WASHINGTON —The warning signs were there, flaring up from Nicholas Giampa’s pseudonymous Twitter feed for over a year. The alt-right lingo and the swastikas. The advertisements of violence.
Giampa’s girlfriend’s parents, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker, 43, and Scott Fricker, 48, were aware of the teenager’s burgeoning extremism. Kuhn-Fricker had found frightening tweets from Giampa on her daughter’s phone. Twitter was where Giampa, a Papa John’s employee and an anime enthusiast, let his malevolence run amok.
Kuhn-Fricker and Fricker had seen enough to say something. Days later, Giampa fatally shot them in their Virginia home, police say.
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When Giampa first started tweeting from the @doctorpepper35 account in May 2016, he already espoused far-right views. An enthusiastic supporter of then-candidate Donald Trump, he often used racist slurs to attack Trump’s critics. In the summer of 2016, Giampa told one Twitter user to “go back to the gas chamber,” called another a “kike” and labeled several users whom he disagreed with as “cucks.” He talked about “globalist scum” and, a few weeks later, referred to a right-wing conspiracy theory about “how hillary has literally murdered people.”
Most of Giampa’s Twitter activity consists of retweets and replies to other Twitter users. He retweeted Trump in July when the president called for a ban on transgender people serving in the military.
During the first several months Giampa tweeted under @doctorpepper35, he was closely focused on the ongoing civil war in Syria, frequently tweeting in support of President Bashar Assad, a strongman who has slaughtered his own people throughout the conflict. Although Giampa did not yet openly associate with white nationalist groups on Twitter at the time, his defense of Assad gave him a common cause with the far-right community. White nationalists have
lionized the brutal leader as a hero who stands up to Zionists in Israel and purges Islamic terrorists from his country. (In reality, Assad has targeted anyone who opposes his rule — including peaceful protesters.)
For unknown reasons, Giampa’s Twitter activity all but stopped from November 2016 to June 2017. He didn’t tweet about Trump’s electoral victory or when the president ordered airstrikes targeting the Assad regime in April, a move that was heavily criticized by his alt-right fans. During the first six months of 2017, the teenager tweeted only one time.
Kuhn-Fricker seemed to have become concerned about Giampa’s ideology soon after he started dating her daughter, The Washington Post
reported. Over the summer, her daughter told her that Giampa was good at history and had asked her, “Did you know that Jews are partly to blame for WWII?”
When Giampa returned to Twitter this past summer, around the time he started dating the daughter of Kuhn-Fricker and Kuhn, his tweets were vicious. On July 26, the same day Trump announced the transgender military ban, Giampa fired off a series of threatening tweets targeting gay and transgender people.
“I’ve already talked 1 tranny into suicide and I’m working on another 2 ,” he bragged. Then he posted a rainbow lynching image, encouraging gay and transgender people to commit suicide. “#transrightsarehumanrights is an oxymoron because trannies aren’t ‘people,’” Giampa tweeted that day.
Giampa retweeted Trump’s announcement of the transgender military ban, but he appeared to have been wavering in his overall support for the president. “I don’t even support trump lol I just think it’s funny how easy it is for him to piss people off,” he tweeted on July 26, months after Trump’s airstrikes against the Assad regime.