*** Warning: Some readers may find details of the case included below disturbing.
From his Monroe County home, Destin Angel Petrides extorted the 13-year-old victim he met on Roblox into an unimaginable choice, state police say.
Petrides, 20, told the victim, who lives in Canada, he could kill himself or “carry out a school shooting,” according to an arrest affidavit.
The victim chose suicide and tried to kill himself twice — once by hanging from a ceiling fan, another time by ingesting pills.
The boy survived both attempts to tell a lurid story of sexual extortion and forced self-mutilation at the coercion of Petrides, a man who boasted of his “worship” of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Nazis, according to the affidavit, filed in June and only recently released to the public. Petrides saw Mussolini as “his spirit animal.”
The victim told Canadian police that Petrides had other victims, including one he was hurting “really bad.”
“This child is in the Philippines and constantly has to do sexual things to his family pets,” Trooper Matthew Kelly wrote in the affidavit.
Efforts to reach authorities about potential other cases were not immediately successful.
Amid all of his abuse of a boy whom state police refer to as Victim AA, Petrides wanted to be known as “Star,” according to the affidavit.
The charges
State police charged Petrides, of Polk Twp., with attempted murder in the first degree; aiding suicide; sexual abuse of children by knowingly forcing or permitting a child to photograph or film himself committing a sex act; unlawful contact with a minor involving sexual exploitation; criminal use of a computer to solicit the victim toward suicide and generating child sexual abuse material; theft by extortion; and sexual extortion.
Grooming into self-harm
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security investigator told state police on June 15 that Canadian police reported “grooming, causing self-harm and enticing (of) a minor in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.”
Victim AA reported the abuse June 11, after Petrides began "swatting" the boy's family. Swatting is falsely reporting an emergency to get police to respond to an alleged crime scene. The boy’s father told police his daughter was “swatted” in Alberta, Canada.
The boy worried that “people are coming to throw Molotov cocktails at his house and that the family was in danger,” according to the affidavit.
He told Canadian police a man named Destin made him “stay on video 24/7, (and) instructed him not to eat and to cut himself.”
How it started
He met the man three to five months ago on Roblox, an online platform for video games. Petrides offered him a job as a Roblox developer and he accepted. He had the boy join Discord, too. Discord is a communications app.
“To verify that Victim AA was serious about taking the job, he had to send a picture of his face to Destin,” the affidavit says.
Petrides asked for his address, too. When the boy refused, Petrides said “he would use AI (artificial intelligence) to make the face photo into something bad and (would) send (it) to his family.”
The boy provided the address.
Swatting and coercion
Next, Petrides asked the boy to call Canadian police using the anonymity of Google Voice and report that a friend “raped his little brother.”
He coerced the boy into providing nude photos by saying he would tell police about the false rape report, according to the affidavit. At that point, Petrides controlled all the boy’s online accounts.
From there, he had the boy begin “cutting,” the act of slicing into his skin. After a while, the cutting became “repenting.”
He had the boy perform tasks “that resulted in either punishments or rewards,” the affidavit says. “The rewards would be food deliveries, package deliveries or crypto currency. The punishments would be cutting or repenting.”
Repenting in blood
Eventually, repenting meant creating “blood walls.”
The boy had to cut himself and draw the words “Star” or “Stars” — Petrides’ nicknames — or an actual star with his blood on a wall.
“The blood wall-making had to be live streamed,” the affidavit says, meaning it was shown live on the internet.
On his birthday, May 8, Petrides had “all of the youth that he extorts carve ‘Happy Birthday Stars’ into their bodies,” according to the affidavit.
If the boy refused a task, Petrides had him “cut a piece of skin off and eat it," according to the affidavit.
Suicide or school shooting
Petrides had other kids at his school involved because classmates beat him up, the boy told police. He stopped going to school and Petrides threatened to distribute his nude photos to classmates.
“Destin had told Victim AA that the only way he could prevent this was to commit a school shooting” or kill himself, the affidavit says.
Petrides planned to ship him “an air soft gun” and a modification kit he could turn into a functioning gun.
He wanted Victim AA to go to school and “first present a knife to draw attention and a crowd,” the affidavit says.
“Once the crowd congregated, Victim AA was to start shooting and Destin instructed him to only aim at heads,” the affidavit says. “Victim AA was to kill as many people as possible before the police responded. The key task ... was to shoot and kill at least one police officer before committing suicide.”
The boy chose trying suicide, but survived both attempts.
On June 15, “swatting calls took place in Canada throughout the day,” the affidavit says.
Canadian publications reported multiple swatting attempts that day and following days, an internet search shows.
Swatting the father and sister
Petrides also targeted members of the boy's family.
The boy’s father received a call saying the caller would tell a local airport “the father was enroute with a bomb.”
“Toronto police received a call that Victim AA’s father was going to carry out a ‘terrorist attack’ outside their station,” the affidavit says. “Victim AA’s school received a swatting call reporting a school shooting.”
The boy’s sister reported receiving a call that the swatting would stop “if the family paid between $20,000 and $30,000.”
Police found the boy’s cell phone controlled by someone other than his father and eventually found phone pictures of the boy mutilating himself and videos of him trying to strangle an orange cat.
Police crack Roblox account
A Homeland Security investigator tracked down Petrides by targeting his Roblox internet protocol address and the boy’s.
The boy’s account, controlled by Petrides, was “IamNothingWorthless.”
Armed with a search warrant, state troopers found Petrides in a bedroom of his home and a “black desktop ... that had water poured over it,” the affidavit says.
A thumb drive had a picture, apparently drawn in blood, that read “Stars Daddy Ace.” They also found pictures with the boy’s and his father’s names, a Google Maps view of their home, a chat on a laptop related to the extortion of the sister and the picture of a “light-skinned arm” with cuts spelling “Happy Birthday” with a star cut in the middle of the two words.”
Efforts to reach Monroe County District Attorney Mike Mancuso and Newfoundland and Labrador police were not immediately successful.
It is unclear why the affidavit was sealed from the public for three months or why it was unsealed.
Petrides was arraigned June 16 by Magisterial District Judge Jamie Levy, who denied him bail. His preliminary hearing is scheduled for Sept. 24 at 10:30 a.m.
