Throughout his rise into spirituality’s elite, Massaro straddled the thin, blurry line between guru and cult leader.
They never spoke again.
When the retreat began, Brent sat among the students. He listened as Massaro answered the crowd’s questions, easing them away from suspicion and into his experiment. He watched as the guru he had followed across the country closed his eyes and led them in silent meditation, trying to connect with the same source of bliss that he had found all those retreats and miles ago. Nobody spoke.
Outside, another Sedona day passed by. Brent crossed his legs and sat still, trying to somehow calm his mind. To find himself. To reach enlightenment.
A hiker found his body in the cool waters of Oak Creek. Brent lay on his back, his unblinking eyes staring at the cliffs above. Scrapes of dirt and blood scarred his gray sweatshirt. Police stood on slick rocks and turned out his pockets, pulling out a small black wallet, his Sedona Experiment II name badge and the key to a Toyota 4Runner parked 225 feet above him.
A detective tugged open the unlocked front door, taking in the result of 34 years of life. An unused tennis bag and a $45 check for a cellphone. A dirty pair of white Nikes. A plastic crate of paperwork, a resume with a yearlong gap and a note, scribbled in capital letters on the back of a McDonald’s receipt.
‘Continue to have faith’
The Arizona Republic
it read.
“I’m not clouded by the events that has happened surrounding my own environment, the circumstances,” Massaro said in his first video posted after Brent’s death. The camera shook in the guru’s hand. He looked like he hadn’t slept: A blond beard stretched across his chin, and deep creases underlined his eyes. “The way it’s been feeling for me,” he said, holding the camera close, “is like this constant pressure in the air.”
He made no mention of Brent. In the weeks after his death, Massaro had flipped between empathy and distance. He called Brent “angelic,” then claimed in an interview with the that they were never close. First Brent was a “dear friend.” Then he was never a regular follower. “We didn’t always feel as connected in that way,” Massaro said in the interview. “He never told us about suicide being on his mind at all.”
The Sedona Police Department listed Massaro as its “investigative lead” in Brent’s death, but detectives later decided no charges could be filed. “We’re not prepared and will not tie it to Ben,” McGill later said in an interview.
But Brent’s friends and family blamed Massaro for his death. So did some of Massaro’s closest followers. Angry eyes followed him across Sedona. Subscribers fled, and his empire teetered. So, in the days after the experiment ended, as his students scattered his message across the country and Brent’s family held a funeral, Bentinho Massaro ran.
Claiming to fear for his girlfriends’ lives, he fled Sedona and announced that his next two retreats would be his last. But the message couldn’t stop. Instead, he would focus on his newest online program, hand-selecting 133 elite students to become “Civilization Upgraders.” For $1,200 month, he would show them how to usher in a New Earth.
Now he held his eyes wide and spoke quickly, trying to make his followers understand that he was under attack, that this wasn’t his fault, that he was still the path to enlightenment. “Continue to have faith,” he urged them. The camera shook in his hand. An energetic detox was underway, he explained. The universe was simply purging its negative vibrations, finally preparing to shift into the fourth density. They were so close.
“I don’t think you realize how quickly you’ll be gone,” he wrote on Facebook the next day. “I’m inside your heart. I hope you know.”