From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.

I'm a loser if also wom we know wouldn't pay me either.

A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.

In Cells will be added to the Terrorism Guide.

I see literally zero hope.

This is in Cells a production of KT Studios and iHeart Podcasts, Season one, Episode ten, Worship at the feet of a coward.

She wasn't in the wrong place.

She was in very much the right place that night, doing all the right things, and she deserved better than this.

If you were a woman and a man in love, in showing it publicly, it would just anger him to the point where he would need to toss things at you.

We're getting in there and they're getting information and seeing things that they don't know how to process.

I'm Courtney Armstrong, a producer at KT Studios, with Stephanie Leideker, Gabriel Castillo, Connor Powell, and Carolyn Miller.

We began this series hearing from Colleen Weiss, Veronica Weiss's mother.

In this episode, we hear from Jane Weiss, Veronica's aunt, who has dedicated her life to activism, Veronica was a nineteen year old college freshman at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was senselessly killed during the Ila Vista shooting spree on May twenty third, twenty fourteen.

The perpetrator Elliott Roger.

His name has come up multiple times, brought up by experts in cells and in relevant news clips.

The frequency of the mentions has to do with his place in the in cell community.

He is the coward at whose feet radicalized men worship.

Briefly, here are the details of what happened on the day of the killing spree.

This is a news report from news Channel three.

Twelve Friday in May twenty third, twenty fourteen.

It was a very dark evening.

Indeed, this was one of the worst crimes that was committed in our County's history.

Sheriff Bill Brown remembers the night Elliott Roger went on a mentally disturbed, deadly attack.

A twenty two year old suspect embarked on a violent rampage throughout Ila Vista.

He began by killing his two roommates and a visitor.

He then got into his vehicle, a black BMW, and he went basically hunting people in Isla Vista.

Here's crime analyst body Movin.

Elliott Rogers he was a British American mass murderer who is known for killing six people and injuring fourteen others during the twenty fourteen Isla Vista killings.

The murders he.

Committed, his suicide and his manifesto have been cited as an early influence into the inceell And manuscript subculture.

And his manifesto was one hundred and thirty seven pages.

It was titled My Twisted World, The Story of Elliott Rogers.

He killed his two roommatess, then drove over to the sorority house and he was going to take his revenge out on these beautiful sorority girls.

Elliott believed that he was going to purify the world and it's necessary to remove love and sex from the human existence again.

News Channel three twelve.

Two sorority girls were killed and their friend was wounded while they walked down the street.

Went past the out of this to market, did a drive by shooting in there at people that were running for cover, and he ended up killing the young man who ran into the market.

He then proceeded to just go on this wild rampage all around town, striking people, pedestrians, people on bicycles.

We have two black and one win going into north.

Nine calls lit up the dispatcher's screens.

Shots were being fired on several streets, and deputies in the area found the shooter.

The deputy's return fire.

He was wounded in that exchange of gunfire.

He then drove off, accelerated, then put the gun to his head committed suicide.

As the weeks of investigative work unfolded, there was a written manifesto and other signs of years of mental issues coming out.

He Ed had basically projected all that he was going to do.

He was a very sick individual.

Sheriff Brown spoke with all family members and said it's hard because you can't make sense out of a senseless situation, as they remembered Christopher Ross, Michaels, Martinez, Veronica Weiss, Catherine Cooper, Cheng, Huan Hong, George Chen, and Wihan Wang.

Information later revealed that leading up to the attacks, he had been showing clear signs of instability and escalating rage.

Here again crime analyst Body Movin.

In fact, prior to him doing this, he would often attack couples that were, you know, maybe on the beach holding hands or in their car, maybe making out, and he would throw coffee at them.

If you were a woman and a man in love and showing it publicly, it would just anger him to the point where he would need to toss things at you.

He stated women should not be given any rights and that their wickedness needed to be contained to avoid the risk of humanity falling into degeneracy.

Elliot said women's refusal to accept him was a declaration of war, and he hoped his attacks would reshape humanity.

So Elliott is really the grounding point for insuls.

They refer to him as Saint Elliott Roger, and when they say they're going to attack women, they say they're going to er her.

Disturbingly, his actions have been lionized by some segments of the insult community, his name now used as a rallying cry to push others toward violence.

Body continues referencing his aforementioned manifesto.

On page one eighteen.

It says this, it came to a point where I had to set a date for the day of retribution.

That is what Elliot Roger calls the day that he went on his spree killing.

I originally consider doing it on the Halloween of twenty thirteen.

That's when the entire town erupts in Rauss's partying.

There would literally be thousands of people crowded together who I could kill with these and the goal was to kill everyone, to utterly destroy that wretched town.

But then, after seeing footage of previous Halloween events on YouTube, I saw that just too many cops walking around it would be too risky, so the day of retribution would have to be on a normal party weekend.

A normal party weekend is exactly what the Friday of Memorial Day, May twenty third, twenty fourteen was.

We're honored to have spoken with Jane Weiss, Veronica Weiss's aunt.

We asked Jane what people should know about Veronica.

Well, her sincere love for all of her friends and family, and her wicked sense of humor, always looking for the humorous side of the things.

If her father was getting a little too allowed in the car, she tell them it's time to play the quiet game.

Always had something witty to say and could converse with anyone, and I think that will always stand out and be willing to take a stand on something that you believe in really marked her.

She was a brilliant student, never let any boundaries slow her down.

She played boys baseball, She ran track and cross country.

She was an amazing water polo player, and an outstanding mathematician and a very wise young woman.

Jane describes a memory from a trip Ronica took to visit her in Seattle.

It was the August before starting her freshman year at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

It was nine months before the rampage.

I took her all over Seattle and we went to the Fremont Troll, which is a big deal in Seattle.

I would never personally climb it.

She climbed up so she could get what she liked to refer to as awkward photos.

And so we'd go any place and take just weird pictures for her collection.

And when I was teaching, I taught second grade, she would text me, and once she started college and they would always start with how's the weather, which I've really learned quickly was can I have some more Starbucks money?

Please?

The tech started with how's the weather?

It was going to end with I really want to go to Starbucks.

You never know what trauma does to people over time, but it impacted me and that I was close to retiring and knew very little about guns or anything along those lines, and it pushed me to do something in my retirement that I would be proud of working in gun violence because what happened to her should never have happened.

Jane is Veronica's aunt on her father's side.

We asked Jane to describe how she heard about what happened to Veronica.

It was the Friday night of memory a day and as a second grade teacher, I was exhausted and knew that I was going to work on my report cards all week, and so I'd gone to bed early, so I did not hear about it that night.

And when I woke up on Saturday morning early, I was watching things that I had taped, so I didn't have the television live on.

Still hadn't heard about it.

At about seven o'clock, my sister called and she had just gotten a call from my brother and she just said sit down, which I was sitting, and told me what happened or what she knew about what happened.

And my immediate thought is we have to get to California, and we have to get there now.

And within probably an hour, I started getting texts from friends who had seen things on the news that I never did see because I got busy trying to find airline tickets on Memorial Day, and my sister got busy trying to find hotel rooms, and we were down in California by three o'clock that afternoon.

Jane continues recalling those early days and the staggering scope of what began to unfold.

We didn't know a lot that first day, but on the Sunday we drove up to Ila Vista and we met people from the college, the dean and the chancellor, and that day they were finding out about the other young men that he had killed in his apartment.

And realized this is going to go pretty big.

And I remember going to the store that night and seeing the People magazine and it already had that on the cover.

And we learned over the few days that his parents had known that he was struggling, and that they had sought a wellness visit about a month before, and they had known he was probably going down a spiraling behavior.

And we didn't want to blame him because mental health happens all over the place.

Veronica had no knowledge of him or anything, and trying to understand what was happening too.

Quite a while before they were able to uncover all of it, but he had been posting videos and manifestos and all kinds of things that we found out about over the course of the next week.

We asked Jane if up until that point she'd ever heard the term, and.

Sell, I had never heard it before, and I'm not really sure if I heard it until I was back in Seattle.

But articles started coming out everywhere, and the stories of previous encounters with law enforcement had started coming out, and pieces of his manifesto had been started to be released, So we were just starting to piece together that, but knowing that he had attempted to get in the sorority that Veronica and her sorority sisters were passing because he wanted to kill all the pretty girls in that sorority that night and they didn't let him in.

The informations kept coming and has even to this day about that subculture and it's everywhere.

It's the dark inner at chat rooms, and realizing how the blame of women took hold of his mind and pushed him down that hole to the point where it didn't matter who it mattered that it was a female.

And that seems to be the rabbit hole that so many young men are going down, and learning that it's part of the subculture of so many mass shootings and other incidents is just terrifying.

It's always jarring.

But I have sort of an understanding of these young loaner what do they call lone wolf shooters, that they hit a pattern over and over again.

And when you hear people talk about, oh, yeah, he was a loner, he was watching the internet, all of those things, and it just sets off a little spark in my brain that this is going to be another one that somehow worships at the feat of a coward that killed my knees over and over again it happened.

M let's stop here for a break.

We'll be back in a moment.

Jane described searching for a way to channel her grief.

Very shortly after returning from Veronica's memorial, Jane found her purpose helping push the Gun Violence Restraining Order the gv ro O across the finish line.

When somebody sees a relative or a friend starting to spiral down and have some of those thoughts, and it's as much homicide as it is suicide, honestly.

I know.

California went first passing their gvr O, the Gun Violence Restraining Order and twenty fourteen, and weirdly, we had a senator in Washington who grew up in Santa Barbara and knew about the shooting and was very affected by it and reached out and they, as our state legislature, tried to pass in Extremist Protection Order in twenty fifteen and again in twenty sixteen, and when it wouldn't go through our legislature, we took it to the voters and passed it as an initiative, which has kind of become a hallmark across the country.

And so being involved in that has been really important because it gives me a chance to speak out about these young men going down those paths and seeing that coming.

And we have a fantastic unit in King County that is all women that goes in and removes the guns, and I'm so proud to have been a part of getting that passed in Washington.

Jane talks about how, despite some changes, violence still happens.

With Elliott Roger used as a twisted inspiration.

She references a specific crime that happened shortly before our interview.

A sixteen year old suspect named Desmond Holly was identified as the gunman in the Evergreen High School shooting.

He had been active on a violent gore site that glorifies previous killers, and his most recent TikTok profile photo was of Elliott Roger.

Yeah, I've seen spring, gentlemen, I've seen the word heroes spilled with the capital er in the middle to make sure that we know it's him.

It was in the news twice this weekend.

I saw an article on Friday about the shooter in Evergreen High School in Denver.

Had a picture on his wall of Veronica shooter.

And there was an article in Mother Jones this morning talking about the Netflix series Adolescents and that they somewhat left out that the parents need to be looking at what their kids are seeing online and being super aware is important for mom and dad.

What do you see?

What can you get to all of that?

And I don't know that that and everybody else's frontal lobe as a parent, that that's got to be looked at.

We asked Jane what she wants people to understand about how far the damage from these acts of violence spreads through families, through communities, and whether schools should be actively educating young people about the dangers.

It's a good question.

I wish we could talk more about the Internet and what kids are seeing and doing on the Internet.

We just had a thirteen year old arrested I think he's out now, who had a school shooting all planned down to Minutia, and they were able to intervene.

But I don't know how to help parents more than getting the word out much more clearly that the Internet isn't a safe place for kids, and isn't a safe place for kids who feel the least bit lesser than, or not as good as, or any of those sorts of things, because they start looking for places where they're encouraged.

We started teaching online safety right as I was leaving teaching in twenty seventeen.

I was the librarian and we did internet safety classes.

But I don't think we addressed that particular issue.

But I do know that when you get into junior high in high school, that definitely needs to be part of the kids' education as well as the adult's education.

I think we can't ignore it any longer.

It's gotten large and kids are having access at so much younger ages.

I just was reading today that there's so many more juvenile arrests, and I think they like to pose online with guns and do all those things, and I just think parents are totally unaware.

And if the schools had an opportunity to pta had an opportunity to present that without making it scary even though it is, parents might pay more attention to letting that internet babysit their children.

Jane continues speaking about the pervasive impacts of social media on developing minds and what actions can be taken.

I'm not positive how you can shut it down, but kids having to say I'm eighteen is not working.

We're getting in there and they're getting information and seeing things that they don't know how to process.

I mean, it is that twenty five year old brain that doesn't even completely finish forming, and we see this twenty two, twenty one.

Yeah, they're a legal age, but they aren't completely formed mentally yet, and somehow we have to take that into account.

I've been part of the Be Smart program with every town talking about the risk of teen suicide and understanding that and modeling that safe storage.

It's keeping guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them, be it suicide, which is close to seventy five percent of the gun desk in Washington State, and the only group it's ticking up in is juveniles.

People don't realize how that fast decision, that five second decision, is rarely given a second chance and storing guns safely.

We're working to make our safe storage law in Washington stronger.

We asked Jane to fill us in on her wide ranging advocacy work.

I had seen in the news that we had a group in Washington called the Alliance for Gun Responsibility that was working to pass an initiative for universal background checks and then an online forum, every Town for Gun Safety was starting up a huge nationwide campaign to send postcards to your senators.

Not one More was the theme, and I sent an online postcard, and then I received a phone call asking if I would like to deliver postcards to my senators, and I did on July first, and somebody connected me up with another survivor who was the citizen sponsor of our initiative, and so I worked that summer with her doing house parties, raising awareness, telling Veronica's story and hopes of getting our initiative passed.

And that one thing led to another, and that summer I was invited to Californi with my brother because they were debating the gun Violence Restraining Order in Sacramento, and this fellow stood up and said, this kid speaking of Elliott was not a criminal.

This is a no brainer.

I moved to pass the gun Violence Restraining Order in California, which gave me the momentum to feel like, Okay, we can do something that's huge.

Jane is now active in multiple advocacy groups, Mom's Demand Action, the Everytown Survivor Network, and the Alliance for Gun Responsibility.

She's traveled to support gun safety legislation and knows that nothing shifts lawmakers more than the power of lived experience.

I was invited to New York to train with every Town as a survivor fellow, and that connected me to a lot of survivors of shootings like Sandy Hook and the Aurora, Colorado and Las Vegas hadn't happened yet, but later met some of those people and we kind of have formed a network of almost family all across the United States.

Through that, I've connected with a lot of survivors in Washington and several of them have accompanied me back there, and a lot of times you hear from the senators and representatives we need more of these stories.

They help us tell the stories when we're bringing out initiatives or bills.

There are better things to do than to surround yourself in grief.

It's not going to bring the child back.

And working to help other communities, help other families stay safe, is a really important thing.

And I do see a lot of survivors that are ready speak up, speak out, and that wasn't happening much before twenty fourteen, and those voices definitely matter.

The legislators tell us over and over that matters because those are real people behind the statistics.

We asked Jane, what you would say to a young man struggling with the same things many sales describe and knowing what can happen when that pain turns violent.

To take a beat and to see what else you have in your life that's positive.

It could be one class, it could be a book, it could.

Be a person.

It doesn't have to be an online situation.

And know that there are people who care about you people who want the best for you, and getting away from that, shutting some of that down.

I heard the governor and Utah talk about that that the social media is an addiction, just like a drug or alcohol or something else along those lines.

To take a beat because it is something that is preventable.

You don't want to be responsible for other people's lives.

We also asked what Jane thought Veronica would say to the man who killed her and five other innocent people.

You didn't need to do that.

There were people that would listen to that talk to you, that would understand you, that would support you.

If you just looked for those people.

Hatred isn't going to do anything ex have deep you up, and she would have been one of those people that reach out to him and be nice to him.

There are lots of those people out there.

But if you're looking only for the bad, guess what you're gonna only find bad.

You get good at what you practice.

Let's stop here for another break.

We'll be back in a moment.

We asked what Jane hoped people take away from Veronica's story and what she hopes will be achieved through sharing Veronica's legacy.

Well, I hope people understand and that a she was completely innocent, She wasn't in the wrong place, she was in the very much the right place that night, doing all the right things as a nineteen year old college freshman at nine o'clock would be doing, and that she.

Deserved better than this.

And I see people when they hear about her and see her picture that they realize this could be their child.

Because bullets they don't judge, they just kill.

And I see that, I see tears.

I sometimes see my own tears.

But I do believe people are moved to realize that she was just a normal nineteen year old college girl doing what a normal nineteen year old college girl would be doing.

I always say when I speak that in Veronica's honor, I will always work to make communities safer and families more involved in gun violence prevention.

It's the guns, and I totally believe it's the guns.

If you can't throw bullets at somebody and hurt them, stabbing is much more int meant, and we're seeing more of that all over the place.

But I do.

Believe that the guns and their access and people not recognizing the lethality of some of these guns most of the people I talked to, I was like, we've never touched a gun or something like that, But everybody says that the survivors hold the moral ground because they've experienced it firsthand.

I really just believe that knowledge is power, and advocating for what works is powerful.

And I know Colleen would say Veronica would hate if we were all moping around feeling sorry for ourselves.

She had much more humor than that.

She wanted us to live life and do everything we possibly could while we're here, and her legacy will be the love and the humor she.

Had for everyone.

She was always looking for the underdog.

Finally, we asked Jane to share how she keeps Veronica's memory alive.

Well.

Every year on her birthday, I do a pay it forward to Starbucks.

One of the places we've visited the summer before she started college was the Starbucks in Pipe Place Market at Seattle, the original one.

I have a few pictures over there.

I've done to pay.

It forward in New York, in New Orleans, any place I am on her birthday, I have a picture of her, and I think about her when I'm tutoring a high school student right now, getting her to read some good books, and I'll say, hey, my niece loved this book.

Why don't you read this book.

So she's alive and a part of me all the time.

For more information on the case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at KT Underscore Studios.

In Cells is produced by Stephanie Leideger, Gabriel Castillo and me Courtney Armstrong.

Additional producing by Connor Powell and Caroline Miller, editing by Jeff Tooi, music by vanikor Studios.

In Cells is a production of KAT Studios and iHeart Podcasts.

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