Around the boy’s neck was a white extension cord he had used to hang himself from a black chain-link fence.
A few feet away, investigators spotted something else: an iPhone propped up on the ground, its camera pointed at the teen’s body.
At first, local police treated Jay Taylor’s death on Jan 17, 2022, as a suicide. Within days, however, a recording surfaced that revealed something more sinister. Jay’s hanging had been live-streamed on Instagram while online users watched.
In messages to Jay, those users suggested the time he should do it — in the middle of the night while his parents slept.
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They made sure he had the means — asking him, “You got a rope?”
They tried to persuade him to kill himself naked — urging him, “Take your clothes off, it’s hotter.”
But by the spring of 2022 — a few months after Jay’s death — police in this tiny maritime town on the Puget Sound were stumped. They couldn’t figure out who wrote the messages or why they would do something so unthinkable, according to investigators, Jay’s family, social media messages and law enforcement records. The detective in charge asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for help.
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The case would thrust investigators into the darkest corners of the internet — forums where groups of online predators manipulate vulnerable children, extorting them to share nude photos, mutilate their bodies and, in the worst cases, kill themselves. As the case dragged on, the FBI would come to view these groups as a terrorist threat, estimating that their members have targeted thousands of children. The agency is now investigating almost 300 people suspected of preying on children and other vulnerable people, cases that involve all 55 of its field offices.
Jay’s death — one of its earliest cases — illustrates the challenges of investigating this new and growing form of online predation. An examination by The Washington Post and Der Spiegel in Germany found that authorities struggled to identify laws that were broken. They faced jurisdictional hurdles as they traced suspected predators to countries around the world. And federal agents encountered reluctance from their own colleagues and other law enforcement officials in the US and abroad, who were just beginning to recognise and respond to this growing genre of abuse.
Early on, local police suspected Jay’s death was connected to these emerging groups. One of the most violent and extreme is known as “764” — named for part of the Zip code of a Texas boy who founded it in 2021 at the age of 15. Its members, authorities said, often seek out victims as trophies to gain clout and notoriety. Some members see their mission as weeding out society’s weakest, which they deem to include mentally ill, gay or transgender youths.
On a rainy Friday in spring 2022, the Gig Harbor detective in charge of Jay’s case sat two visiting FBI agents down in a conference room at city hall and for the next hour projected horrific images onto a large screen.
One captured private chats between Jay’s online tormentors, laughing and bragging about the fake empathy they’d used to coerce him into killing himself.
Others showed teens who had carved their torturers’ names and swastikas into their own skin. Some images showed young people who had been blackmailed into harming themselves sexually.
One of the FBI agents, Pat McMonigle, recoiled at the cruelty. “The lack of any kind of mercy for this kid, the manipulation they used, was shocking,” McMonigle recalled.
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By the end of the slideshow, McMonigle felt sick. He and his FBI partner walked out of the police department in a daze. Both had young children and lived in Gig Harbor. McMonigle and his four children often shopped at the grocery store where Jay hanged himself.
The two agents had planned to grab beers afterward at a bar across the street. Instead, they sat in their unmarked car to regroup.
It was obvious to them that a horrible predatory act had taken place, but they questioned whether they could investigate it. McMonigle and his partner worked for the FBI’s joint terrorism task forces, which focus on domestic threats like the Boston Marathon bombers or foreign ones like al-Qaeda terrorists. With Jay’s death, it wasn’t clear where the predators were located or whether they were driven by terrorist ideology.
McMonigle, 45, would later encounter brutality and bureaucratic hurdles in the case that challenged him in ways he’d never faced in his 16 years at the agency. By the end, he would sum up his experience with three words: “It broke me.”
But as the two agents sat in the car on that spring day in 2022, all they could think about was how the tormentors who targeted Jay were still out there, probably trolling the internet for their next victim.
The two investigators looked at each other, McMonigle recalled, and decided: “We’ve got to do something about this.”
Saving Jay
From talking to Jay’s parents, the agents learned he was a runner and prolific crafter.
In their two-story home an hour outside Seattle, Jay had filled his room with creations he was crocheting, knitting and painting for others. A half-finished hot pink sweater for his aunt. A beaded bracelet spelling out the names of his three brothers and their dog, Scout.
He was also painfully shy. At his third birthday party, he was so overwhelmed at being the focus of the entire room that he burst into tears.
Similarly, when Jay — who was assigned female at birth — told his mom at age 10 that he believed he was meant to be a boy, his biggest worry was what others would think. So he made the transition gradually — first telling friends and family that he might be gay and eventually that he was transgender.
His struggles with mental health began during the pandemic. Isolated at home with school shut down, Jay became anorexic and depressed at age 11.
“The cutting was scary,” said his mother, Leslie, a teacher at the time, recalling the scars she found on Jay’s legs at age 12. They sought help for him at Seattle Children’s Hospital. They educated themselves, learning how cutting is sometimes a coping mechanism for young people overwhelmed by emotions. They enrolled him in weeks-long residential treatment programs, driving thousands of miles to Colorado, Nevada and California to get him help.
His parents saw him get better. Online communities played a big role, they said. Jay joined an online LGBTQ+ support group. He launched an Etsy shop for his crafts and did speed crocheting with online pen pals.
But Jay’s parents were alarmed at what they discovered on his computer between his stays in residential programmes. Jay’s father, Colby, an executive for an online shipping company, found anorexia forums in Jay’s search history. Jay was also frequenting chatrooms devoted to cutting on Discord, a popular social media platform among gamers.
So his parents instituted strict rules. They took away his phone for a while. They deleted and blocked certain Discord servers from his laptop. Eventually, Jay was allowed to surf the internet but only in the family living room and with automatic time restrictions installed on his phone and laptop.
“We spent two years building systems in place to keep our child safe,” said Colby, 50.
For the most part, it seemed to work.
But in the final year of his life, they noticed inexplicable setbacks. For weeks, Jay would be happy, stable and safe. Then, suddenly, he would tell them he was struggling with intrusive thoughts of accidentally hurting himself or someone else.
“‘Honey, you never thought about that stuff before,’” Jay’s mother, now 48, would tell him. “‘I don’t know where you’re getting that.’”
“‘I need you to watch me. I need you to take my phone.’ He’d tell us things like that,” his father said. “We couldn’t explain the roller coasters.”
‘They need to be stopped’
After Jay’s hanging, his parents couldn’t sleep.
They struggled with how to explain to their three other children why Jay was now gone. Mostly, they sat on the living room couch while episodes of Game of Thrones played on a loop — none of it registering.
“I couldn’t process it,” Leslie said. “I’d forget briefly he was even gone, then get a call from the organ donation people or the funeral home and it’d all come rushing back again.”
It was in the middle of this fog, six days after Jay’s death, that they received a late-night message on Instagram.
“im not sure how much youve been told,” it began. The stranger, a teenage girl in Australia, said there was a video they needed to see.
Leslie couldn’t bring herself to look, so Colby went into their bathroom, closed the door and opened the video on his phone.
The recording showed a grid of users in an Instagram group chat. Only Jay had his video turned on. Colby recognised the black-and-white striped shirt on his son, who was standing on a guardrail next to a fence. There was no audio, but announcements flashed at the top of the video as users sent messages to one another.
Colby watched with rising horror as Jay positioned the white cord around his neck. Knowing what was coming next, Colby rushed to turn off the video.
Colby’s son had been the target of a dangerously sadistic group, the girl in Australia explained in messages. Some in that same group had pushed her to hurt herself, too.
“this is why ive came to u,” she wrote. “they need to be stopped.”
Colby gave a copy of the video to local police, and they later gave it to the FBI. McMonigle and his partner watched it over and over, searching for clues.
McMonigle had almost two decades of experience as an intelligence officer and FBI analyst, agent and field supervisor. He had joined the agency after a college classmate died on Flight 93 in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. He’d served as a hostage negotiator and survived a bombing in Afghanistan and a close call in Somalia.
His work overseas had been tough but straightforward. “You know who the enemy is, al-Qaeda guys in caves,” he said. By comparison, the threat now before him was amorphous and insidious — obscured by smartphones and fake IP addresses.
As law enforcement agents, they lacked the vocabulary for the acts they were investigating, McMonigle said. Coerced assault? Digital homicide?
He and his partner suspected from time references in chats they found that Jay’s tormentors lived in Europe. But to compel more detailed information about them from online platforms like Instagram and Discord, the FBI agents needed a prosecutor willing to pursue criminal charges.
They tried to persuade prosecutors at their region’s US attorney’s office to open an investigation under a variety of laws — even statutes against animal cruelty, after they found videos of perpetrators coercing teens into killing their own pets. The closest precedent they could find was a case in Massachusetts involving a woman sentenced by state courts in 2017 to 15 months for involuntary manslaughter after encouraging her boyfriend in calls and texts to kill himself.
A federal prosecutor in Seattle, whom they usually worked with on terrorism cases, initially declined to open a case, saying they needed more evidence. McMonigle said the assistant US attorney wanted cases that could be investigated within the US and had a high chance of conviction.
Months into their investigation, the two agents ran into the prosecutor again outside a bathroom at the US attorney’s office, which is housed in a tall glass building in downtown Seattle. “He proceeds to tell me that there’s no criminal case there. That we’re wasting our time, and my face got real red,” McMonigle said.
He responded angrily: “If only the parents knew you were talking this way about their son’s death, saying there’s no crime here, no reason to investigate.”
McMonigle’s partner declined to comment because he still works at the FBI and was not authorised to speak about the matter.
The agents persuaded a subordinate prosecutor in the same office — Assistant US Attorney Cecelia Gregson, who specialised in child abuse cases — to approve subpoenas under laws prohibiting the possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material.
Because their authority ended at the US border, the federal agents could subpoena only companies with servers and business in the US. But even that limited scope yielded a trove of messages, photos, videos and user information from Discord, Instagram and other US-based platforms. The data suggested that a 764 member in Germany was at the centre of the effort to target Jay, McMonigle said. Investigators didn’t know his real name, but on forums, he called himself “White Tiger”.
In one online profile uncovered by agents and also obtained and viewed by The Post and Der Spiegel, White Tiger described himself as an “E-girl groomer/extorter, paedophile.” He bragged on forums of having terabytes of child pornography and of coercing underage girls to send nude photos and bullying unstable kids into doing what he wanted.
“when i see a loser guy degrading himself, i get hard,” he wrote in a post.
He hid his real-life identity by using fake emails and multiple accounts across several online platforms.
For weeks, McMonigle, his partner and an FBI analyst dug into those profiles for clues to his real identity. In the summer of 2022 — half a year after Jay’s death — they caught a lucky break. One account was linked to an address in Hamburg, McMonigle said.
Inside a modern, expensive three-story house with floor-to-ceiling windows lived a medical student who was born in Iran and had immigrated to Germany with his parents.
Finally, the investigators had a suspect: an 18-year-old named Shahriar.
A trail of victims
Without the medical student’s knowledge, McMonigle and his partner gained access through subpoenas to files he stored online. (The Post is withholding Shahriar’s last name because of Germany’s privacy laws.)
They found videos and chats with mentally vulnerable children and teens but also personal images. One photo showed Shahriar cross-dressing in women’s clothes. Another showed the teen alone at home, dressed as a Nazi officer and wielding a large sword. But the image that puzzled McMonigle most showed Shahriar at a museum as a little boy, smiling as he stood next to a German tank. (Note: The descriptions of images in Shahriar’s files showing him cross-dressing, dressed as a Nazi officer and at a museum are based on interviews with McMonigle.)
“I remember having a hard time thinking, ‘What happened to this kid?’” he said.
As they delved into Shahriar’s digital world, investigators saw patterns to his tactics. A tall, thin, goateed youth, he often wooed mentally ill girls with love and attention on Discord, Instagram and Telegram, then allegedly blackmailed them with the photos and videos they sent him. (Note: Based on interviews with German and US authorities and online posts by White Tiger viewed by The Washington Post.)
There was the 12-year-old girl who carved a heart into her right thigh for him. The suicidal 13-year-old who repeatedly cut into her breast. A 15-year-old anorexic girl coerced into inserting a folding knife into her genitals. An 11-year-old girl blackmailed into self-harming sexual acts until visibly smeared with blood.
He shared recordings of their mutilation in gleefully proud messages with other 764 members. To show off, he invited others into group chats and forced his victims to cut visiting 764 members’ names into their skin as well. (Note: The descriptions of the victims and Shahriar’s alleged actions are based on interviews with US and German investigators as well as other authorities familiar with the case. The names of eight teenagers allegedly abused by Shahriar are being withheld by The Post because they are minors.)
One victim stood out — a girl from a Nordic country whose online name the FBI agents recognised from messages on the night of Jay’s death.
The Nordic girl was 12, depressed and suicidal when the user she knew as White Tiger found her in 2021. At his request, she cut herself repeatedly and wrote out his name with her blood, according to chats viewed by McMonigle and other investigators. In one act, captured on video, he commanded her to crush a small bird, dissect it with trembling hands, and present it to him on a sheet with “White Tiger” and a heart painted on it. (Note: The description of White Tiger’s interactions with the Nordic girl is based on interviews with McMonigle and German officials.)
But the one demand the Nordic girl refused to carry out was killing herself. White Tiger kept pressing her, according to records from investigators, even as she sought help from psychiatric clinics and talked of quitting Discord to become more mentally stable.
Knowing that White Tiger was desperate to secure a live-streamed suicide — considered an ultimate trophy among 764 members — the Nordic girl began looking for someone else who could kill themselves in her place. The Post is not naming her because she is a minor. In a series of messages, White Tiger coached her on how to gain the trust of mentally frail teens. (Note: The descriptions of the Nordic girl’s motive and White Tiger’s coaching of her are based on interviews with US and German authorities and other officials familiar with the case.)
In an online post obtained by The Post and Der Spiegel, he bragged of having “a suicide tutorial too (to help the emo girls).”
It was the Nordic girl who initially found and befriended Jay, authorities learned. (Note: Based on interviews with US and German investigators.)
Jay’s parents provided The Post and Der Spiegel access to his laptop, which contained many of the same messages agents examined in their investigation. Those messages show that one day before Jay died, he posted an open request on Discord for new transgender or gay friends who were interested in crafts. “I had a sudden urge to get a pen pal so here I am!” he wrote.
That night at 2:10 am — just hours before his death — Jay received a response. The records on his laptop showed only Jay’s side of the conversation because the other person had since deleted their messages — a feature allowed by Discord.
When the conversation turned to self-harm, Jay said repeatedly that he didn’t want to kill himself.
“i got some stuff going on that i want to live for lol.”
He apologised several times — among his more than three dozen messages that night — explaining that he was no longer interested in harming himself. But something the other person said later on appeared to change his mind.
“ill think about it, its only 2:30 and my mom wakes up at 5 so i got some time to think.”
Investigators said the Nordic girl overcame Jay’s resistance to suicide by telling him she wanted to kill herself too and that they should do it together. She sent him suicide instructions that White Tiger had previously given her. (Note: Based on interviews with McMonigle and German authorities.)
In some of his last messages on Discord, Jay wrote:
“if your gonna do it dm (direct message) me and ill do it with you, preferably not tho.”
“just dont kys [kill yourself] without me.”
That night Jay got out of bed and walked past his mother, who lately had been sleeping on a cot in his bedroom. He grabbed a white extension cord from a computer his father had built for the family. He made plans with the girl to shift their conversation from Discord to Instagram. “i cant bring discord because its only on my computer and theres no wifi outside,” Jay explained. (Note: The description of Jay’s last night is based on interviews with his parents and messages found on his laptop.)
The grocery store was a 15-minute walk away. As Jay arrived at the parking lot, investigators said, the Nordic girl called White Tiger in a panic to join her on Instagram, where she was talking to Jay. Posing as “Erika” — a hacked profile stolen from a girl in California — White Tiger took over the conversation, investigators said.
He made sure Jay had something to hang himself with, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Jay to disrobe and talked Jay through the final act. (Note: The descriptions of White Tiger’s conversations with the Nordic girl and how he coached Jay through the last moments of his suicide are based on interviews with German authorities. McMonigle confirmed those details.)
A meeting in Hamburg
Despite the evidence the FBI agents had collected, Shahriar remained outside their jurisdiction. They needed to go to Germany and try to persuade local authorities to arrest him.
McMonigle said they had to overcome resistance from supervisors at the FBI. “They didn’t even want us to go to DC at first to brief them, much less Germany,” he said. “They didn’t want to fund the trip. They asked which division the money would come from … international terrorism or domestic terrorism.”
McMonigle and his partner — a Marine Corps veteran and young father — prepared a two-hour PowerPoint presentation designed to shock German authorities into action.
On Feb 13, 2023 — more than a year after Jay’s death — the FBI agents were greeted at Hamburg police headquarters by more than a dozen German prosecutors and local and federal police.
They walked through the chat messages plotting Jay’s death, videos of White Tiger victimising others and files linking Shahriar to it all. (Note: The description of the meeting is based on interviews with German officials and McMonigle.)
But the meeting came to a close without any discussion of next steps. It became clear to McMonigle that nothing immediate would be done.
At a loss, the two FBI agents went to lunch in the Hamburg police cafeteria, then to a bar.
For months, they had studied White Tiger and graphic videos of his victims. And now, just minutes away from their suspect, there was nothing they could do. They didn’t visit Shahriar’s home for fear of interfering with any possible future investigation by local authorities.
“I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I go take the bus to his medical school,’” McMonigle said.
It was eerie riding through Shahriar’s stomping grounds, glaring at every student who boarded the bus.
“I remember thinking, ‘What if he gets on the bus?’”
“We’d given them everything we had - including White Tiger’s real identity and so much data,” he said.
Months after the Hamburg meeting, back in Seattle, McMonigle kept thinking about new victims Shahriar might be stalking while he remained free. He worried their suspect could carry out violence on a larger scale. “Where does it go from getting one kid to kill himself in the woods to then needing bigger and bigger kills?”
McMonigle began having nightmares of Shahriar, of his own children being harmed. He drank too much. He developed a twitch in his left arm.
Then, one afternoon — half a year after meeting with Hamburg police — McMonigle took his son to football practice and found himself sobbing in front of the other children and parents. While sitting in the bleachers, he received an email from Jay’s mother, Leslie. She told him she felt lost in an exhausting cycle of grief but thanked him and his partner for “working tirelessly to find the individuals who convinced Jay to take his life”.
“Why are you thanking us?” McMonigle thought, overwhelmed by guilt. “We’ve gotten basically nowhere.”
Over the years, McMonigle had lost nine colleagues to suicide. He knew the toll it could take. He requested and was granted reassignment to an administrative job. When he told superiors about the mental effects he was experiencing from the case, they ordered him to turn in his gun and interviewed colleagues about his fitness to serve.
“They always say it’s okay to not be okay,” he said. “Until you’re not okay, then you’re a liability.”
The FBI declined to comment on McMonigle’s experiences and the agency’s investigation of White Tiger but said in a statement that online groups such as 764 are a growing threat and focus of the agency.
In June 2024, McMonigle decided to quit the FBI altogether.
A search for answers
On June 18, 2025 — three-and-a-half years after Jay’s death — McMonigle was driving through Gig Harbor in his truck when he received a text from a former FBI colleague. German police had arrested Shahriar.
McMonigle pulled over with tears in his eyes and said a silent prayer. It hadn’t all been for nothing.
Jay’s parents learned of the arrest from the FBI. They felt relief and also a sense of hope — that those responsible for their son’s death might finally be held accountable.
The day after the arrest, German authorities held a two-hour news conference at Hamburg police headquarters. They described the findings of their investigation in detail without identifying Shahriar by name, as is customary in Germany for people arrested and awaiting trial.
Police had descended on the house where Shahriar lived with his parents in the middle of the night, hoping to find him logged on to his laptop or phone so they could access them. But he was asleep.
On his devices were terabytes of videos and photos. Of beheadings, disembowelments and children being abused. The content was so graphic that German authorities had to provide psychologists for investigators. (Note: The description of Shahriar’s arrest and items found in his home is based on the news conference and interviews with German authorities.)
Hamburg prosecutors said Shahriar and other 764 members were driven by competitive one-upmanship — who owned the most brutal videos, who could persuade someone to debase themselves in the most horrific way.
For Shahriar, German officials said, much of the violence was “to satisfy sexual urges” and “to fulfil his perverse power fantasies”.
A lead investigator, Björn Gebauer, showed an image from Shahriar’s hard drive, explaining to reporters, “I would like to take you into the mind of White Tiger.”
The photo was a meme of a leopard toying with its soon-to-be meal, a baby impala, by resting its paw on the prey’s shoulder. Over the leopard, Shahriar had written “Me,” and over the baby impala the words “a lost Cute Child.”
In Shahriar’s home, authorities had also discovered knives, brass knuckles, scalpels and firearms, as well as animal carcasses, manuals for AK-47 and AR-15 rifles, and instructions on his computer for making car bombs, pipe bombs, bio- and chemical weapons, and for committing terrorist attacks.
German investigators said Shahriar was studying medicine to transition from torturing teens online to living out fantasies in person by preying on vulnerable victims through medical work.
German authorities accused Shahriar of 123 counts of sexual abuse and violence. Their criminal charges focused on harm he allegedly inflicted from the time he was 16 to 18 on eight teenagers from four countries. The most serious charge: murder in the case of Jay Taylor.
In response to questions at the news conference about why it took German authorities two-and-a-half years after the FBI meeting in Hamburg to arrest Shahriar, the head of the State Criminal Police Office, Jan Hieber, said it was “regrettable” that the investigation took so long but that it was complex.
He said the FBI’s evidence was not admissible in German courts, “therefore, the investigation here in Hamburg had to be started from scratch.” Without meticulously analysing hundreds of screenshots and video recordings, chief public prosecutor Jörg Fröhlich said, they “probably wouldn’t have gotten an arrest warrant.”
It is unclear whether Shahriar abused any teens during the time it took authorities to arrest him. Two months after Jay’s death, according to the German investigators, Shahriar nearly persuaded a 15-year-old girl in Canada to kill herself with a knife.
Later, German prosecutors announced 81 additional criminal charges against Shahriar and said he had victimised more than 30 adolescents in all. The new charges include five attempted murders.
The legal charges against Shahriar account only for acts that occurred before 2023, when German police seized his computer and phone during a raid of his home. After the 2023 raid, Shahriar obtained a replacement phone and laptop and probably continued his behaviour “without interruption”, German authorities have said. Other parents have contacted authorities since the arrest, suspecting their children may also have been victims of White Tiger.
Prosecutors are now focused on the legally complicated task of convicting Shahriar of murder through “doubly indirect” means — using as his two tools the Nordic girl and Jay himself.
In an interview with The Post, Shahriar’s defence lawyer, Christiane C Yüksel, called the murder charge an overreach and said Shahriar, now 21, is not guilty. Yüksel said she took the case because of the complex legal issues at stake. “There are questions of who is responsible. Questions of how we regulate the internet. These are important questions.”
After his arrest, Shahriar’s parents said they did not know much about his online life. His father, who founded a medical technology company, told a German media outlet that his son was highly intelligent and educated. He played tennis and chess. But he became isolated during the pandemic.
“He then just sat in his room and was on the internet,” the father said, “from morning to night.” He knew Shahriar played online games, but “what else he did there — I don’t know. I can’t always stand by and control it.”
Meanwhile, Jay’s parents have followed the court proceedings from afar.
Because of Jay’s death, Leslie changed careers and became a licensed therapist, helping other teens struggling with self-harm. Recently, she sat down in Jay’s old room, now her home office, and logged on to a virtual therapy session — surrounded by Jay’s stuffed animals, his crochets, the chocolate stain he’d left on the carpet.
If only Jay had been able to talk to someone who actually cared about him that night instead of people intent on hurting him, Leslie said, “I know he would still be here.”
Downstairs, her husband, Colby, was also trying to make meaning of Jay’s death. The FBI had returned Jay’s laptop and phone. Colby opened up a thick plastic evidence bag and spread its contents on the dinner table.
He wanted to hold accountable online platforms that continue to allow users like White Tiger to find and exploit children. He wanted to propose legislation — perhaps called Jay’s Law — that would make it a crime to digitally coerce someone into suicide.
To do that, Colby needed to understand what happened. He wanted to uncover the exact words and tactics White Tiger used on his son. He wanted to prevent it from ever happening to others.
So he plugged in Jay’s old laptop, placed his hands over the keyboard and braced himself as the screen lit up. — The Washington Post
Chris Dehghanpoor contributed to this report
