WASHINGTON — The warning signs were there, flaring up from Nicholas Giampa’s pseudonymous Twitter feed for over a year. The alt-right lingo and the swastikas. The advertisements of violence.
Giampa’s girlfriend’s parents, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker, 43, and Scott Fricker, 48, were aware of the teenager’s burgeoning extremism. Kuhn-Fricker had found frightening tweets from Giampa on her daughter’s phone. Twitter was where Giampa, a Papa John’s employee and an anime enthusiast, let his malevolence run amok.
Kuhn-Fricker and Fricker had seen enough to say something. Days later, Giampa fatally shot them in their Virginia home, police say.
HuffPost has found his tweets, written by “Kevin Gallo” under the handle @doctorpepper35. They suggest a 17-year-old who’d drifted beyond the trolling of his teenage peers on the internet far-right and was fully in thrall to the racist, apocalyptic fantasia of white nationalism.
As @doctorpepper35, Giampa tweeted about his hatred of transgender people and his admiration for Adolf Hitler. He tweeted about using Jews as target practice.
Almost three months before the murders, the teenager from Lorton, Virginia, praised a book called Siege, an obscure, ominous work written by James Mason, a neo-Nazi devotee of Charles Manson. The 1992 book, republished last year by hyperviolent white nationalist sect Atomwaffen Division, is essentially a call to “Helter Skelter” racist insurrection. Giampa also retweeted an endorsement of The Turner Diaries, William Luther Pierce’s infamous white nationalist novel about race war, often found on the bookshelf of American domestic terrorists.
Kuhn-Fricker had tried to keep her 16-year-old daughter away from Giampa. The teenagers met at the same private high school for students with special needs. One of Giampa’s family members described the boy as struggling with mental illness for years and being “on the spectrum” for autism.
At one point last year, it seemed like Giampa’s life was improving. He was proud of his job. He had a girlfriend. “They dated for six months and it was a very happy dating period ― brunches and beaches and lots of good times,” said a family member.
But a darker side of the teenager was emerging on social media. By November, Giampa, under his Twitter pseudonym, was referring to himself as a Nazi.
Days before Kuhn-Fricker was murdered, she alerted the high school principal to neo-Nazi content on a Twitter account she believed was operated by Giampa, The Washington Post reported. Kuhn-Fricker urged her daughter to break up with Giampa and, after some initial resistance, the girl seemed to agree.
On Dec. 22, police say Giampa sneaked into his girlfriend’s house in Reston, Virginia, and shot Kuhn-Fricker and Fricker dead, then turned the gun on himself. Four other family members were in the house during the shooting, including the couple’s 10-year-old son, who was out on the lawn when police arrived, according to dispatch audio obtained by ABC7. Giampa is currently at the Reston Hospital Center, where he is being treated, under police guard, for life-threatening wounds, including what a family member described as a brain injury. Fairfax County Police Department has charged him as a minor for the murders of Fricker and Kuhn-Fricker, but they are waiting for his medical condition to improve before serving him, Reem Awad, a spokeswoman for the police department, said.
Police have withheld Giampa’s name because he is a minor. HuffPost identified him through his Facebook profile, where he goes by Nick Breedlove, using his mother’s maiden name. Until recently, he listed the daughter of the slain couple as his girlfriend. (The teen girl’s Facebook page has since been removed.) A hospital operator at Reston Hospital Center confirmed on Wednesday that Giampa was a patient there. Friends of the victims’ family spoke to HuffPost on the condition of anonymity about the teen girl’s relationship with Giampa.
While his Twitter account is under a pseudonym, Huffpost found that the email address associated with @doctorpepper35 is also linked to Giampa’s Facebook profile. In July, @doctorpepper35 wrote to a Twitter user with a name that matched the one Giampa’s girlfriend used on Instagram. The user @doctorpepper35 also referred to Virginia as “my state” in a tweet.
The avatar for the Twitter account is currently a skeleton wearing a Nazi SS military hat. The bio reads, “Read Siege,” a reference to Mason’s book.
The Twitter account Kuhn-Fricker found and alerted the school principal to “retweeted missives praising Hitler, supporting Nazi book burnings, calling for ‘white revolution,’ making derogatory comments about Jews and featuring an illustration of a man hanging from a noose beneath a slur for gay people,” The Washington Post reported, without identifying the account. That description matches @doctorpepper35’s tweets.
It’s unclear how Giampa arrived at such extreme views. Little has been made public about him. His parents, Marilyn Breedlove-Giampa and Michael Troy Giampa, took down their Facebook pages after the shooting. HuffPost has obtained screenshots of Breedlove-Giampa’s Facebook account, where she posted tributes to Confederate generals and argued in favor of keeping Confederate statues in various cities. She also posted a photo of her son at a shooting range, holding what the caption says is a Thompson submachine gun. The target is a “Nazi Hans” zombie cartoon.
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