Kylie Arellano, the Utah teenager who vanished from her family’s home in Garden City on May 29, 2025, was found alive in Oregon on Sunday afternoon, 521 days after she disappeared. She was 15 when she left and is 17 now.
Her mother, Stephanie Coleman, has said the two traded “I love you” texts at 9:44 that night, and by 9:52 Kylie’s phone had gone dark. The next morning her jacket was lying in the driveway, some of her things were packed, and her Xbox was gone.
After a year and a half of leads pouring in from around the country and overseas, Oregon police working with the FBI’s Salt Lake City office and the Rich County Sheriff’s Office found her with a 39-year-old man, who was taken into custody without incident. A law enforcement source told Fox News that the man allegedly contacted Kylie on Snapchat before she was reported missing.
In the FBI’s press release on the recovery, Director Kash Patel (⚆_⊙) follows his line about holding those responsible accountable with a sudden warning to anyone using “gore groups” to target and exploit children, promising that the bureau is coming for them and touting its fight against nihilistic violent extremism. Nowhere does the release say the man in custody belongs to one of these groups, or that one had anything to do with Kylie.
It reads like a non-sequitur, and while it never explicitly connects the two, it would be a strange thing to toss in if the case had nothing to do with them. Then again, this is Kash Patel we’re talking about, so strange is more or less the baseline.
I also find it odd that the 39-year-old still hasn’t been identified and that no charges have been announced. Maybe that’s innocent enough since the investigation is ongoing, as there could be other suspects, and agencies often sit on names until the paperwork is filed. But this is Kash Patel’s FBI, so the explanation could run anywhere from an overlooked detail to hedging their bets so they don’t end up announcing they got the wrong guy again.
I’ve written about plenty of cases over the years where online predators, a lot of them on Snapchat, coaxed girls out of their homes and were eventually found with the girl in the predator’s own home. Kylie’s 521 days puts this at the extreme end of that spectrum, and nobody should call any of this normal. Still, based on what we know so far, it sounds to me like a “routine” abduction, in the grim sense that it fits a pattern I keep seeing.
What doesn’t sound right to me is the alleged 764 “gore group” connection. 39 is far older than the typical member of a network whose ages usually run from mid-teens to early 20s, and kidnapping isn’t typically one of their goals.
What 764 and its offshoots do, according to the FBI, is find vulnerable kids, often ones struggling with depression or mental illness and some as young as 13, and blackmail them into sexual or violent acts, including self-harm, hurting animals, and sexually exploiting siblings. The footage then gets passed around among members, all of it wrapped in an ideology that celebrates violence and societal collapse. The group even writes guides on how to groom victims.
The abuse happens through a screen, and the point is the content and the control, not a runaway living in a stranger’s house a few states away. I griped about this same fog of vagueness when the FBI announced their first juvenile 764 case in Maine, and apparently the lesson didn’t take.
So why does any of this matter? Because the truth matters. If the public needs to be aware of a threat, they need to know exactly what the threat is and not get vagueposting from the frat boy director of the FBI.
A parent who hears “gore groups” in connection with a rescued teenager will reasonably wonder whether their kid’s Snapchat is a gateway to a nihilistic cult, when the more likely danger in a case like this is an adult who wants a child and has found a way to reach her.
Those two threats call for different conversations at the dinner table and for very different responses from law enforcement. If this case does turn out to involve a gore group, then fine: say so, name the man, file the charges, and show your work. Until then, hanging a scary warning on a rescued girl’s headline is just a press release with a mood.
(Sources)
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