LGBTQ+ CRIME IN THE U.S.
Now, They’re Just Killing Trans Kids
And nobody’s talking about the terrorist behind it all
You probably haven’t heard the story of Nex Benedict, a straight-A student brutally beaten to death in an Oklahoma school bathroom on February 8.
The Owasso Public Schools, the Oklahoma school district where Nex was murdered, sure doesn’t want you to know about them. Nex was nonbinary, and identified as they/them. It’s why Nex was murdered. And it’s why the school district would like to see this story stay out of the news. So far, it has succeeded.
A witness described Nex’s murder to Tulsa television station KJRH:
…three older girls were beating on the victim and her daughter in the girl’s bathroom.
“I know at one point, one of the girls was pretty much repeatedly beating her head across the floor,” she said.
That’s when she said a teacher walked in and broke it up.
“She couldn’t walk to the nurses’ station on her own, and staff didn’t call the ambulance, which amazes me,” she said.
The local news reports were subdued, with KJRH offering this paragraph, as if Nex’s death was just one of those things that happens in schools these days:
A 16-year-old Owasso High School student died on Feb. 8, and police are working to learn what happened.
On Feb. 15, Sue Benedict confirmed her child, Dagny Benedict, was the victim.
The Owasso Police Department said they were called to Bailey Medical Center by the teenager’s parent on Feb. 7 around 3 p.m. When officers arrived, the parent told them their child was involved in a fight at the school, according to police.
It wasn’t a fight. As you learn much further down in the story, it was a targeted bludgeoning of an innocent child.
2 News got the tip about the fight from a woman who claimed to be the mother of the victim’s best friend. We spoke with her on Feb. 9.
“I think complications from brain trauma, head trauma, is what caused it,” she said.
And then, finally, we see the bit in the story about another student repeatedly bashing Nex’s head into the floor.
If you’re not sobbing now, if you’re not crying or screaming or yelling, then you know how numb we’ve all become to the daily news. This isn’t your fault. The psychosis of a lost nation has affected all of us.
But you should read about Nex anyway because they could be anybody’s kid. Including yours.
According to an obituary that we should not have to read:
Nex was a nature lover. They enjoyed caring for cats but particularly loved their cat, Zeus. Nex also enjoyed watching the Walking Dead, drawing, reading, and playing Ark and Minecraft. During the funeral, their family said they loved to cook and would often make up their own recipes.
And as I said, Nex was an A student. They were killed in a school bathroom at the prime of their teenage years, where hope should have been their emblem, not the hate of the school they attended.
It’s not a coincidence that Oklahoma is the nexus of the Libs of TikTok and its terrorist founder and “owner,” Chaya Raichik.
Raichik used to describe herself as a “stochastic terrorist,” but she removed this description from her social media profiles for obvious legal reasons. Libs of TikTok, and Raichik in particular, have been running a dedicated campaign against the LGBTQ+ community since 2021.
She relishes her role in causing violent disruption against the LGBTQ+ community:
One post of hers alone resulted in more than twenty bomb threats:
Last March, police in Coralville, Iowa, investigated a bomb threat targeting a junior high school. Authorities brought in specially trained dogs to sniff for explosives and started looking into why someone might try to target the community’s teachers and students.
Law enforcement quickly determined that the threat was a hoax. Detective Hanna Dvorak from the Coralville Police Department arrived at a theory.
“It appears this all stems from a post made earlier this week by Chaya Raichik and her ‘Libs of TikTok’ account,” Dvorak wrote in a report to her superiors.
The NBC article continues:
Raichik had posted that the school offers a “pornographic” book in its library that “teaches kids about gay sex.”
Then, the bug-eyed followers of her TikTok account took action, just like Trump’s supporters have gotten into the habit of swatting prosecutors (including Jack Smith) and witnesses involved in the many Trump trials around the nation.
You might be wondering by now, what the heck is a stochastic terrorist?
According to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security, and Law:
As described by leading scholars, stochastic terrorism involves ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable’ (Hamm, M. S. & Spaaij, R. [2017]
By spreading hate, stochastic terrorists spread violence. They’re cowards, too, because they don’t have the courage to partake in the violence they gleefully promote. They want their followers to do it for them.
As most of you know, a stochastic terrorist with 91 felony indictments and a conviction in civil court of rape and defamation wants one more chance to ruin the country even further as an American president.
Anyone who promotes violence toward the LGBTQ+ community should be held accountable. This includes the Republican government of Oklahoma, where its state superintendent of schools, Ryan Walters, is one of Chaya Raichik’s biggest fans:
Walters is a stochastic terrorist who was also responsible for Nex’s death with his relentless attacks against the LGBTQ+ community, and nonbinary folks in particular.
The United States has veered so far to the right that Nex’s murder has received no headlines. There was a time, like when Matthew Shepard was killed against a split rail fence in the Wyoming outback, that this story would have been a headliner across the nation.
Not today. Nex’s family suffers alone.
The spread of Republican hate has numbed us. These kinds of Republicans have infested the state governments of many red states since the hate cult of MAGA began taking hold of the country in 2016.
And now, Nex Benedict, a sixteen-year-old with their world, and, for them, a bright future ahead, is dead.
This is our future if, God forbid, Trump wins re-election. The infestation of red states has already begun. It won’t be easy to turn it around even if Biden wins re-election.
But if he doesn’t, it’s checkmate, not just for kids like Nex, but the rest of us, too.
Notes
UPDATE: Mainstream press finally beginning to pick this up:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/02/21/oklahoma-teen-lgbtq-nex-benedict-died/
As far as I know, no arrests have been made (including after the update).
Raichik calls her TikTok terror campaign “Libs of TikTok” because she thinks she’s “owning the libs.”
Nex’s family has a GoFundMe page at:
This story would not have been possible without this writeup by Vishal Singh in the Daily Kos, which is how I learned about it:
If you feel threatened by your community, there is help:
LGBTQ+ affirming crisis support can be found at such groups as Trans Lifeline (877–565–8860), the Trevor Project (call 1–866–488–7386 or text START to 678–678), and the LGBT Hotline (888–843–4564).
Thank you for reading this story and taking what action you can to help end these atrocities.
