(Content Warning: Self-Harm)
32-year-old Austin Knoob used to own a nightclub, and until April was working as a teacher’s aide at Carbondale Community High School in Illinois. Now he’s sitting in federal custody facing two counts of sexual exploitation of a child, and reading through the affidavit just about made me physically ill.
The victim told the FBI she started talking to Knoob on Snapchat about four years ago, when she was 12. Agents found roughly 720 messages between the two of them, with Knoob using the name of “Frank.” The ones prosecutors chose to highlight are the kind that make you want to pour bleach in your eyes.
In one exchange, Knoob asked the 12-year-old victim if she had “any new material,” referring to explicit videos of the girl. When she said she did, he wrote back, “I definitely wanna see lol.”
A separate exchange has him telling her his last day of work was coming up and that he “need[ed] a lot,” and after she sent six images and nine videos, most of which the FBI classified as CSAM, his response was “I love you.” Later in that same conversation, he floated visiting her so they could “make our own videos,” as though this were a budding romance instead of a grown man harvesting content from a kid he was grooming.
Investigators say he sometimes did this while bored at his actual job, working alongside actual teenagers he was supposedly there to help. He also bragged to the girl, unprompted, that he’d slept with multiple students and with his girlfriend’s cousin, who he said was 15 or 16.
Knoob told the FBI he believed she was around 15 when they first started talking. He also said he wouldn’t want to “go below 15” when it came to viewing CSAM. Believing your victim is 15 instead of 12 doesn’t make you any less of a predator. That’s like saying, “Yes I’m a cannibal, but I don’t eat anything younger than a toddler.”
The self-harm stuff is where this case stops looking like a garden-variety predator story and starts looking like something closer to torture. Knoob knew the girl was hurting herself and, according to the affidavit, added her to a Telegram group specifically built around people who wanted photos and videos of her doing it.
When that group wanted more, they told her to recruit female friends into making similar content. She refused, and members responded by posting her home address along with the full names of her mother, father, and grandmother, then threatened her family unless she kept sending them what they wanted.
Somewhere in there, Knoob also told her he wanted to buy her a dog, not because he liked dogs, but because he wanted her to do “things” with it.
She was eventually pulled into a second, more extreme group that she described to investigators as a “cult,” where members shared footage of blood writing on walls, animals being killed, and people livestreaming their own suicides.
She remembered being pressured to carve a set of numbers into her stomach, something like “seven something four.” The affidavit stops short of confirming it, but anyone who’s paid even glancing attention to this corner of the internet knows exactly what that number is.
764 isn’t a gang with a clubhouse or a membership card, and it isn’t run by any single person sitting at the top handing out orders. A teenager in Texas coined it back in 2021 after his own zip code, and since then it’s spread the way a meme spreads rather than the way an organization spreads, with kids all over the country slapping the label on their own splinter groups and inventing their own tactics underneath it.
What ties them together isn’t ideology so much as a shared hobby, and that hobby is grooming and torturing other kids for entertainment and clout. Strip away the branding and what you’re left with is a loose confederation of incel losers who couldn’t get a date in real life, so they built themselves a fake kingdom out of terrified 12-year-olds instead.
And Knoob is 32. Not some teenager mimicking a trend he saw online or a confused kid who fell into a bad crowd. He’s a full-grown man who apparently needed to be the “cool” adult hanging around actual teenagers to feel like he mattered while manipulating a child more than half his age into destroying herself for his entertainment.
Knoob’s attorney argued for his pretrial release, offering an ankle monitor and a promise from Knoob’s daddy that he’d make sure his adult son had no internet access at home. As if he were being grounded and not facing a federal child exploitation case.
Thankfully, the judge wasn’t having it, denying bond and noting that despite presiding over plenty of CSAM cases, she’d never seen anything quite like this one. He’ll stay locked up while the case moves forward, and prosecutors have already said there may be more victims out there as the investigation continues.
Given how casually this cretin bragged about the number of kids he supposedly touched, I wouldn’t bet against investigators finding more victims.
(Source)
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