﻿When we find celebrities we look up to, be it actors, musicians,
or, more recently, online influencers, we tend to put them up onto a pedestal where
they can do no wrong in our eyes. Therefore, it always seems to be most
shocking when a celebrity commits a crime, as they’re supposed to be the pinnacle of society’s
ideals. However, that is, of course, not always the case. In today’s video,
we’ll be looking at a celebrity murderer from the early days of online influencers,
and one of the original “YouTubers” who helped form and cultivate the anime community on Youtube,
a man by the name of Trey Sesler, or as many of you may know him, “Mr. Anime”.
Youtube has now been around for many years, and as it’s grown in popularity since its
humble beginnings in early 2005, it has proven to be a viable source of creative content and,
for the lucky few, a way to make a living. However, back in the early days of youtube,
the concept of growing a community through regular channel uploads was fairly new,
and everywhere you turned there were people innovating and defining what it would mean
to be a YouTuber. One such individual was the aforementioned Trey Sesler, who got his start
on youtube by uploading short films and skits he wrote, directed, and edited himself to his brand
new channel called LensCap Productions. Over time, however, Trey began to branch out his
content to include reviews as well as skits. These reviews mainly focused on anime, a Japanese style
of animation, and Trey quickly found himself an audience under the persona “Mr. Anime”.
However, despite how straightforward and normal Trey’s online persona may have seemed,
there were darker parts of his childhood that the internet had yet to find out.
Trey Eric Sesler was born August 3rd, 1989, to Rhonda and Lawton Sesler, and their one other son
Mark. The family lived an average life in Waller County, Texas, with Lawton working
at Robinson Elementary School, and Rhonda working as a respected writer at the local newspaper.
Neither of the Sesler boys was out of the ordinary, having been raised well by their loving
parents and having a normal school life, however, Trey was definitely the quiet one out of the two.
While he appeared completely average from an outside perspective, internally,
unusual thoughts and plans were starting to develop in a young Trey’s mind.
At the age of thirteen, he confided in a teacher that he had made plans to call the cops to his
house one night with the complaint of seeing the shadow of a person loitering around his window.
He would then sneak away and hide in some nearby bushes before jumping out with a baseball bat,
clobbering the police officer, and stealing their firearm. With the firearm secured, Trey
then planned on driving to a friend’s house with the intent of shooting and murdering him.
To say this alarmed Trey’s teacher would be an understatement, and he was quickly taken
in for a psychiatric evaluation, however, the incident was eventually dropped by the police
and the psychiatrist, neither of whom believed there was anything actually wrong with Trey.
It was in Trey’s later teenage years that he would solidly develop the interests that
would go on to shape his future, namely film work, anime, and firearms.
In September of 2006, a little over a year after its creation, Trey debuted his youtube
channel and began uploading. The skits he uploaded to his channel were created with
the help of his friends, as well as his family, such as his father or brother,
and the internet soon took a liking to the quirky and endearing videos Trey put together.
His channel didn’t begin to explode until roughly a year later though, as that was
when Trey adopted his Mr.Anime persona and gave honest and straight-to-the-point anime reviews.
These reviews not only skyrocketed the popularity of Trey’s channel,
garnering him one million views in just 2011, which was incredibly impressive for the time,
but it also is largely credited for the rise of anime content
on youtube which now dominates the site. This truly made Trey a bonafide Youtuber, and one
of the original creators who helped make the site the international phenomena it is today. However,
as time passed and Trey uploaded one video after another to his channel, soon surpassing a
total of 300 videos, small signs of Trey’s waning mental state began to slip into his videos.
Trey had been interested in firearms from a young age, and when he was old enough would
end up purchasing quite a few. These guns often made appearances in the comedy skits he uploaded,
however, Trey eventually began to upload a new kind of video to his channel where
he would give full demonstrations and reviews of his firearm collection.
Any worries that might have been forming in his community’s minds were quickly assuaged when Trey
uploaded a video of himself talking about and mourning the rise in mass shootings that were
happening at the time in correlation to a wave of layoffs happening across the country.
What the community didn’t know, however, was that the fantasies of murder and mayhem Trey
had experienced as a child had never left, and in fact were flowing full force through his mind
while he kept quiet to those around him. Trey had been living as alone for much of 2011
in the house of his Grandmother who had recently passed. This was largely due to familial issues
that had arisen between Trey and his Dad, who were arguing over the fact that Trey had dropped out of
college without a solid plan for the future. While this stress was taking a toll on Trey’s
mental health, he also began to do disturbing research on serial killers, mass shootings,
and even going so far as to download satellite photographs of his former high school, Waller
High School, where he made plans for how to ram his car into the school for maximum damage.
Trey then made horrifying plans to walk into the school and kill as many people as possible with
his .22 rifle, turning him into the kind of person he had once demonized on his own channel.
While this was going on, the internet was in a storm over rumors surrounding Trey,
including that he used his own animals and local livestock as firing targets,
and that he was responsible for several fires throughout the area.
His videos also began to take a turn for the worse. What were once well-thought-out and planned
videos soon devolved into the incoherent ramblings of someone whose mental health was slipping.
Around this same time in late 2011, Trey shared with a close friend that the situation with his
father was not improving and that he was actually planning on killing him.
As arguments with his family continued and he developed a serious issue with alcohol abuse,
Trey announced he was going to take a two to three-week break from Youtube. This break
ended on March 13th, 2012, when Trey uploaded his 323rd video titled “ Mr. Anime’s New Job!”.
The video was incredibly positive as Trey informed his fans that he had actually been sought out and
offered a job by a filmmaking company which he readily accepted. While he did sadly inform his
viewers that he would have to reduce his upload schedule to compensate for his new workload,
he promised that he would still regularly upload as much as he could.
According to the video, life seemed like it was taking a turn for the best for Trey.
However, this was tragically not the case. The entire video, which would
end up being the last one ever uploaded to Trey’s channel, was a complete lie.
Trey stayed up binge drinking the night of March 19th, 2012, just around a week after uploading
his last video. In the early hours of March 20th, the following morning, Trey drove to his
family home with guns in tow. He lured his mother into the garage before shooting her in the chest.
He then went into his childhood home where he shot his brother in the head
before proceeding to shoot and kill his father who had been alerted by the noise.
Trey then completely trashed the house and killed the family pets.
Planning on continuing his murderous rampage, Trey packed his car full of
guns and 100 rounds of ammunition before driving down to his alma mater, Waller High school.
In a strange and fortunate turn of events, however, Trey did not go through with his
plans to shoot up the school. Instead, he simply sat in the parking lot, contemplating the minimum
of 70 students he wanted to kill, before leaving and heading to a nearby friend’s house.
The police were eventually sent by the Sesler’s family members to go check on them after no one
had heard anything from the family, and when they arrived, they found a horrible scene.
The bodies of the family were dead on the floor, and littering the walls in black marker were
phrases such as “I will never forgive myself, I don’t know why I did this, God help me!”,
and “...god forgive me because I cannot forgive myself.”, all of which were written in Trey’s
handwriting. The police were able to track Trey down and promptly arrested him, where he would
later confess everything to investigators. Trey claimed that he had killed his family so that
they would never have to go through the pain of hearing about the school shooting he planned on
committing, however after he shot his mother, Trey said he instantly regretted his actions but felt
that he was “...already committed really…”, and carried out his father and brother’s murders.
The guilt from the deaths of his family was the only force that stopped him from
carrying out his plans against Waller High School, narrowly avoiding taking the lives
of countless innocent teenagers and adults. Despite being in Texas where the death penalty was
legal, Trey was controversially sentenced to life in prison. Even the Chief officer at the time,
Cheif Rehak, explained that he understood the public’s emotions towards the case
and the sentencing at the time, and stated: “Is there even justice in a case like this?”,
acknowledging the conflicted feelings a crime of this nature can bring out in even the most
stable of individuals. Trey was sentenced to prison just four months after his murder in 2012
and continues to live his life in prison with no new updates about his situation.
What are your thoughts about the case? Let us know down in the comment section below,
as well as tell us about any other cases you would like to see us cover.
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