I’m sure anyone who browses this subreddit has heard of the dark web. You know, the place where you can hire hitmen and watch people being tortured or whatever. Sure, those stories are creepy, but very little, if anything, is true when it comes to them.
Last year, during my final year of high school, I took a career exploration class that allowed me to pick a job and study under people who work in that field. Being the nerd that I am, I thought cybersecurity would be cool to study.
After weeks of looking for someone under whom I could study, my father put me in contact with someone we’ll call John. John owned a cybersecurity company that has been active since the early 90s and has collaborated with United States law enforcement and the FBI on multiple cases. I was immediately hooked; I knew I had to study under this guy. I emailed him, emailed his work, called him multiple times; I wouldn’t leave this guy alone until he said yes. One afternoon, as I was eating my lunch at school, I got a text from him confirming my work placement.
When I first met John in person, I was instructed to meet him at one of his offices. When I arrived at the building, I soon realized that the place was being used as a call center for selling air conditioners, but I didn’t question it.
I met John in his office, which was way in the back of the building. He was a tall, slim man with a bald head and thick glasses. He wore a very nice suit as well. We talked for a bit, and he came off as very nice. He talked about video games and what he thought of recent movies that had been released at the time, and for a while, I forgot that I was talking to my boss. Suddenly, he got serious and pulled out a few papers. He told me I didn’t have to read them because he would sum it up for me, and all I had to do was sign them.
He told me that working for his company could be very rewarding. He would pay for multiple online courses so I could learn Java, Python, C#, and some cybersecurity courses. He would also provide me with a desktop PC and any accessories that I would need with it. But he also told me about the downsides of working for his company. He told me that I’d have to view sensitive content and deal with “the harshness of the real world.” I put on a brave face and told him that it was nothing I couldn’t handle, and at the time, I even believed that.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The next few months were honestly pretty boring, mostly just doing online courses from home. But honestly, anything beats going to school, so I really couldn’t complain. One afternoon, as I was finishing one of my courses, I got a Teams call from John. He told me about a recent case he and his team were working on, and he wanted my help.
The case was about a shootout that happened in Oklahoma. A family owed money to a biker gang that had ties to drug trafficking, and one evening, the gang pulled up in front of the family’s house and opened fire. Four people were killed.
You might be wondering how this has any ties to the dark web. Well, after investigating, John and his team were able to locate the biker gang’s website, you know, where they would put up listings for their drugs.
I checked out the website for myself, and it honestly wasn’t too special. It’s something that I’ve seen before.
What disturbed me the most, though, were the crime scene photos. The mother was slumped over the kitchen table, her hands covering her bloody neck. The father was lying on the floor and appeared to have been shot in the stomach several times and died due to blood loss. A child no older than seven was dead beside his mother, shot in the head and covered in blood. The final picture was of an infant child. I don’t even feel comfortable describing what I saw.
I guess it really is just another gore site, you know? When I think about it, I’ve seen all this stuff before online. But I guess I never truly understood that these were all just people. People who had normal lives, people who had dreams, who had feelings. Now they were just nothing but bloody corpses, decomposing and emitting an awful smell.
Fuck, I just wish I could forget.
I’m constantly haunted by that family. I was there when multiple shooters were prosecuted in court, and I was there for the family’s funeral as well. But their faces never seem to leave my memory. I’m posting this story here because nobody will actually take this seriously. You will all just assume it’s fake.
I just hope that the next time you see a gore picture or video, you can look past all the blood and remember that they were just like you and me.
They were people.