The FBI rescued a 13-year-old girl who was lured to a California motel room by a Pennsylvania man she met online who allegedly groomed her to send him sexually explicit images and to commit self-harm.
Matthew Edward Pysher, 18, had been in contact with the victim for three months before he and the girl met up at a motel in Castaic, north of Los Angeles, where he was arrested Friday night, officials said.
“The facts charged in this case are chilling,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli said. “If your children have access to use the internet, sadistic predators may have access to your kids.”
The man from Bangor, Pennsylvania, is connected to Nihilistic Violent Extremism, known as NVE , and was initially charged with travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct, Essayli said.
The extremists associated with this movement “prey on children and talk them into compromising sex acts and self-mutilation,” said Akil Davis, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.
“So they want to bring down society, and they want to get other young people to join them and also be despondent with them,” Essayli told reporters in Los Angeles.
“It’s a very sick and twisted ideology. And again, they’re looking for kids that are already vulnerable. This poor girl, maybe she felt isolated, she felt alone, and this guy befriended her and started talking to her, and you can see how he’s using affection to try to persuade her to harm herself,” Essayli said.
NVE predators often use platforms connected to gaming and young people, such as Discord, to reach out to potential victims.
“We believe that he is associated with this nihilistic, violent extremism ideology, NVE, one of the most twisted and disturbing ideas to crawl out of the internet,” Essayli told reporters.
The suspect, using the online handle “Piano Man,” struck up an online friendship with the victim while she was in a group chat dealing with mental health issues, Essayli said.
Pysher had “flown from Philadelphia that day to meet the victim, intending to engage in criminal sexual activity with her and to mutilate her,” through cutting, according to Essayli.
“The victim told law enforcement that he had engaged in sexual conduct with her and that he used a knife to repeatedly cut her, and that he also choked her to the point where she couldn’t speak,” he said.
The girl’s mother had reached out to the FBI on Feb. 10 to report that her daughter was being encouraged to harm herself by a man she met on a “Discord server related to individuals suffering from mental illness.”
Pysher was scheduled to appear in court Monday afternoon. NBC News has reached out to a lawyer representing him.
A representative for Discord could not be immediately reached for comment.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org, to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.
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