Last month, Nicholas Giampa, a 17-year-old in Virginia, was charged with the murder of his girlfriend's parents. Her parents had been trying to convince her to break up with him because of his alleged neo-Nazi allegiances, The Washington Post reported at the time. The girl's mother was particularly concerned about a Twitter account she believed was his, which retweeted tweets advocating "white revolution," praising Hitler, and showing a picture of someone hanging below a gay slur. After his girlfriend's parents tried to break up an encounter between them, Giampa allegedly shot them and himself. The parents both died, but Giampa survived and was taken to the hospital.
On Thursday, The Huffington Post reported that it had discovered the Twitter account believed to belong to Giampa. He went by the name Kevin Gallo and used the handle @doctorpepper35, which has since been suspended. The same email address linked to the account is linked to Giampa's Facebook profile, and the user messaged someone with the same name that the girlfriend went by on Instagram.
His retweets defend the Nazi salute, praise the radical neo-Nazi organization Atomwaffen Division, and rave about Siege, a book by Nazi and Charles Manson follower Mason. He described Jews as "everyone’s enemy" and wrote that "Muslims and Jews are incapable of assimilating and a threat to their culture." In response to a tweet asking how parents should prepare their children for a world with trans people in politics, he wrote, "Show them how to use a gun and use Jews as targets."
Since Trump was elected, neo-Nazis and other hate groups have experienced a resurgence. On Nov. 18, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported 701 "hateful harassment" incidents since the Nov. 8 election. Hate crimes in New York had gone up 115 percent by the first week of December.
Giampa is by no means the only American with the racist beliefs he expressed, and stories like his are a sobering reminder of the hate sweeping the country and spreading through social media.
