely by the police. Both homes had been surrounded by police tape. The investigation had only just begun.
I had decided to spend the 4th of July relaxing at home with no major plans… That is, until a researcher friend of mine messaged me on Discord and told me to turn on the news. Less than an hour had lapsed since the first shots rang out, and every major outlet in the country was airing live coverage of the gruesome aftermath of the shooting and the ensuing manhunt.
I got to work right away, taking in the details and archiving things as they emerged – eyewitness statements, arial views of the police response, and early descriptions of the key details. These contemporaneous archives would prove invaluable in the weeks and months following the shooting. In the moment, I had no idea that I was embarking on an investigation that would change the entire course of my life.
Days went by, then weeks, then months. There were a lot of us investigating the shooting in the early days, but as time marched on, people lost interest and dropped out. Only the most dedicated of us, around 5 researchers total, would ultimately stick around to unravel the mystery. And boy, was there a mystery. Bobby Crimo was a prolific internet user. He was also a Soundcloud rapper known as Awake the Rapper, a factoid that would garner quite a bit of attention in the media due to his eerie lyrics and music videos which seemed to foreshadow the fatal shooting on July 4, 2022.
Bobby was also a fan of Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, carefully constructed interactive narratives that lead internet sleuths on a scavenger hunt for clues with the end goal of deciphering a puzzle. Bobby loved ARGs so much that he created one of his own to promote his music.
The puzzle at the end, which could presumably be deciphered using clues from his music videos, was a 27-page book of random numbers, titled Arcturus, which Bobby published for sale on Amazon the year prior to the shooting. It was this puzzle which captured our attention the most. Truthfully, we might have moved on from the investigation much earlier if it weren’t for our growing obsession with solving Bobby’s ARG.
Whether Arcturus was related to the shooting or just a way for Bobby to promote his music career is still up for debate, but it was our persistence in pursuing the solution that ultimately led us to a series of dark discoveries that would flip the official narrative upside down.
As my investigation unfolded, I decided to create a video series on YouTube to document my journey. When I started, I had no idea how many episodes there might be. My plan was to start publishing my findings while they were still fresh in my mind and then create additional videos as my investigation progressed.
At the time, my YouTube channel was experiencing a surge in growth due to my detailed, deep dive videos on dark topics, ranging from mass shootings to the fentanyl epidemic, and even delving into historical topics like the infamous government mind control program, MKULTRA. My viewers appreciated my commitment to diving deep enough to uncover facts that hadn’t been published previously, and to presenting complex topics in a way that made them easy to understand.
When I began publishing my series on the Highland Park shooting, I was approaching 10,000 YouTube subscribers, and I had begun receiving small checks. $50 or so per month, which wasn’t enough to pay a single bill where I lived, was enough to encourage me to keep going, nonetheless.
My YouTube growth was cut short unexpectedly when a community of creators banded together to mass report my content for “conspiracy theories”, specifically targeting my work on Highland Park and another video I made about Payton Gendron, the mass shooter in Buffalo, NY who I believed was groomed by a shadowy provocateur he called Saint Sandman.
I had also been quick to point out the Satanic and occultist undertones in some of Gendron’s adjacent communities. This little detail undoubtedly made those trying to cancel me foam at the mouths. 2 years later, in 2024, I would succeed in proving the involvement of a Satanic cult in Gendron’s radicalization, but in 2022, I was shit out of luck (read my exclusive research on Payton Gendron here.)
Needless to say, I was pretty discouraged when YouTube permanently banned my channel, going so far as to forbid me from creating a new account to watch YouTube videos and forcing me to spend the rest of eternity creating sock accounts and using VPNs to bypass the restrictions. There was a period of about 2 weeks where I considered giving up. Perhaps I simply wasn’t resilient enough.
My audience wasn’t large enough and I didn’t have enough creator support to make such controversial content. My lapse in willpower soon subsided, and I found myself once again determined to continue my research. I uploaded my Highland Park videos to Rumble and Odyssey and pushed forward.
I came out the other side of this ordeal as a much smaller creator, having lost most of my subscriber base on YouTube. But I saw this as an opportunity to do something I’d wanted to do for a while – rebrand. I’d come a long way from my gun shooting and video game playing days of Twitch. I wanted to focus exclusively on investigations, and this seemed like the perfect time to make it happen. My main focus was still on my Highland Park investigation, and despite my follower base being cut in half, people were paying attention.
After releasing my 3rd video in the series, I was contacted by a friend of Bob Crimo Sr.
Bob and Denise, along with many other members of the Highland Park community, were following my series with great interest. They were tired of watching the story twisted and politicized by mainstream media. They wanted the facts, and as far as they were concerned, I was the only person who was on the right track. The family friend first reached out to me via email in September of 2022:
Hi Becca,
First, let me start by saying, the Crimo’s find your reports to be thorough. There are a few inaccuracies, but not many.
We personally feel that Bobby may have somehow gotten involved with some nefarious people. His comings and goings over the past couple [of] years were very strange. He would dissappear for days and then reappear, saying he was with various people that he met online or certain groups of individuals.
I personally feel like he may have somehow had his mind manipulated in some way, as do his parents. None of it makes any sense.
Robert Crimo Sr would love to fill you in on some important information.
He was wondering if there may some time he could speak with [you] via a secure line?
There is quite alot of detail to convey.
The first time Bob agreed to have a phone conversation with me, I was very nervous. I felt like things had gotten almost too real. I was used to researching topics, putting out videos, and moving on. It never dawned on me that my pursuit of the truth could lead me to become personally involved in the life of an alleged mass shooter. Bob Crimo Sr. is a simple man – honest, almost to a fault, and naïve to the dangers lurking on the internet, though he would soon be forced to learn the ropes.
Like me, Bob was determined to find answers about his son’s involvement in the shooting.
Bobby was living with Bob at the time, but Bobby was also an adult, and Bob wanted to give him his space. He didn’t take much notice when Bobby’s real-life friends stopped coming around as much, and were eventually replaced by a new group of friends – people that Bobby had met online. This is how I got started down the path of investigating the gore website Bobby frequented in the months before the shooting.
It was a uniquely grotesque site called Documenting Reality.
It took time to build trust with Bob, but eventually he would begin confiding in me and revealing non-public information that would take my investigation to new levels. I eagerly walked through the doors he had opened for me, but what I found on the other side were roads that were much hazier.
My journey would eventually lead me to an unsettling reality, one in which I was no longer confident that Bobby Crimo, acting alone, had shot all of those innocent people from the rooftop of Ross Cosmetics. Torn by the uncertainty, I made the decision to remove my video series from the web and start over from square one (Watch my video statement about this here.)
On the same day that I was contacted by Bob’s friend, another intriguing character entered the story – a woman named Jamie Borchardt. Jamie first appeared as a quirky account on Twitter in September of 2022. Her handle, “L173080”, was Bobby’s booking number at the Lake County jail. Her bio contained morse code which translated to, “I promise you,” and her username, “Cyka-blyat” was a Russian gamer word that roughly translated to “Fucking Bitch” in English. Jamie used this X account to claim she was Bobby’s girlfriend.
On September 18, 2022, Jamie decided to subtweet me:
I can also confirm that one ‘investigative’ YT channel reporting on Crimo claims to have inside sources and factual info. Bobby, his family, & close [circle] don’t know OR condone this channel and it was submitted to the legal teams long ago. Would you like some more rope? Pop off..
I sent the tweet to the rest of my team via our shared Discord server. “They don’t seem reasonable, they sound very angry,” remarked my research partner, Paul.
Spoiler alert: Paul is always right.
I was perplexed by the sudden emergence of this mystery girlfriend in our investigation and decided to ask the Crimo family friend about her:
There is an account on Twitter here who has contacted me, claiming to be Bobby’s girlfriend. Do you know anything about them?
Later that day, I had my answer from the family friend:
Hi, I just got off the phone with Bob Sr. He thinks she may have some connection with him, as she reached out with him after his arrest. He thinks she may be a bona-fide “fan girl”!
This immediately sat wrong with me. I’d had interactions with so-called “fan girls” during past mass shooting deep dives, most of them connected to the dreaded “TCC” or True Crime Community – a demented network of social media users who glorified, and even sexualized, mass killers. It wasn’t uncommon for these types of women to seek out contact with killers in jail and embark in romantic relationships with them. But as time went on, I started to wonder if there was more to Jamie than the standard hybristophiliac.
Not looking for any more online feuds, I decided to play it cool and see if I could get Jamie on my side. It wasn’t difficult to do, especially when I learned that Jamie was after the same answers I was after. Our relationship from that point on remained cordial and collaborative for some time. But the red flags were, at times, difficult to ignore.
Jamie was prone to manic, emotional outbursts online. She would attack anyone speaking derisively of Bobby with tweets that bordered on illegal threats. There were times when I was legitimately concerned that Jamie may be capable of committing a mass killing of her own with the sole purpose of vengeance against those she perceived had wronged Bobby – a group which included the entire community of Highland Park.
It didn’t take me long to discover that Jamie was a habitual liar, and not particularly good at it. She claimed to have been close friends with Bobby and his family for years prior to the shooting, having met Bobby at a rap concert in Indiana, but there were multiple holes in her story. For one thing, Bobby’s family had never heard of her before, and Bob sent me emails from Jamie indicating that the first time she had ever contacted him was on September 6, 2022, just over a month after the shooting.
She also told Bob that she had known Bobby for years, but Bob wasn’t convinced this was true. He knew most of Bobby’s long-time friends, and didn’t remember meeting her at any concerts in Indiana. When I expressed these concerns to Bob, he dismissed them. I think Bob was just really hopeful that Jamie was genuine and that she shared his passion for seeking answers and proving Bobby’s innocence. When I told Bob that I didn’t think Jamie was trustworthy, he said, “You know what’s funny about that… she said the same thing to me about you.”
Jamie posted pictures of herself often, but the pictures were obscured by heavy Snapchat filters, making it difficult to determine her age. I would eventually learn from talking to her that she was close to my age, possibly a bit older, but at least in her late 30s. This was especially concerning to me because of her claim that she met Bobby in 2016 and fell in love with him. In 2016, Bobby Crimo was only 16-years-old.
Perhaps Jamie didn’t consider these optics when she fabricated her history with Bobby, or perhaps she didn’t intend for anyone to discover her real age. Regardless, it wasn’t long before I warned my team about sharing research with Jamie. Although, admittedly, she was smart, resourceful, and good at digging. I tried to keep my info-sharing with Jamie limited. Sometimes, I would give her a name or an address but withhold from her how I got the information in order to prevent her from reconstructing it in the future and claiming it as her own.
This turned out to be a very wise decision.
Jamie didn’t have an account on Documenting Reality because it required a one-time Bitcoin donation of $20. As for myself, I had access to an account which previously belonged to someone else on my team, meaning I could scour the site for clues about Bobby’s associations there as much as I wanted to.
I spent months on that horrible site, avoiding the gore and obscene sexual content as much as possible. It wasn’t possible to avoid it fully. Documenting Reality isn’t like other gore sites. The website is set up in categorical forums – Suicides, car accidents, war footage, etc. But there is another, unique forum set up for paying members only called The Water Cooler.
The members of Documenting Reality converse and interact in a manner that is much more intimate than most other websites I’ve been part of. They post pictures of themselves, sometimes in the nude, discuss their day to day lives, their families, their jobs.
The members here aren’t the typical, edgy 15-year-old gore website viewers. These are grown adults with families and jobs. They live in neighborhoods just like yours, sit in cubicles right next to you, and wave you into their lane in traffic.
But when no one is around, they open up their laptops and log in to their favorite website. They watch a few videos – a fatal car accident, a cartel member peeling off a victims face and ripping out their heart, a beheaded baby. They comment on the videos, sometimes with something heartfelt, but other times they just write “LOL”. Then, they navigate to The Water Cooler where a melodramatic dynamic plays out.
The Water Cooler is a confusing mix of friendships and rivalries. There are budding romances, fiery arguments, and a good amount of friendly teasing that sometimes takes the form of slurs and edgy banter.
It’s not unusual for members to use racial tropes and offensive language, though most members probably aren’t really racist in real life, just in their weird little niche on the internet. Unraveling all of the relationships and trying to piece together who knew Bobby and in what capacity was a daunting task, similar to jumping into the middle of a soap opera where you have no context for any of the characters or their situations.
From the time I began communicating with Bob and Jamie, most of my research into the Highland Park shooting took place on that website. There were times when I felt my mental wellbeing beginning to plunge and forced myself to take breaks. It was hard work, but it was fruitful.
The tendency of Documenting Reality members to overshare about their personal lives within The Water Cooler enabled my team to identify many of them. I gave a lot of this info to Jamie with clear instructions to keep it private. I wanted to make sure I built the most solid case possible before publishing anything. Jamie would take the info I gave her and dig around on social media sites for clues.
Despite my reservations about Jamie, I maintained a collaborative relationship with her for a long time. But in 2023, a series of incidents led me to cut off all information sharing with Jamie and advise the rest of my team to do the same. Jamie had gradually become even more obsessed with proving Bobby’s innocence, to the point where she could no longer be trusted to give unbiased information. She created a Substack page dedicated to her cause. On her Substack, Jamie had some pretty good articles summarizing our case that Bobby couldn’t have acted alone. Her articles borrowed heavily from my team’s research with my permission.
Then Jamie began to reveal that she had been recording her phone conversations with Bobby in jail. She only released a few snippets here and there, but it was still a concerning development, certainly against the jail’s rules, and possibly skirting the law, as well. Bob expressed concerns to me about this, stating that Bobby had faced disciplinary action after breaking the rules regarding phone calls, but Jamie didn’t seem to care. She continued to find ways to maneuver around the restrictions. On September 21, 2023, Jamie posted a video on Substack and on X that would change everything.
In the dramatic video, Jamie video records her phone screen as Bobby claims to have been set up by the FBI before suddenly being cut off. A shocking revelation, to be sure, and one that would finally validate Jamie’s conspiracy theories and prove Bobby’s innocence.
But there was a problem – it wasn’t true. The names of the FBI agents Bobby gave were fake, and the details he gave made no sense. This, combined with our general distrust of Jamie and our suspicions that she’d been manipulating Bobby led us to dismiss the video as a publicity stunt intended to bait the media into responding. And the media did just that. The video didn’t make Bobby look innocent to any rational person; it did the opposite. It made Bobby look like a heartless troll with no remorse or accountability. Or, it made Bobby look like a mentally unstable conspiracy theorist. Either way, it was unlikely to impress a future jury.
I phoned Bob with urgency. He hadn’t seen the video until I sent it to him and was equally concerned for a much more valid reason. Bobby’s phone privileges, already on thin ice due to his relationship with Jamie, were now almost certain to be suspended indefinitely. I urged Bob to stop engaging with Jamie, but he still wasn’t fully convinced that she was a bad actor. I was.
A few months later, my research partner Paul came to me with a recording that was sent to him by Jamie. Paul has a talent for audiovisual work, and Jamie needed the audio cleaned up. In the recording, Bob is having a conversation with a person who sounds like his brother Paulie and another, unidentified man, about the shooting.
Paul: “Don’t mention any of this, I’m talking with Jamie.”
Me: “And how did she get it?”
Paul: “He butt dialed her and it went to voicemail. This was after they found the gun on the ground. Don’t mention this. I’m not supposed to be sharing it for some reason.”
Me: “Why would Bob be calling her the same day of the shooting? That doesn’t make any sense. That’s why she doesn’t want you to share it with me. Because Bob told me that she only contacted him a couple of weeks after the shooting and he never heard of her before that.”
Paul: “She thought that Bob was talking to a local cop and making up a story. I had to clear up the audio to learn what was actually happening and tell her… From the sound of it though, they’re waiting on the gun owner to be matched to the gun.”
Me: “Yeah but if she reached out sometime after his arrest, and this conversation took place before they had confirmed the gun was his… I don’t know. Somethings weird about that, dude.”
Something was definitely weird. Some time later, when I decided to tell Bob about the recording, he responded with surprise and incredulity. “How did she get that recording?” he asked. “She said you butt-dialed her and left a voice message,” I explained, “but that can’t be right, because she didn’t email you for the first time until September 6. Do you remember where that conversation occurred?”
Bob replied, “It couldn’t have been a voicemail, I was sitting with Paulie, and the other voice is my friend of 40 years who I was on the phone with at the time.” Bob’s voice raised an octave, “How did she get this recording of me? I was sitting in my house!”
I had finally convinced Bob that Jamie was untrustworthy, a paltry silver-lining to an otherwise unnerving discovery. It was also around this time that I discovered Jamie was working with a journalist named Trevor Aaronson on a podcast about the shooting.
Things were about to get a LOT more interesting.
To be continued…
