Man who planned mass shooting of women at OSU convicted

COLUMBUS — Tres Genco wanted to make history, to be remembered for carrying out a mass shooting specifically targeting women at Ohio State University with the hopes of killing 3,000.

Instead, he’ll be remembered for something else: the first “incel” to be convicted of federal hate crime charges.

For those reasons, prosecutors are urging a federal judge in Cincinnati to hand down a sentence on Thursday that sends a message to the online community of men known as incels, or involuntary celibates. The members harbor anger toward women because they believe women deny them romantic or sexual attention.

“Society needs to be protected from individuals like the defendant who not only espouse such a toxic philosophy but plot mass attacks of violence in furtherance of it,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Megan Gaffney Painter wrote in court records. “The defendant would have carried out a devastating mass murder if he had not been stopped. The women of our state need to be protected from the defendant for as long as possible.”

Gaffney Painter asked U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott to sentence Genco to 12.5 years in prison. Defense attorneys argued that Genco harmed no one and should be sentenced to two years of time served since his July 2021 federal arrest. He pleaded guilty to a charge of an attempted hate crime in October 2022.

“He committed no actual violent acts toward women, nor did his conduct in this offense ever put women in fear of harm,” wrote defense attorney Richard Monahan. “In fact, in the entire course of the attempted hate crime,

Mr. Genco never actually encountered a woman.”

Dlott, in a ruling earlier this month, rejected some of Monahan’s arguments. She found that Genco “was ready to act” on his threats.

“His conduct is more reprehensible than an attempted hate crime,” Dlott wrote.

‘Most extreme form of hatred’

Genco’s sentence will be closely watched by those who monitor extremism and hate groups. It comes at a time when the incel movement showed signs of growing, said Samantha Kutner, who researches extremists and serves as an intelligence analyst for GlitterPill, a company that fights counterterrorism.

“This would be a landmark case in gender-based violence,” Kutner said.

Incels often talk in extremely misogynist terms about women, rape and causing harm to women. In some online forums, where men become radicalized, incels are encouraged to take their own lives. Others are encouraged to carry out real-world violence. Prosecutors said since 2017, at least 38 people in the United States and Canada have been killed by self-described incels.

Kutner said Genco’s case marked the most “extreme form of hatred toward women.”

“Cases like this where someone very clearly stated their intent to harm as many people as possible based on being an ideologically motivated extremist fueled entirely by gender, it’s critical to set a precedent,” Kutner said.

Michael Benza, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said Genco’s sentence will be used as a benchmark in other cases against incels.

“The government will base its future sentencing recommendations on what the new defendant did and compare that to what Genco did,” Benza said. “And the defense will be looking to say, ‘My guy wasn’t as bad as Genco, so he should get less time.’”

Benza said it’s apparent that federal prosecutors are taking note of the incel movement. He said it appeared they were seeking to identify those in the group and identify potential threats.

“They’re looking, I’m sure, to develop a history of these cases, but also they must think there’s an idea that these people might start acting,” Benza said. “And they want to try to get ahead of it before somebody shows up at a university and starts shooting people.”

Plan to ‘slaughter out of hatred, jealousy, revenge’

Prosecutors wrote in court filings that’s exactly what they believe Genco intended.

Genco was initially arrested on March 12, 2020, by Highland County sheriff ’s deputies in Hillsboro, a small city in Southwest Ohio, after his mother called 911 and said her son was acting erratically and went in his room with a gun. She told deputies she found notes he wrote and worried that he planned to harm others.

Genco pleaded guilty to making a terrorist threat and served a 17-month state prison sentence. He had been out for about five months when the FBI finished combing through phone records and “found something far more sinister in the works,” prosecutors wrote in court records.

Investigators discovered 3,487 messages that contained the word “incel” on his web and phone history. In addition, he posted more than 450 times on incel forums. They also found that he idolized Elliot Rodger, an incel who killed six people and injured 14 in an attack in 2014 near the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Genco also conducted dozens of searches of incels who carried out violence, including Marc Lepine, who killed 14 women in 1989, and Alek Minassian, an incel who killed 11 people and injured 15 in 2018.

Investigators found disturbing memes saved on his phone, including one that depicted a woman being raped at gunpoint.

FBI agents unraveled his plan to carry out violence. That included buying guns, conducting surveillance and obtaining weapons training in the U.S. Army.

He bought a bulletproof vest, a hoodie that said “revenge” on it and a bowie knife. He later obtained an AR-15 with a bump stock, which makes the gun fire as an automatic weapon. He also purchased a ghost gun — an untraceable gun made with a 3-D printer that fires like an automatic weapon — and two other handguns.

In July 2019, Genco wrote a manifesto, “A Hideous Symphony, a Manifesto Written by Tres Genco, the Socially Exiled Incel,” while on vacation in Greece. He also wrote notes on hotel stationery that laid out his plan to target women at Ohio State, and his hope to have a “kill count” of some 3,000.

He wrote that he enlisted in the Army to train for the mass shooting.

“This training will be for the attainment of one reality, the death of what I have been deprived most, but also cherish and fantasize at the opportunity of having but has been neglected of: Women,” he wrote. “I will slaughter out of hatred, jealousy and revenge.”

The same day, he searched Ohio State sororities.

‘Your hopeful friend and murderer’

He went to basic training in the Army on Aug. 20, 2019, in Fort Benning, Georgia. While he was there, he read about mass shootings and posted in a Kik Messenger group that he was kicked out of an incel forum for saying he wanted to rape and kill women.

The Army booted Genco in December 2019 for poor performance and conduct.

He returned home to live with his mother and kept preparing for the shooting, prosecutors said. He wanted to carry it out on May 23, 2020, the anniversary of Rodger’s infamous attack.

As he planned the attack, he wrote another note on his phone: “If you’re reading this, I’ve done something horrible. Somehow you’ve come across the writings of the deluded and homicidal, not an easy task, and for that I congratulate you for your curiosity and willingness to delve into such a dark topic.” He signed it, “Your hopeful friend and murderer.”

Gaffney Painter, the prosecutor, wrote incels increasingly pose a violent threat to women and that a long prison sentence would send that message.

“The incel movement presents a terrorist threat, both domestically and abroad,” she wrote.

Difficult upbringing

Monahan, Genco’s attorney, wrote in his argument that his client had a difficult upbringing. He said that, although Genco’s writings were disturbing, his client had matured after serving his state prison sentence and no longer identified as an incel.

Genco grew up in Los Gatos, California, with a single mother who was autistic and agoraphobic, a disorder that often causes some people to avoid unfamiliar settings. She also suffers from severe post-traumatic stress disorder from child abuse.

Genco was bullied in school and later homeschooled, which court records say stunted his social skills. He went to Shasta College, an online school, for a year. His grandmother died and left his mother an inheritance that she used to move to Hillsboro, Monahan wrote.

“He was extremely socially awkward due to his upbringing and found online relationships to be significantly easier,” Monahan wrote. “It was, however, also a place that he encountered many extreme views, including the incel movement.”

Monahan argued Genco’s online comments were more of a therapeutic outlet, rather than specific threats. When he wrote his manifesto, he was drinking alcohol heavily for the first time, Monahan said.

Before he was arrested by sheriff ’s deputies, Genco aspired to become a pharmacy technician. He had expressed to people that he no longer believed in incel ideology because he “didn’t want the negative stuff back in his life,” Monahan wrote.

After he was released from state prison, he worked at a restaurant in Chillicothe and at a candle-making business and enrolled at Columbus State Community College. He never attended the school because the FBI arrested him on the hate-crime charge.

Monahan also wrote that Genco suffered from undiagnosed bipolar and alcohol use disorder at the time he plotted the shooting.

“In sum, Mr. Genco is in a very different place in his life than he was at age 19, over three years ago,” Monahan wrote.