The show follows the 30 Rock actor and his family before he was set to stand trial for the 2021 Rust shooting. Baldwin accidentally fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins when a prop gun was loaded with a live round on the set.
The incident was brought up during the first episode, resulting in critics to trash the show for how it was portrayed.
The Daily Mail’s review of the show slammed Baldwin for making the tragic event all about himself.
“If this series is meant to make us feel sympathy, it has done the reverse,” the writer noted.
During the show, Baldwin discussed the past year as he was going through the lead up to his now dropped involuntary manslaughter charge.
“This past year was just terrible. There was times I’d lay in bed and I’d go, ‘Wow! I can’t get up.’ That’s not like me,” the actor said in a cut away scene.
The Telegraph noted how the show weirdly goes from serious moments to the family going to get their haircut as a group. The writer compared the show to “a saccharine pity party, where Baldwin swings between mucking about with his kids and staring into space as he contemplates the manslaughter charges.”
While Baldwin does not directly mention the tragedy, his wife Hilaria commented over the course of the hour show.
“Halyna lost her life in the most unthinkable tragedy,” Hilaria Baldwin said. “We are going to feel and carry that pain forever.”
Social media users also were appalled with how the death was discussed.
“I just saw this advertised on tv and she says ‘where do you go from a tragedy’ maybe she should ask Halyna’s husband and child,” one user wrote. “Exploiting her death for money is disgusting and a disgrace, I hope nobody watches your trash TLC.”
Others called it a slap in the face to Hutchins’s family and many stated they will boycott watching.
(Maire Clayton, Headline USA) President Donald Trump posted a SpongeBob SquarePants meme after some expressed backlash over Elon Musk telling federal workers they were required to justify their jobs last week.
Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency sent an email instructing government employees to list five accomplishments by 11:59 p.m. Monday.
The Tesla founder originally posted the meme Sunday on X, and the president soon put it on his Truth Social account a few hours later.
The meme featured the animated character looking at a notebook and appeared to be thinking. The bottom half of the image features the hands of his best friend Patrick Star as he holds a list that is titled “Got Done Last Week.”
The list includes “Cried about Trump,” “Cried about Elon,” “Made it into the office for once,” “Read some emails,” and “Cried about Trump and Elon some more.”
DOGE’s decision to send the email to federal workers was met with mixed opinions.
FBI Director Kash Patel instructed employees to pause on responding to the request, according to The Hill.
“FBI personnel may have received an email from OPM requesting information,” Patel wrote. “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all of our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures.”
“When and if further information is required, we will coordinate the responses,” Patel continued. “For now, please pause any responses.”
The billionaire originally sent out a message on X Saturday telling workers to be prepared for the email.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk wrote. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week.
Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
“Let’s first clarify the $500 billion figure. I know that we had $100 billion [in US aid provided to Ukraine], and that’s a fact. But I’m not going to acknowledge $500 billion, regardless of what anyone says, with all due respect to our partners,” Zelenskyy told reporters at the “Ukraine Year 2025” forum.
The Ukrainian leader also said he was not prepared to pay back the $100 billion because President Biden and Congress agreed to provide the aid as grants, not loans that would be paid back.
“I made agreements with Biden and with the US Congress. I’m grateful to Congress. It was about grant support, and a grant is not a debt. We don’t have to repay a debt. So, it’s not about the figure, it’s about the fact that we do not recognize it as a debt,” Zelenskyy said.
The Ukrainian leader said he was willing to reach a new deal that would involve the US getting resources in exchange for continued US support. “If the condition today is that the United States — our strategic partners — says, ‘We’ll give you assistance, but you have to repay it with profit for the United States,’ that’s an agreement, not a grant. That’s a new agreement. I’m ready for such a dialogue, and I’m sure it will be positive,” he said.
According to media reports, the deal the US has offered Zelenskyy would have given the US 50% of the rights to Ukrainian rare earth minerals. Zelenskyy said on Sunday that he would not sign “something that 10 generations of Ukrainians will have to repay.”
Zelenskyy’s latest comments about the potential deal are sure to anger President Trump. US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has said Trump was “very frustrated” over Zelenskyy’s refusal to sign the deal his administration has offered. The lack of an agreement was one reason why Trump lashed out at Zelenskyy, calling him a “dictator” over the lack of elections in Ukraine.
In an apparent response to Trump’s comments, Zelenskyy said Sunday that he was willing to resign if it brought peace and NATO membership to Ukraine. “If [it guarantees] peace for Ukraine if you really need me to resign, I am ready. I can exchange it for NATO,” he said.
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Jury selection started Monday for the man accused of slaughtering seven people at a suburban Chicago Independence Day parade nearly three years ago. But a day before trial proceedings began, a trustworthy researcher released compelling evidence suggesting there were multiple shooters at that July 4, 2022, massacre.
The research comes from Becca Spinks, whose past work has helped put child predators behind bars. Spinks is working on a multi-part series on the Highland Park shooting, which she’s generously allowed Headline USA to run in its entirety.
Spinks’ full series is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the entire context of the Highland Park shooting and its alleged perpetrator, Robert Crimo III, also known as Bobby.
However, perhaps the biggest revelation from her series is worth emphasizing in a standalone article: It looks like there were multiple shooters at Highland Park.
Indeed, Spinks noted that the official story has Crimo committing the entire shooting from atop the Ross Cosmetics building, a local store on the northwest corner of Central Avenue and 2nd Street. While the evidence clearly shows that Crimo was certainly near Ross Cosmetics armed with an AR-15, two of the shooting victims were totally out of his vantage point, as well as that of the Ross Cosmetics rooftop, according to Spinks.
“The two victims at the far back of Port Clinton Square were completely obscured by the side of Walker Bros,” she noted, also publishing a photo of the scene she described. “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.”
A photo taken at the approximate position of one of the deceased victims. Ross Cosmetics, where Bobby Crimo is alleged to have been shooting from, is across the street and to the left, completely obscured by Walker Bros restaurant.
Further supporting the multi-shooter theory are witness statements.
“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.),” Spinks noted. “Some eyewitnesses were clearly wrong about their descriptions of the shooter and at least one seemed to be purposefully lying.”
Spinks focused on someone she found to be particularly credible, witness and near victim Michael Schwartz.
“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 told the media, describing an athletic man positioned in a “true military crouch” and whose demeanor was “military style methodical.”
“Mr. Schwartz is a uniquely reliable witness because of the amount of detail included in his testimony. Studies 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,” Spinks noted.
Part 3 of my investigation into the Highland Park shooting and alleged gunman Robert Crimo is out now! pic.twitter.com/1JfphkcJAN
“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.”
The Crimo trial is expected to last for months. Headline USA will continue to provide coverage as it develops.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
(Headline USA) U.S. stock indexes are drifting on Monday following their sharp losses from last week.
The S&P 500 was up 0.1% in midday trading after flipping between small gains and losses through the morning. The relatively modest moves follow its 1.7% tumble on Friday, which followed several reports on the U.S. economy that came in weaker than expected.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 153 points, or 0.4%, as of 11:45 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% lower.
Berkshire Hathaway climbed 3.9% for one of the market’s bigger gains after Warren Buffett’s company reported a jumped in operating profits for the latest quarter. But even there, the good news came with a bit of caution.
The owner of Geico, BNSF railroad and other businesses said over the weekend that it’s sitting on a mountain of $334.2 billion in cash. Such a large amount could indicate Buffett, who’s famous for buying stocks when prices are low, may not see much worth purchasing in a market that critics say looks too expensive.
Starbucks rose 1.9% after saying it would cut 1,100 corporate jobs and leave several hundred more positions unfilled as new CEO Brian Niccol tries to make it a leaner operation.
They helped offset a 2.9% drop for Domino’s Pizza, which reported results for the latest quarter that just missed analysts’ expectations. Its international operations were a standout, but a closely tracked sales trend weakened for corporate-owned U.S. stores.
Big U.S. companies have broadly been reporting better profits for the last three months of 2024 than analysts expected, which is one of the main reasons the S&P 500 set a record before sliding at the end of last week. The pace of reports will slow this week, but several potentially market-moving updates are still on deck.
Chief among them is Nvidia, the company that’s become one of Wall Street’s most influential stocks because of what had been nearly insatiable demand for its chips. Wednesday will be the company’s first profit report since a Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, upended the artificial-intelligence industry by saying it developed a large language model that can compete with big U.S. rivals without having to use the top-flight, most expensive chips.
That called into question all the spending Wall Street had assumed would go into not only Nvidia’s chips but also into the whole ecosystem that’s built up around the AI boom, including electricity to power large data centers.
Nvidia’s stock bounced between gains and losses through Monday morning, helping to pull the S&P 500 and other indexes up and down in its wake. It was virtually unchanged in midday trading.
Other big profit reports due this week include Home Depot’s on Tuesday and Salesforce’s on Wednesday.
This upcoming week will also feature updates on consumer confidence and inflation, topics that are at the top of Wall Street’s agenda following last week’s slump.
Recent reports have shown that consumer sentiment is souring as expectations for inflation worsen. Stubbornly high inflation could prevent the Federal Reserve from delivering more relief for the economy and financial markets through lower interest rates.
In the bond market, Treasury yields were edging lower ahead of the upcoming reports. The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 4.40% from 4.43% late Friday.
In stock markets abroad, German stocks ticked higher, and the DAX advanced 0.6% after political conservatives wonan election dominated by concerns about Europe’s largest economy.
Indexes were lower across much of the rest of Europe and Asia. France’s CAC 40 fell 0.8%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng slipped 0.6% and Japan’s market was closed for a holiday.
(Casey Harper, The Center Square) Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., sent a letter to newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi Monday calling for the release of the “complete, unredacted” files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy New York man of mystery accused of international sex trafficking who died in police custody in 2019.
Blackburn also sent a letter to Internal Revenue Service Acting Commissioner Douglas O’Donnell calling for Epstein-related records.
Epstein has been the center of swirling rumors and a symbol of government secrecy as files related to his clients and his death have remained hidden. Patel has publicly pushed for transparency and indicated that he would help bring transparency to the Epstein case.
“As you know, over the course of many years, Jeffrey Epstein built a heinous global sex trafficking network that caused irreparable harm to countless women,” Blackburn said in her letter. “Since Mr. Epstein’s death in 2019, there is still much about this tragic case that is not known – including the names of his associates that are listed in the flight logs of his private jet and in Ghislaine Maxwell’s ‘little black book.’”
“While some redacted portions of Epstein’s flight logs and Maxwell’s ‘little black book’ have been released in various lawsuits, it is paramount that the FBI provide full transparency to the American people and immediately release the complete, unredacted records in this case,” she added.
Blackburn said the previous FBI Director Christopher Wray “stonewalled” her on this issue.
“In fact, despite informing me during his December 2023 appearance before the Judiciary Committee that he would ‘get with [his] team and figure out if there’s more information we can provide’ on the Epstein matter, Director Wray never provided any such follow-up information,” she said.
Blackburn pointed out that at Patel’s confirmation hearing he pledged to help expose the Epstein issue.
“The American people deserve to know exactly who was affiliated with this network.”
(The Center Square) – Apple announced Monday it plans to invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years – its “largest-ever spend commitment.”
“We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” said Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook.
The company included some specific plans in its announcement, including opening a new 250,000 square-foot server manufacturing facility in Houston that will support Apple Intelligence, its artificial intelligence program that “helps users write, express themselves, and get things done.”
It’s also planning to open a new manufacturing academy in Detroit to spur the economy there and support the growth of advanced manufacturing in the U.S.
“Apple engineers, along with experts from top universities such as Michigan State, will consult with small- and medium-sized businesses on implementing AI and smart manufacturing techniques,” according to an Apple press release. “The academy will also offer free in-person and online courses, with a skills development curriculum that teaches workers vital skills like project management and manufacturing process optimization.”
In addition, the tech giant is planning to double its U.S. Advanced Manufacturing Fund from $5 billion to $10 billion, a fund “created in 2017 to support world-class innovation and high-skilled manufacturing jobs across America.”
The company also said teams and facilities expansions will occur in Michigan, Texas, California, Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Oregon, North Carolina and Washington.
The White House reposted the announcement on X, formerly Twitter, calling it an ‘AMERICAN VICTORY.’
“I’ll be blunt here: The Democratic Party is f***ing terrible. Plain and simple,” one donor told The Hill. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.”
The move came after Harris’s campaign raised over $1.5 billion in donations, but yet allegedly spent it all and ended up with $20 million in debt.
After the 2024 election, the Harris campaign charged donors who unknowingly agreed to recurring contributions through its joint fundraising committee with the Democratic National Committee.
A second anonymous donor told the outlet, the Democratic Party lacks organization.
“They want us to spend money and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking,” the donor stated.
The donor said he believes the party needs a change and did not learn from past elections.
“The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016,” they continued. “They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”
Democratic strategist Steve Schale tried to deflect and blame post election fatigue for the lack of donations.
“I’ve talked to a number of donors who just don’t have a lot of confidence after 2024 and want to see how people are thinking about issues differently,” Schale said.
However, he did note Democrats are frustrated after the loss where Trump earned the Popular Vote and Republicans hold the majority in both the House and Senate.
Some donors are now putting stipulations on where the money can be used, according to The New York Times.
Former Joe Biden supporter John Morgan told the Times, he will be donating to individuals rather than the Democratic Party.
“The D.N.C. learned nothing from the last election,” Morgan bluntly stated.
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). Before you begin, make sure to read Part 1!
(Becca Spinks—BX WRITES) 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.
People attend a candlelight vigil for the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. / PHOTO: AP
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.
The Highland Park Mass Shooting Mystery – Part 2
As my investigation led me closer to the shadowy figures surrounding Bobby Crimo in the year leading up the the shooting, an independent crime scene analysis yielded some startling anomalies. Could Bobby really have been the sole… pic.twitter.com/JCmUy1mEOT
She had also gotten her hands on certain documents related to Bobby’s case, which she claimed she obtained via Freedom of Information Act 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.
An Awake the Rapper video titled, Out of This World features Bobby sitting in front of a wall covered in clues.
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.
Bobby in Todd Rhode’s shop, draped in a Trump flag to imitate Ashli Babbitt.Bobby in Todd Rhode’s shop wearing an FBI hat.
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.
Fletcher Stiles, known as “LERK” on Documenting Reality, claims to be a former mental health professional.
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.
Michael Paone, seen on the right side of a photo taken with other members of the Documenting Reality forum.
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, had 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, Headline USA editor 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.
A photo taken at the approximate position of one of the deceased victims. Ross Cosmetics, where Bobby Crimo is alleged to have been shooting from, is across the street and to the left, completely obscured by Walker Bros restaurant.
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 testimony. Studies 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?
(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to sentence a former DC Homeland Security and U.S. Department of Agriculture official to 27 months in prison for perpetrating an $880,000 fraud on the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program.
According to the DOJ, the defendant, Wendy Nicole Villatoro, 40, formerly of Washington, D.C., submitted eight PPP loan applications with various financial institutions, and 15 Economic Injury Disaster loans with the Small Business Administration—all of which contained materially false statements.
The DOJ said Villatoro submitted loans on behalf of fake businesses and inflated the number of employees, the average monthly payroll, the gross yearly revenue, or the cost of goods sold.
UPDATE: The DOJ seeks 27 months prison time for the thieving ex-Homeland Security official.
“The defendant was a D.C. public official who was appointed by the D.C. Mayor in 2021 to be a commissioner on the Homeland Security Commission … Yet, somewhere along the way, she… https://t.co/9z5HgqxOOIpic.twitter.com/Sb8Pit3HuB
“While most of Villatoro’s loan applications were denied, she successfully secured over $844,000 in PPP and EID funds. Villatoro used the funds to pay off her student loans, pay off the car loan on a BMW SUV, and buy luxury items,” the DOJ said.
Villatoro pled guilty in November. She faced a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
While she has accepted responsibility for her crimes, the DOJ said she deserves to go to jail due to her previous government jobs.
According to the DOJ, she worked for the Department of Agriculture at the time she committed the massive fraud.
Before that, she was a D.C. Homeland Security Commissioner. According to a LinkedIn account with her name, she was a “senior expert publicly confirmed as Commissioner by the District of Columbia City Council to provide recommendations to the Mayor on improvements in security preparedness.”
She also said she’s a Doctoral Candidate in cybersecurity.
“I am a disruptor with expertise in sustainability, strategy, program management, logistics, homeland security, disaster management, and technology,” her LinkedIn bio states.
The DOJ said those factors count as strikes against her.
“What makes this crime particularly egregious is not only the nature of the offense, but the position the defendant held within society,” prosecutors said in a sentencing memo filed last Thursday.
“The defendant was a D.C. public official who was appointed by the D.C. Mayor in 2021 to be a commissioner on the Homeland Security Commission. This Commission was established in 2006 to evaluate the city’s security and to make it safer for its citizens,” they said.
“Given that the defendant worked in the public sector for over 10 years, she must, at some point, believed in the government’s fundamental mission—to serve the public. Yet, somewhere along the way, she decided to defraud her employer out of nearly $850,000, despite making $117,962 annually.”
Villatoro is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday. She has not yet filed her own sentencing memorandum.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
