CONTENT WARNING: This one is just brutal. If you’re feeling even the slightest bit queasy about the headline, please don’t read any further.
By David Futrelle
Sunday morning, a young man named Brandon Clark allegedly murdered 17-year-old Instagram “e-girl” Bianca Devins, apparently a friend of his, brutally slashing her throat and then slashing his own in an attempt to kill himself. Sometime between the murder and the attempted suicide, he took a photo of her bloody body and uploaded it to 4chan.
The photo quickly spread across social media, including the Incels.co forum, where it was evidently found by a commenter calling himself canino1997, who reacted to the horrific tragedy by masturbating to the picture of Devins’ lifeless body and sending a picture of the resulting “cum tribute” to the girl’s mother (or perhaps her stepmother) as a sort of ‘”lesson” for her.
He attached a screenshot of what he said were the messages he’d sent to the mother along with his “tribute.”
Naturally, other incels applauded canino1997’s initiative. “[Y]our doing god’s work,” wrote one commenter. “Based as fuck,” added a second. “Based kikebook Stalkercel,” agreed a third, which is the Incel way of saying he thought that canino1997 is was an excellent Facebook stalker.
On Facebook, Bianca’s stepmother didn’t say anything about
canino1997’s particular act of malicious harassment, but she did post at length about the anguish of seeing the photos of her stepdaughter’s corpse — an anguish amplified by the knowledge that countless strangers were passing the pictures around in an attempt to shock others and, in some cases, to garner new Instagram followers.
It is absolutely disgusting that people are sharing, screenshoting the pictures of Bianca’s (tragic) death!! Wtf is wrong with you people!!?? … I will FORVER have those images in my mind when I think of her. When I close my eyes, those images haunt me. …
Imagine sitting there, in disbelief and praying to God that this is all some mistake and that your baby will walk through the door any minute. Now imagine seeing those pictures and having everything in you break. Imagine not even being able to yell out and scream or cry because your soul has now just been broken.
After writing this blog for eight years, and watching the political developments in the US over the last three, I can’t say I still have a lot of faith left in humanity. But discovering the incel and his “cum tribute” hit me like a punch in the gut; in some ways it feels as gratuitously cruel as the murder itself.
There’s a lot more to say — none of it good — about this case and the assorted reactions to it online. But I will save that for later posts.
NOTE: Canino1997’s original post was taken down by the Incels.co mods, though evidence of it remains in the responses to it from other commenters. I borrowed the screenshots from a post in IncelTears, a subreddit devoted to monitoring and mocking incels.
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Mels, you’ve reminded me of something I read in Readers Digest back in the late 90’s-early 00’s. It was an expose on websites dedicated to showcasing people dying horrible deaths, the messier the better, for their users’ enjoyment. When a grieving father contacted one of these sites to take down footage of his daughter’s death (she was killed by a train, I think), he was essentially laughed at and told in so many words that if he didn’t want that death posted there then his daughter should have chosen a blander way to die.
Stuff like this has been around since the earliest days of the Internet age. It’s just easier these days for that kind of person to spread it to folks who don’t ever want to see it for shits and giggles.
He knows what he does; the cruelty is the point. And people under 20 are perfectly capable of having empathy and understanding how their actions affect others. It’s truly disgusting that you give this absolute horror of a human being the benefit of the doubt when his actions have shown he cares NOTHING for a grieving mother on the day her child was murdered.
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” -Maya Angelou
@Redsilkphoenix
Yes, I remember hearing from classmates about whichever shock sites were popular when I was in high school (the early 00s), and I’m sure this sort of thing has been around as long as the internet has.
I think it’s shitty to gawk at photos of dead bodies, even if it comes from a place of natural curiosity and anxiety about our own mortality (e.g. rubbernecking, of which I admit I’ve been guilty on the road).
It just feels next-level-nasty to knowingly, pointedly torment the loved ones of the dead. I can’t wrap my mind around it.
I hope Ms. Devins’ family and friends are able to access whatever counseling they need to get through this. And whatever legal assistance, for that matter, to tackle the sisyphean task of getting the photo taken down wherever possible.
Remember, folks, it’s an incel’s looks that make people despise them….
I hope her family can remember the good in Bianca’s life easier than the bad. I hope this starts a campaign to pull all these nasty incels into the light. It’s easy to be a internet nazi when you’re anonymous, it’s not so easy when everyone who looks you in the eye knows what you’ve said.
Building on what Pyxxxie said, I hope this follows canino1997 to every employment interview he is given.
TO Canino: Enjoy your future saying, “You want fries with that?”, sociopath–assuming that even a fast-food joint will have you.
@Ivory Bill Woodpecker
Hey, let’s not debase fast food workers. They’re undervalued enough for working hard and receiving scant pay and customer disrespect to boot.
I wouldn’t want a guy like this jackoff handling my food order, either.
I usually just read, smirk a bit while bewildered at the psychology shown by the people you post about here since I usually just see them as harmless, if entirely wrong-headed, and move on but man this hit real hard.
Even now while they’re trying to distance their culture from this event, they’re still calling her an e-thot and trying to come up with any possible excuse why she might have possibly deserved it. Do they even realize the contradiction in that? If you want people to genuinely think you disliked the event, move on from these shitty online communities since for every 10, 100, whatever people who are “just joking”, 1 is serious about it and just emboldened by the shit you post, not deradicalized by the sense of community.
As much as I enjoy many of the trolly aspects of internet culture, this shock jock stuff like its radio equivalents draws in the most anti-social kind of people every single time. Check out shit like the well-known Opie and Anthony fandom which has had a crossover between both formats for a while as an example.
@Mels
He sounds like the kind of guy who would spit in your food – or worse. (Although that is probably true of incels in general)
How can they do that? I lost faith in humanity.
Apparently one of the more recent incel memes is ?? (clown world). This seems to be basically like “dumbest possible timeline”, except from the point of view of the more awful incels. They’re like, the normalest normal of normals, or the knowers of the truthiest truths, and yet… reality utterly fails them. People don’t act like their concept of people, society doesn’t act like their concept of society, and society doesn’t even act like other people’s apparent concept of society. (Not that they have a good grasp of other people’s concepts.) And there are a small number of men who appear to successfully act mostly like their concept of men, but imitating them doesn’t work.
So I guess some of them figure that the best way to live in “clown world” is to take inspiration from the Joker? Or a least their idea of a wacky, rapey murderclown.
Oh, it’s meant to be a lesson? You’re teaching the mother that she should have taught her daughter morals — then the daughter wouldn’t have ended up murdered and you wouldn’t have felt compelled to use her image as pornography?
And here I was thinking that you did something really stupid and revolting just to get attention. I wondered why a person would sink so low just because he was lonely. Doesn’t he have any better ideas? I thought. ‘Cause this is disgusting.
This is all that I can think of:
Socrates: But no one tries to seek evil, nay, none truly seek to spread it. Everyone is the hero of their journey, so tell me, is there objective evil in this world if none shall be its agent?
Me: Yes, over there with the Incels.
Socrates: But think about the philosophy! How can they be truly evil when they-
Me: *shows this post*
Socrates: . . . I rest my case. . .
This would drive me to murderous action if I were personally affected. As it is: sickened but not surprised – so many of these arseholes are in competition with one another to be the most vile man on the planet.
Well done shit head, you’re up there in the top 10.
On the subject of this kind of behaviour always having been around – absolutely. There is an Old way of swearing in some parts of England: ‘sweet FA’. I always used to think that f a was fuck all, but it originally came from Fanny Adams, a child who was murdered in London in the 19th century. She was chopped up, so the fa part is referring to there was nothing left of her.
But I am pretty sure that this gallows humour was not used to torment her family.
I can’t comment on your post today without breaking every rule. Consider it said anyway.
Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be a human being, given the things some of us get up to.
Time to wheel out Mr Rogers again:
“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.””
[looks at Facebook’s and Twitter’s moderation policies]
I dunno, you tell me?
Literally the only positive take on this – and even then it’s a piddlingly positive element when offset by the overwhelmingly negative stuff – is that this post proved too much even for an incel forum.
Although when you consider what they not merely routinely let through but actively encourage people to post, this is hardly encouraging. And I also suspect that the motives behind the deletion weren’t so much a sudden attack of conscience as fear of being cited as an accessory in the event of a lawsuit.
@Mel:
One of the websites with the picture of the girl’s remains after she died in a car crash in 2006, was R*****.com.
I was going to post the full name of the website, because it’s been defunct for years now, but I suppose you still might be able to find it on the Wayback Machine.
I remember reading the comments from the site’s regulars, and even they said that tormenting her family with correspondence was completely vile.
The man who murdered this beautiful young girl…I wish he someday realizes the horror of what he’s done, and lives the rest of his life locked up. Which is what I wished for Timothy McVeigh, rather than the death penalty.
The incel who masturbated on the girl’s picture…I have a feeling his day-to-day life is punishment enough.
I really fear that people have become desentisized to this sort of thing, to a great extent.
Please report this loathsome toad to the FBI. Sounds like a hate crimer waiting to happen.
I needed THIS like a brick in the back of the head this morning…
We will never reach the end of our depravity as a society.
…
To lighten the mood (if I may), did y’all know aliens (the outer space kind) play baseball?!?!?
Yup, at “Area 51”, they built a baseball diamond.
GoogleMap “Groom Lake, Nv”
canino1997 sounds like a future serial killer.
There seems to be no end to the ways we’re fucked, and it’s increasingly hard to have hope for the future. So, please: if you (any of you) are feeling as despairing as me, and you have time and opportunity, get out into nature for a few hours. Grab a good book or a camera and get among some trees. The world will still be fucked afterwards, but self-care is important.
Under Trump’ DoJ, there’s no freakin’ point.
Cheeto Jesus would probably give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Others have spoken far more eloquently than I feel at this moment.
Suffice to say, words cannot convey the depth of my loathing–and my rage–at these miserable, putrid wastes of carbon, both at the murderer and those who chortle at this family’s pain. For me, it brings 2 mind the suffering like-minded fucktards subjected Zelda Williams 2 when her father Robin took his life: shriveled, constipated feces where their souls should be.
I’ve probably said this before, but I am a card-carrying, dyed in the wool witch & believe in Lady Karma: I have seen Her handiwork in action. I will also say, as a witch, I have 1 curse that I keep in my arsenal, but I will abide by the comments policy & merely say I have deployed it towards these vermin who wear human skin & delight in human misery.
May Lady Karma find you quick (&, no, that’s not my curse).