September 14, 2025 / 9:20 AM EDT
/ CBS News
A teen who opened fire in a Colorado high school this week was active on a so-called “violent gore” site months before the attack, the Anti-Defamation League said in a report released Friday.
Colorado officials said Desmond Holly, 16, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot after injuring two students at Evergreen High School, had been “radicalized by an extremist network,” but did not provide further details.
According to the ADL report, several school shooters in the past year, including Holly, had been active on the same website, which the organization says is known for hosting content backing white supremacist ideas as well as material portraying graphic violence against both people and animals. People can navigate to the website, WatchPeopleDie, and access a forum where they can watch real images of beheadings, shootings and other violence. The site started on Reddit, before being banned in March 2019.
“We’re talking about thousands of people who are on these spaces,” ADL Senior Vice President of Counter-Extremism and Intelligence, Oren Segal, told CBS News. “There’s no friction to access— anybody can do it.”
Beverly Kingston, the director of Colorado University’s Center For The Study and Prevention of Violence, told CBS Colorado that school shooters often exhibit similarities in their behavior and have been known to pay tribute to other mass shooters. The website Holly used was also frequented, the ADL says, by other individuals who have carried out school shootings. They include 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who shot and killed a student and a teacher at Abundant Life Christian school in Wisconsin last year, and Solomon Henderson, a 17-year-old who committed a shooting that killed one and wounded another at Antioch High School in Nashville in January.
Holly, who posted a photo of Rupnow on TikTok, appeared to have joined the site in December 2024, in the month between the Madison and Nashville shootings, according to the ADL.
“Many of these online spaces are glorifying these young, violent shooter types, where they’re even referencing one another,” Segal said.
Holly’s most recent profile photo on TikTok was of Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in California in 2014 and had a history of engaging in and spewing misogynistic content online, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The 16-year-old posted a photo of himself holding a gun next to a box of ammunition on his X account two hours before the shooting. On social media, Holly showcased his collection of tactical gear, which featured extremist symbols. In a now-deleted TikTok post that contained references to a 2019 mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, he engaged with a comment encouraging him to “make a move,” according to ADL.
CBS News reached out to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office to see whether the department’s findings were consistent with those in the ADL report. A spokesperson said they cannot comment as the investigation remains open.
The domain of Watchpeopledie is registered by proxy, according to a search of the “whois” registration database – and hides the names of the owners. Cloudflare is used as the registrar for their main domain, Segal at the ADL said, and uses Cloudflare-owned IP addresses, which means that WPD is either hosted on Cloudflare or they are using their passthrough services.
Segal said Cloudflare allows it to remain … that it’s basically a service provider not taking action and “allowing the hosting of the site.”
A spokesperson for Cloudflare told CBS News that it is not the hosting provider for the website, adding that the company “typically does not host websites and doesn’t have the capacity to remove content that is hosted by others.”
Segal said that ADL shares their findings with law enforcement agencies across the country. He did not specify an agency or the specific report. Segal said understanding incidents perpetrated by people influenced by nihilistic online spaces as a broader trend rather than one-offs could be a step toward preventing violence.
“We need to see that there’s a connection there, there’s a through line,” Segal said. “There’s a common theme and a common thread, which are these online platforms.”
Lauren Fichten is an associate producer at CBS News.
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