[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
We’ve never been more upset to say we were right.
Over the past several months we’ve been following the story of Matthew Taylor Coleman, who allegedly murdered his young children after being radicalized by the site’s bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories. He was nicknamed the “QAnon Dad” by various media outlets. Well, that name is no longer specific enough, we’re afraid.
We warned numerous times that this was likely just the first of numerous such tragedies. We reasoned if it’s the online Q insanity that drove Coleman to brutally kill his own children because he thought they had “serpent DNA” that it could easily drive someone else to violence as well. And now that fear has become reality.
Related: Trisha Paytas Addresses Wild Conspiracy Theory Baby Is Reincarnation Of Queen!
According to WDIV Click On Detroit, at about 4:11 a.m. on Sunday, September 11, a young woman in Walled Lake, Michigan called the police about a shooting. She was so upset, she couldn’t even tell officers her address. They had to trace the call. Police soon found out why.
Her father, identified as Igor Lanis, was trying to kill her.
According to Oakland County Sheriff Micheal Bouchard, the 53-year-old snapped and shot his wife, his daughter, and the family dog. Only the daughter survived. The 25-year-old had called the police after being shot while trying to escape the rampage. Police say Igor shot his wife, Tina Lanis, 56, in the back four times as she was trying to get away — his daughter was shot in the back of the legs. Bouchard revealed the poor girl’s injuries were severe:
“I think she said she couldn’t feel her legs. So obviously the injury is pretty substantial.”
She was crawling out of the house as officers arrived. They had to use deadly force to stop her enraged father — after he opened fire on police, they returned fire, killing him. Bouchard says the killing was justified as he was a clear danger to everyone around him:
“I think there was danger to anybody. In fact, he had his keys with him when he engaged the officer and the deputy with the gunfire, so who knows where he was headed.”
The Sheriff said they were working “to gain insight into what set this into motion.” One person apparently holds the answer to that question.
Igor had another daughter, Rebecca Lanis, who was not home at the time of the attack. She has decided to speak out about what happened to her family. Thus far she has provided the only glimpse into a motive for her father’s shocking actions — he was radicalized by Q.
She had found a Reddit subgroup called QAnonCasualties, a forum for people with family members who had been twisted by the conspiracy theory epidemic. In a heartbreaking post on Sunday, she wrote that “the internet ruined” her father. She explained that after the election her father had gotten into the same nonsense that’s gripped millions:
“In 2020 after Trump lost, my dad started going down the Q rabbit hole. He kept reading conspiracy theories about the stolen election, Trump, vaccines, etc. He always said he wanted to keep us safe and healthy.”
That desire got twisted by the site, which spreads bizarre misinformation, including the idea that the leading Democrats are all part of a cannibalistic cabal of child molesters that Donald Trump is secretly waging a one-man war against. Rebecca continued:
“It kept getting worse and he verbally snapped at us a few times. Nothing physical though. He never got physical with anybody.”
As far as anyone could tell, before Q, Igor was a gentle man, known to neighbors as “the guy with the fluffy white dog” for his frequent walks with his “beautiful” Great Pyrenees. The same dog he shot multiple times with a shotgun.
As Rebecca lamented:
“Well, at around 4 AM on September 11, he had an argument with my mother and he decided to take our guns and shoot her, my dog, and my sister. My mother succumbed to her wounds and my sister is in the hospital right now.”
The newly orphaned young woman also spoke to the local paper the Detroit News, telling them about her late father:
“I think that he was always prone to [mental issues], but it really brought him down when he was reading all those weird things on the internet.”
She told WDIV about how it just kept getting worse:
“In 2021 I could see him starting to spiral. Then in 2022 he was completely spiraled off the deep end. Every conversation we had, he had to bring up vaccines or COVID or 5G or EMFs or something.”
She told the outlet she wanted to get the message out about Q, saying:
“If any of you have relatives like this, you need to start monitoring them, especially if they have guns. If they have guns, you should just hide them or something because these people are dangerous.”
We couldn’t agree more. We’ve been trying to get this message out for months now. If someone you love is being twisted by Q, you can’t just ignore it and hope it will go away. It’s only going to get worse. Please, please, seek out professional help for them. Set up an intervention. Both of these QAnon Dads were said to be kind, harmless people before being corrupted by conspiracy theories. This is going to happen again; please don’t let it be to your family.
She also showed the outlet links online already painting the story of her family’s killing as a hoax. Of course.
Rebecca says she and her sister, whose condition has been downgraded from critical to stable, are planning to move away and start over after the tragic incident. See more (below):
BTW, Rebecca ended her enraged post on Reddit by writing directly to those responsible for spreading these conspiracy theories:
“F**k you, QAnon. I hope the FBI tightens its grasp on you and that your lackies [sic] rot in prison (and hell) for poisoning so many people.”
Couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
[Image via WDIV Click On Detroit/YouTube.]
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