He was suicidal and needed help. Online predators pushed him to take his life on camera.
The death of a Minnesota man offers a case study into how a sadistic online group has used the messaging app Discord to find and torment vulnerable people.
Samuel Hervey, a 25-year-old in the throes of a severe mental health crisis, positioned his phone so its camera would capture the gruesome spectacle that was about to unfold.
The Minnesota native stepped into the frame of the video live stream, his long hair spilling from the hood of a white sweatshirt. He sat down cross-legged and emptied a plastic bottle filled with gasoline onto his head and his clothing. Then he lit a flame.
As fire engulfed him, more than two dozen people watched in a private video chatroom on the popular messaging app Discord. They laughed, cheered and congratulated themselves, according to a recording reviewed by The Washington Post.
Among those watching the November 2021 live stream was a 15-year-old girl in an Eastern European city who had spent much of the previous week in close contact with Hervey, urging him in private messages and voice calls to take his life on camera, The Post found. It was an effort, she later said in an interview, to impress others in a global online community that rewards cruelty.
“I was getting my big break,” she recalled thinking during Hervey’s suicide. “It was a competition of who could do the worst thing. So I obviously felt very cool.”
The circumstances leading to Hervey’s self-immolation remained mostly a mystery to his family and friends and to law enforcement. The Post traced the suicide to the online community known as “764” and found that it was enabled by a messaging app the group has used to find victims halfway across the globe and lure them into closed, largely unmoderated spaces.
Hervey’s path into a virtual den of predation — and the role of a teenager who believed coaxing a stranger to kill himself on camera would boost her social status — offers a disturbing case study of what federal prosecutors warn is an emerging threat posed by sadistic groups that target vulnerable people online. And it illustrates the deadly consequences when social media platforms fail to contain that threat.
“Fmlk,” an 18-year-old in Eastern Europe, told The Washington Post she encouraged two people to kill themselves live on social media when she was 15. (Shawn Boburg/The Washington Post)
The Post located the girl, who operated under the screen name “Fmlk,” through an extensive analysis of her digital footprint. Now 18, she spoke on the condition that she be identified only by her Discord screen name, age and region. The Post is not naming her because she was a minor at the time. She said she agreed to talk because she regrets her actions, which she said also included encouraging a teenage girl to kill herself on a live stream in March 2022. Fmlk said she has since left the online group.
“I feel very bad for what I did, even now,” she said during one of several in-person interviews in her home city. “It’s something that happened when I was in a bad space. … I feel like this thing is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”
The FBI has said 764 — named for the first three numbers of the Zip code of the town in Texas where its founder lived — and its offshoots have targeted thousands of children in recent years, often persuading them to share nude photos and then extorting them into harming animals or themselves. In a warning late last year, the agency said the groups try to get their victims, many of whom have mental health issues, to kill themselves on camera “for their own entertainment or their own sense of fame.” The FBI has said the group meets the definition of a domestic terror organization.
Although Discord prohibits promoting self-harm on its platform, Hervey and others communicated about his suicide plans for more than a week in a chatroom that was created specifically to broadcast his death, The Post found.
Even afterward, the chatroom remained online. Fmlk lured the suicidal teenage girl there four months later so an audience could watch her take her own life, she said. The Post was not able to confirm the second suicide.
Told of The Post’s findings, Hervey’s mother, Florence Hervey, said: “Discord should have been monitoring better. It’s all very sad.”
Samuel Hervey's mother, Florence Hervey, stands in her home in International Falls, Minnesota. (Erica Dischino for The Washington Post)
Florence Hervey provided The Post with messages and data from her son’s Discord account because she said she wanted to raise awareness of the potential dangers on social media for minors and other vulnerable people. The Post, in partnership with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, analyzed that material and other chatroom exchanges to reconstruct the weeks leading up to Hervey’s suicide, which occurred while he was traveling in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan.
Discord, a hub for gamers, is one of the most popular messaging platforms among teens and is growing fast. The platform allows anonymous users to control large swaths of its private meeting rooms, and it largely relies on users to report predatory conduct in those spaces.
“The horrific actions of 764 have no place on Discord or in society,” Discord’s vice president of trust and safety, Jud Hoffman, said in a statement to The Post. “Discord is committed to providing a safe and secure online environment for all users, and we are taking decisive actions to address harmful content on our platform and to find and remove the users who create such content. We are continuously working to improve these measures, and, where appropriate and permitted by law, Discord aims to collaborate with the FBI and law enforcement.”
Hoffman said that since 2021, Discord has increased the size of its safety team and prioritized rooting out predatory groups. He added that the platform aims to protect privacy while using automated tools that check for predatory conduct. Those tools include machine learning models that help identify bad actors and mechanisms to detect and track groups like 764, the company said in a statement.
Neither the FBI nor Discord would say how many suicides have been connected to the platform or the group. In addition to Hervey’s immolation, The Post confirmed a second 764-related suicide — the 2022 death by gunshot of 29-year-old Daniel P. McCoy of Florida — and spoke to Discord users who said they witnessed three other such suicides on live streams.
“It is difficult to even comprehend such shocking and inhumane violence targeted at innocent and vulnerable children,” Matthew G. Olsen, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said last month at a news conference following the sentencing of a 764 member who was accused of operating chatrooms where children were pressured to cut themselves. “But we cannot look away.”
‘Welcome to my suicide chat’
Hervey was alone and desperate, marooned in Kyrgyzstan.
In August 2021, on his way from Minnesota to India, he was waylaid in the former Soviet republic due to covid restrictions. He spent weeks in hostels in Bishkek, the capital, and tried to extend his travel visa as he ran low on money, messages show.
He turned to social media for connection, including in this series of messages he posted on Sept. 6 of that year under the screen name “asunder.”
asunder
09/06/2021
I am very lost.
Should I accept this is the end?
I have no support system
I really think the worst part is not having anyone to talk to
Hervey’s path to that moment had been winding. Growing up in International Falls, Minnesota, Hervey had shown great promise. Wade Sutton, who taught Hervey literature from middle school through high school, described his former student in an interview as brilliant, curious and eccentric. “A teacher hopes to get one or two like Sam in their whole career,” Sutton said.
A high school valedictorian, Hervey studied biochemistry at the University of Minnesota.
After turning 18, Hervey, assigned female at birth, began transitioning by taking hormone therapy. He married another university student, Usama Hussain.
A printed photo of Samuel Hervey, left, with his spouse, Usama Hussain, hangs on Florence Hervey's refrigerator. (Erica Dischino for The Washington Post)
During the pandemic, Hervey’s mental health quickly worsened, friends and family said. He dropped out of the university and separated from Hussain, who said Hervey’s mental illness overwhelmed their relationship.
“It got to a point where it was too much to handle for me,” Hussain said. “Sam would refuse to take his meds.”
Increasingly erratic and delusional, Hervey was involuntarily committed to a state-run psychiatric treatment facility in Minnesota in late 2020 and, according to court records, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition that causes delusions, hallucinations, mania and depression.
Florence Hervey texted him while he was in the hospital. “I will always be available for you my darling,” she wrote.
That would be their last communication. Released in May 2021 with medications to stabilize his condition, Hervey cut off contact with his family.
A few months later, he left for India on what he considered a pilgrimage to Buddhist temples. He told friends he was paying for the trip with government stimulus checks he collected during the pandemic.
In Central Asia, his mental health appeared to deteriorate, messages show.
“man, I’m like really f---ing depressed. Like, depressed to the point where it is likely to cause other mental health problems,” he wrote in an Oct. 15 message to an online friend.
He turned to people he had met on the internet for help, asking them to send money, messages show. When those people suggested he seek help from family members, Hervey responded that his family members had all died in a civil war.
By Oct. 30, Hervey told someone else in a private message that he had made a decision.
“dude I’m gonna kill myself,” he wrote. When the person asked why, Hervey replied: “because it’s the only way to love myself, I guess.”
That same day, Hervey created a chatroom — referred to as a server on Discord — dedicated to his suicide. He named it “anhero tempest.” “An hero” is slang for someone who takes their own life.
asunder
10/30/2021
hello
welcome to my suicide chat
I’m trying to host my own virtual funeral
He began promoting the server in other spaces on the platform, urging other Discord users to join, messages show. Several people told him not to do it.
“I think you shouldn’t kill yourself,” one person wrote. “I’ve been in your shoes before.”
But then, on Nov. 1, 2021, came a note from someone else who seemed eager to establish a connection: “Hello! I’m looking for friends.”
The sender offered few personal details other than a username that contained four letters: Fmlk.
A teen outcast turns to recruiting victims
The 15-year-old who sent the note was not, in fact, looking for a new friend.
Instead, she told The Post, she saw Hervey as potential prey for the sadistic online community of which she was a part — and possibly as someone whose death could help her launch her own splinter group.
She suggested that Hervey talk one-on-one with her in a voice chat on Discord. That’s when the encouragement began, she said.
“You can do this!” she said she told Hervey during that first talk.
Fluent in English, she had made her way into the “inner circle” of 764, becoming a kind of recruiter for the group after proving her bona fides for more than a year, she told The Post.
During hours of interviews at a coffee shop and in a restaurant, she was at times nervous but spoke matter-of-factly as she described her entry into the dark online community.
It began in 2019, she said, when at age 13 she was scouring social media for gory pictures and videos. She joined chatrooms on Discord and Telegram for a group that called itself CVLT, a 764 predecessor whose members posted graphic images of self-harm and child pornography.
At the time, she said, she was trying to belong. She had no friends at her school and felt like an outcast. Classmates called her “weird,” she said. She began skipping her ninth-grade classes and spending her time interacting with the people she was meeting online. “I thought they were edgy,” she said. “I wanted them to like me.”
To impress the group’s members, she said, she used racial slurs in chatrooms and bragged that she had committed crimes.
She said she chose the screen name Fmlk in part because it could be seen as an acronym standing for an expletive followed by the initials of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Fmlk said she joined a sadistic Discord group because she wanted to fit in. “I thought they were edgy,” she said. “I wanted them to like me.” (Shawn Boburg/The Washington Post)
In the spring of 2020, she said, she intentionally set fire to dry grass near a rural village in her country and recorded a video of it. She said the fire spread to nearby buildings before it was extinguished. She said that authorities never discovered she lit it and that she boasted about it online.
She gave The Post a copy of a video showing the fire that she said she started. Efforts to get records about it from local fire departments were unsuccessful.
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She struck up an online relationship with someone in the community who went by the online name “Kush,” a slang term for marijuana. Kush kept his real identity closely guarded, but he told her he was in his mid-20s, she said.
At times, he showered her with attention in group chats. “I love you,” he wrote multiple times in Discord chatrooms, tagging her, according to messages obtained by The Post. “why don’t you love me?” he asked her. In other moments, the messages show, he made graphic or demeaning sexual comments about her in group chats.
“Sometimes he would be nice,” she said, “other times he’d be super mean.”
When Kush asked her to send him nude photos, she did, recognizing his prominence in the sadistic online community, she said. She sometimes referred to him as “master,” messages show.
She said Kush was close to Bradley Cadenhead, the Texas resident who at age 15 created the first 764 server on Discord in January 2021.
Discord has said it became aware of the group that same month and alerted law enforcement authorities. Still, the group continued to grow and the platform struggled to contain it. Members of the group repeatedly evaded Discord’s enforcement actions, creating new accounts and servers when they were banned by the platform, The Post previously reported.
Cadenhead was arrested in August 2021 after Discord flagged his account to law enforcement for sending child pornography, and he was later sentenced to 80 years in prison.
In Cadenhead’s absence, new leaders emerged, including Kush, the teenager in Eastern Europe said. She said Kush brought her into 764’s inner circle, where a small group decided whom to target. One of her roles, she said, was to recruit girls who would cut themselves on camera, girls the mostly male members referred to as “cut whores.”
She was trawling Discord in November 2021 for girls who could be exploited, she said, when she stumbled upon Hervey and arranged the first voice chat with him. It was immediately obvious to her Hervey was troubled.
“That guy was definitely suffering from a severe mental disorder,” she recalled. She asked Hervey why he wanted to kill himself. Hervey, she said, replied by talking about aliens, his shape-shifting spouse, and a U.S. government conspiracy against him.
“I kept saying, ‘When are you going to do it?’ ‘What are you waiting for?’ ‘You can do this’,” she told The Post.
A death on Rescue Mountain
Over the following days, with Fmlk’s encouragement, Hervey planned a time and a place to burn himself alive. He would do it on the coming Sunday, he told her, at an ancient pilgrimage site on a mountain just south of Bishkek called Tashtar-Ata, also known as Rescue Mountain.
Hervey worried that Discord would close down his server, on which he had written passages about his suicide plans. Other users had told him they reported his account for violating Discord’s rules, he wrote in private messages.
“so I guess this Discord account was reported for violent extremism because I made this server,” he wrote to another Discord user on Nov. 1, 2021.
Discord did not respond to questions from The Post about whether it had received reports about Hervey or his server.
The server remained up, even as Hervey wrote about his plans there and in private messages to other Discord users.
“Today is the second to last day of my life,” he wrote to Fmlk on Nov. 5. “I bought the gasoline today. … Right now, I kind of feel like it was always meant to end like this.”
In those final days, Hervey at times expressed reservations — but his messages drew limited responses and few offers of help.
“bruh I’m crying and I can’t sleep,” he wrote to one user on Discord the night before the planned suicide.
“I don wanna go away, I don’t want you to go away, I don’t want the story to end,” he wrote to another person that night. “but I understand why it has to.”
By morning, though, Hervey signaled he would go through with it. He sent Fmlk photos of the plastic bottles he had filled with gasoline. And, as he left his hostel for Rescue Mountain, he sent updates to the group that began assembling in his server.
“I’m on the bus now,” Hervey wrote in the server at 9:44 a.m. on Nov. 7.
Hervey’s Discord data shows that at least 29 people were in the chatroom at one point that day. Fmlk told The Post that Kush was among those watching as Hervey prepared to set himself on fire: propping up his phone, sitting on the ground, praying, then dousing himself.
Some were recording the live stream, she said.
A 27-second clip that later circulated online shows Hervey on his back, his body aflame and writhing on the slope of a snow-covered mountain.
“We did it,” one user yelled, as others laughed.
“It’s so funny,” another said.
“That is the worst death possible, man,” someone else said.
After another viewer declared, “Shoutout to f---ing 764,” the 15-year-old claimed credit for herself.
“Big shoutout to Fmlk,” she cheered. She confirmed to The Post the voice was hers.
Recognizing the potential for a law enforcement investigation, she said she deleted the private messages she had sent Hervey on Discord from her main account. “I didn’t want to incriminate myself,” she said.
Those messages were no longer visible when Hervey’s mother provided The Post with data from his account. Hoffman, the Discord executive, confirmed in a statement that Fmlk and others who sent messages to Hervey deleted them. Hoffman said the platform does not retain the content of deleted messages.
Kush, meanwhile, openly talked about Fmlk’s role in chatroom messages obtained by The Post.
“Fmlk set it all up & found the dude,” he wrote in a Telegram group chat the day of the suicide.
A person found Hervey’s body at the pilgrimage site that day and reported it to police in Bishkek. Authorities there investigated and ruled it a suicide, an officer said. A medical autopsy found Hervey died of “shock as a result of burns; thermal effect of high flame temperature.”
The authorities shipped Hervey’s electronics and other belongings back to his family and told his mother that his phone had been set up as if to record the suicide. Until she was approached by Post reporters, she was unaware that he had been pressured into killing himself or that the act was watched live by others online.
‘Send more suicide videos’
Fmlk said Hervey made her the administrator of the server before he killed himself. That meant she assumed control of who got access to the server and who could moderate it. It also allowed her to use the chatroom for more predatory behavior.
That opportunity arose in mid-March 2022, when someone told her a teenage girl was openly talking about ending her life in a Discord server dedicated to suicide and depression. She told The Post she directly contacted the girl, who she estimated was in her late teens.
“I got her to a different server, the same server Sam used,” she recounted.
Just as she did with Hervey, Fmlk said she encouraged the girl. About 15 people watched as the girl put a plastic bag over her head and injected helium into it until she stopped breathing, Fmlk told The Post.
On March 20, 2022, she wrote in a Discord server chatroom that a “chick killed herself,” chat logs show. The Post could not identify the person or locate videos of the incident. Hoffman said the platform could not find evidence of the suicide, although Discord said it took action against a separate Fmlk account weeks earlier after finding it was moderating a server that contained child sexual abuse material, he said.
Fmlk said the suicides drew praise from Kush. He pressed for more in chats on April 18, according to exchanges obtained by The Post.
Kush
04/18/2022
send more suicide videos
Fmlk
04/18/2022
I’ve only done two, soryuyy ill do more soon
Kush
04/18/2022
lost the fire one, can you send it please?
Online, Fmlk seemed to revel in her reputation.
“People say I make people commit suicide,” she wrote in a Discord server the following month. “Everything they do is their own choice. I only help them pick a choice.”
In November 2022, she said, police in her country confiscated her electronic devices because authorities had identified child pornography sent from one of her social media accounts. She acknowledged to The Post that she had done so, saying the other user had requested it.
She was surprised, she said, that police did not question her about Hervey’s suicide because the recordings were on a phone that was seized. The police told her parents to get her a psychological evaluation, she said. She was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, depression and anxiety and started therapy twice a week, she said.
Her parents, who do not speak English, remained unaware she had joined the online group, she said.
But changes in her real life were helping her extricate herself, she said. She had started the 10th grade at a new school that fall. She made new friends, and she came to see the online groups in a different light.
“I realized those people are scum,” she told The Post. “I realized if I keep doing that, my life was not going to be good.”
She said she deleted the social media accounts associated with the groups.
In retrospect, she said, she believes she was “groomed” by Kush.
“If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have done those things,” she said.
The Post contacted Kush through his Telegram account. He denied any involvement in encouraging Hervey’s suicide and later sent messages insulting Fmlk and a Post reporter. He did not respond to detailed questions, including about his real-life identity.
Discord told The Post it banned multiple accounts tied to Kush this year, one of them in April for “targeted extortion.”
Florence Hervey walks through Riverview Cemetery in Littlefork, Minn., to visit the grave of her son, Samuel. (Erica Dischino for The Washington Post)
Florence Hervey said she wishes there had been a more thorough law enforcement investigation into her son’s suicide. But after learning what happened, she said she feels compassion for the teenager in Eastern Europe.
“I feel this person was vulnerable herself in terms of being conditioned to search for belonging by harming someone else,” Hervey said. “And I hope that she’s in a more healthy state of mind right now.”
Two days after The Post sent detailed questions to Discord for this story — and more than three years after Hervey’s suicide — Discord suspended an account the teen had maintained, citing what the company said was “self-harm encouragement,” according to a screenshot she provided.
