An Ohio man who federal prosecutors accused of planning to “slaughter” women and kill thousands of people in a mass shooting pleaded guilty to an attempted hate crime, authorities said Tuesday.
Tres Genco, 22, admitted to targeting women at a university in Ohio in 2020, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio said in a news release.
According to the prosecutor’s office, Genco identified as an “involuntary celibate,” or incel, a group of men who harbor hostility toward women for denying them “sexual or romantic attention to which they believe they are entitled.”
In March 2020, the Highland County Sheriff’s Department was called to Genco’s home, according to court documents. Someone reported Genco had barricaded himself in his room with a gun, and the person was worried he might hurt himself or planned to hurt others.
After getting Genco to surrender, investigators said they found an AR-15-style rifle with a bump-stock and Glock pistol modified to fire fully automatically with no serial number. As part of his plea, prosecutors said, Genco admitted he possessed those weapons as part of his plot.
Investigators said they also found many writings dating back to at least 2019. Genco wrote a memoir in which he said he would “slaughter” women “out of hatred, jealousy and revenge,” and referred to death as the “great equalizer,” prosecutors say. Genco wrote a note indicating he hoped to kill as many as 3,000 people, prosecutors said. They added he attended Army basic training in Georgia from August through December 2019, though he was discharged.
The movement is “defined by violent misogyny, pervasive self-loathing and a distinctive lexicon, misogynist incels developed their own insular platform where the hatred of women unifies users across racial and political divides,” according to The Southern Poverty Law Center.
The movement gained greater public awareness in 2014 after incel Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 others in a shooting in Isla Vista, California. Part of the shooting occurred outside a University of California, Santa Barbara sorority house.
According to court documents, Genco had profiles on a popular incel website forum from at least July 2019 through to mid-March 2020 and shared hundreds of messages on it. In one post, Genco shared details about spraying “some foids and couple” with orange juice and a water gun. “Foids” is a term incels use to refer to “femoids,” or women.
