By Kat Tenbarge and Ben Collins -
NBC News
A YouTube channel with numerous videos featuring Monday's Highland Park shooting suspect posted clips simulating the violence he perpetrated, including one that appears to show the parade route and another featuring an animated gunshot.
The channel,
zerotwo
, has been removed by YouTube, but the archives of the channel and its videos remain online.
The suspect, 21-year-old Robert
Bobby
E. Crimo III, had another YouTube account called
Awake
, which was also the name under which Crimo performed as a rapper.
Law enforcement has independently verified that account is associated with Crimo.
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The
zerotwo
channel , a screenshot of which was captured by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, contained archived footage of Crimo, who appears in many of the channel's videos and in his profile picture.
It contained 17 videos posted in the last two years, all of them less than five minutes long.
Some of them contained the same scenes and images from
Crimo's
Awake channel.
Channel zerotwo
's most recent video
, uploaded eight months ago, included a cartoon figure shooting at people and a voiceover that implied violence.
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One such video, titled
Robert Crimo Archive Footage: File XM058
, appears to show the parade route site that became the site of a deadly shooting that killed seven people and wounded dozens more Monday during a March 4 parade. July.
Crimo was arrested later that same day.
[With the same detail that planned the attack, his victims remember the horror they experienced]
Our sister network, NBC News, saw a copy of the
File XM058
video , which is 17 seconds long and was uploaded 10 months ago.
It shows a wide shot of an empty street in the early morning.
The camera moves as if attached to the back of a vehicle driving down the street, and the sound of an emergency siren can be heard over the footage, though it's unclear if the audio was edited into the footage.
Crimo does not appear in the video.
A YouTube spokesperson said in an emailed statement: “Following the horrific Highland Park incident, our trust and safety teams quickly identified and removed violent content, in accordance with our community guidelines.
Additionally, we've taken down some channels in accordance with our creator responsibility guidelines."
Site of the mass shooting during a July 4, 2022, parade in Highland Park, Illinois. Jim Vondruska/Getty Images
On the website for the City of Highland Park, it is described that the parade route begins on St. John Avenue before turning onto Central Avenue.
The street view of Central Avenue provided by Google Maps matches the images in the YouTube video.
[“We didn't know where the bullets were coming from”: the terror experienced by survivors of the shooting in Highland Park]
Authorities said Tuesday that Crimo planned the attack for "several weeks" and that he wore women's clothing during the shooting to avoid detection.
Crimo scaled a fire escape to reach the roof of a building near the parade route, where he fired more than 70 shots into the crowd below, according to authorities.
Crimo, a native of Highland Park, used a legally purchased high-powered rifle that is similar to an AR-15, authorities said.
Sgt. Christopher Covelli of the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force explained at a news conference Tuesday morning that Crimo had been planning the crime for "weeks," and that authorities had been investigating the messages on the phone. line associated with the shooter to determine a motive.
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Crimo was very active on forums focused on violent videos and extremism in the years before the attack.
He was also active in a forum that exclusively aggregated videos of murders and violent incidents online, last posting in the week before the shooting.
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On the Discord chat app, Crimo lashed out at “communists” under his rapper name Awake.
The Discord channel, titled
SS
, was first discovered by researchers from the Unicorn Riot website, a nonprofit media group that tracks the far right.
Crimo also published what it called an Amazon e-book
manifesto
, which consisted of 28 pages of numbers seemingly meant to be cracked.
The eBook, which was published in February 2021, is no longer available on Amazon.