In the early morning darkness, FBI agents broke down the door of a two-story townhome in Los Angeles. Their target was a 28-year-old man they linked to a sprawling online network of predators that targets young girls across the globe.
“I’m right here,” Jose Henry Ayala Casimiro called out, as agents swarmed the San Fernando Valley home he shared with his parents and younger brother. “What’s going on?”
Agents handcuffed Ayala and searched the house, seizing his desktop computer, gaming consoles, phone and any other devices they suspected he may have used to communicate with victims, his brother recalled. Ayala’s parents, roused from sleep, watched in stunned silence, unaware of the extent of their son’s alleged crimes, which were laid out in a 62-page criminal complaint filed in federal court.
In an interview with federal authorities, a teenage victim accused Ayala of committing extreme acts of cruelty. She reported that he made young girls he met online throw up on camera and lick up the vomit. That he pushed others to put cigarette butts out on their skin. That he had others go even further and carve his name into their bodies.
Authorities said Ayala was driven by his participation in a loose online network known as “764,” whose members coerce children into performing self-harm and sexual acts on camera to gain status with other members of the network.
Last year’s raid of Ayala’s family home has played out repeatedly across the nation, as federal authorities hunt down other members of this growing online subculture, also referred to as Nihilistic Violent Extremism, which weaponizes digital platforms to exploit and radicalize children.
The FBI has more than 500 investigations open into this type of online predation, which has been linked to the livestreamed suicide of a Washington teen, the rape and kidnapping of a Virginia girl and school shootings in Wisconsin and Tennessee.
Over the last 18 months, some of these alleged 764 perpetrators were arrested in unassuming suburban pockets of L.A. County. And, as in Ayala’s case, some neighbors and family members said they had no clue that the depraved exploitation of minors was allegedly orchestrated from a computer near them.
Last August, federal agents arrested 27-year-old Dong Hwan Kim at an apartment complex in Downey. A minor victim accused Kim of working with Ayala and another 764 associate to run an online server where they “created, posted, and traded child pornography, and extorted minors to get nude and write names on their skin, cut themselves, and stick objects such as knives and bottles into their genitals,” according to the complaint filed against him in federal court.
Rafael Lopez, a Downey resident who has lived next door to the Kim family for years, said the FBI raid last summer caught neighbors by surprise when they were jolted awake by megaphones.
“It’s a quiet neighborhood,” Lopez said. “No violence, nothing like this.”
Three blocks away, a dent remains in a wooden door from the battering ram agents used to force entry into the home Bryant Najera Gonzalez shared with his parents.
Najera, arrested in February at age 24, is accused of grooming girls to engage in self-harm and sex acts on camera and then threatening to release the images or videos if they refused to obey orders, according to the complaint filed against him in federal court.
“It’s something you could never expect,” Najera’s father told The Times. “There were no signs.”
Ayala, Kim and Najera all face child pornography charges in the Central District of California and have taken plea deals.
Ayala pleaded guilty to one count of production of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography and is set to be sentenced next month. Kim pleaded to two counts of production of child pornography and will be sentenced in November. Najera pleaded to one count of exploitation of a child to produce sexually explicit material and will be sentenced in January.
In lengthy interviews with The Times, Ayala’s family described him as a man with severe mental health issues who they said tried to kill himself multiple times — including twice at the behest of people online. His family, who said they have received death threats since the arrest, asked not to be identified due to privacy concerns.
“My son is sick in the head,” Ayala’s mother told The Times. “He’s not well.”
Part of what makes 764 and other Nihilistic Violent Extremist groups so terrifying is that in addition to grooming minor victims, members also intentionally recruit and radicalize juveniles to become predators themselves, according to the FBI.
“You not only want to protect your child from being victimized,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Amanda Elbogen, who is prosecuting Kim and Ayala, “you want to protect your child from being looped into this community and victimizing others.”
California federal prosecutors describe the threat of 764 as distinct from other child sex abuse material cases because of the level of sophistication and collaboration among those in the network and the fact that perpetrators force their victims to engage in self-harm.
Elbogen estimates that Ayala and Kim victimized dozens of young girls and women, both nationally and internationally.
Perpetrators target underage girls, typically between the ages of 10 and 17 years old, often preying on minors already struggling with mental health issues such as depression and suicidal ideation, according to the FBI.
Members of these networks share detailed guides on how to identify vulnerable girls online and groom them by pretending to have a romantic interest or be a supportive friend.
Once groomers have established a relationship with a victim — often through flattery, gifts and advice — they then share extremely gory and sexual videos to desensitize the minor and make them easier to manipulate into performing extreme acts themselves, according to Joseph Guzman, the assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the case against Gonzalez.
And the sadistic acts 764 perpetrators promote are not always contained to a computer screen.
In the case of Kim, agents found direct messages on his desktop computer between him and a minor victim in which the victim describes him allegedly assaulting her and beating her dog.
“I still remember how it felt like a knife on fire stabbing me,” the victim wrote to Kim, describing being allegedly sodomized by Kim with a hairbrush, according to the complaint filed against him. “I disassociated from my body while repeating phrases in my head such as ‘dont talk dont talk dont talk.’”
The three L.A.-based perpetrators, while representing a small corner of 764, share several similarities. They are all men in their twenties, who lived with their parents in working-class households. They were described by family members and neighbors as antisocial and chronically online.
Guzman said that in the 764 cases he has reviewed, the alleged predators are mainly young men seeking a form of social currency to build their reputation in these online communities.
“It seems like they are struggling to find belonging in society, and they are able to accomplish that in these online 764 communities that victimize minors,” Guzman said. “The people who commit these horrifying acts seem to gain a false sense of power they don’t get in their normal lives, and yet they disregard the trauma they cause for victims.”
Ayala — known in the online world as “cocohennn” — landed on the radar of authorities in 2022.
That year, tips came into the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, according to an affidavit written by Carolyn Thompson, a special agent with the FBI.
When Los Angeles police officers obtained search warrants for two of Ayala’s social media accounts in August 2023, they found more than 100 images and videos of child erotica, including an individual who had cut the name “Henry” in his forearm, according to the complaint.
And, in June 2023, a tipster reported that Ayala persuaded her teenage sister to carve the letter “H” on her body, according to the complaint. The teen victim submitted several reports herself in 2023, describing having an online relationship with Ayala and providing his home address.
Ayala’s family members said they weren’t aware of what Ayala was doing while locked away in his bedroom, hunched over a desktop computer. In interviews since his arrest, they told The Times they were actually relieved when he stayed home because of his serious mental health issues.
Ayala had tried to kill himself at least eight times, according to his brother, who provided extensive medical records to The Times showing that Ayala had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and had a history of suicidal behavior. The first attempt, documented in the medical records, was when Ayala was in high school.
During the pandemic, his brother said, Ayala went on a downward spiral, frequently mixing drugs and alcohol and “getting more obsessed” with the computer. Ayala’s brother said he is speaking out now, because he feels the family did not get the support needed to deal with his brother’s issues.
Twice, Ayala’s brother said, the family found Ayala turning blue after a suicide attempt, his computer camera broadcasting the incident. His brother said he saw people online encouraging Ayala to kill himself while they watched. Both times, he said, his brother had overdosed.
Still, the family was shocked when their home was raided by Homeland Security Investigations and LAPD in August 2023.
Afterward, Ayala’s mother said she locked the desktop computer away in the garage.
At the time, Ayala was not federally charged and for a while the investigation seemed to fade away.
More than a year later, in February 2025, another tip came in — this time to the FBI — saying that a 17-year-old had created a new server on social media that acted as a “grooming pool” for Ayala and others, with many underage girls who were “predated upon,” Thompson wrote in her affidavit.
As Thompson reviewed social media records, she learned Ayala had been communicating with two Colorado minors. FBI agents raided Ayala’s home and arrested him on April 3, 2025.
The next day, a Colorado healthcare worker and mother received a phone call as she provided hospice care to a dying patient. The caller ID read “FBI.” She answered, thinking it was a spam call. But as she listened, her worst nightmare unfolded. An FBI agent told her that her teenage daughter had been a target of Ayala.
She said federal authorities told her they’d identified her daughter through her exchanges with Ayala using her school email. It was the first time the mother learned about “764.”
“I went down the rabbit hole, and my therapy bill went through the freaking roof because I was having like two-hour sessions three times a week,” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Where did I fail as a parent?’”
She soon learned her daughter spoke with Ayala frequently. In those conversations, she said Ayala acted like he was her daughter’s “safe zone” and told her that her parents didn’t understand her.
The two emailed and video called, the mom said. She said pictures were shared between the two, but she never wanted to learn the full extent of what was shared.
She said her daughter, who is in therapy, refuses to talk to them about what happened to this day.
“I just know that right now, my daughter’s mental capacity is so jacked up and so confused that she doesn’t even know what is right and what is wrong anymore,” she said.
“How am I supposed to let my kid be a kid in the world we live in today?”
Ayala shuffled into the federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles last December, hands shackled, head down.
His mother and younger brother listened from the gallery in stone-faced silence as Elbogen laid out the dark crimes he was admitting to that afternoon.
Ayala admitted he had coerced minors into creating and sharing videos depicting themselves engaging in sexually explicit conduct. That he and others would then blackmail the victims if they did not continue following orders. And that he had done it all as part of his participation in 764.
His mother cried outside the courtroom afterward.
His brother said he wanted to apologize to the victims and their families for what had transpired.
“I’m sorry that we didn’t do enough,” he said. “We thought we were handling it the best we could, but I guess we failed.”
“I think this whole past year, this whole main mission that I’m trying to understand is where did this all go wrong and how could this have been prevented,” his brother said. “I’m not trying to back up my brother. I don’t want to … I want him to get punished. For sure he’s going to pay the consequences.”
They are not the only ones contending with the fact that their family member was allegedly radicalized into a violent predator by strangers on the internet.
Earlier this month, federal authorities announced that a 17-year-old from Maine, tied to 764, will serve time in detention for sexually exploiting a child, distributing child sexual abuse material, sending interstate threats, cyberstalking and identity theft.
“This case makes clear, unfortunately, that parents must be vigilant, both to protect their children from the crimes of these extremists and to ensure their children do not fall into their influence,” John A. Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for National Security, said in a Sept. 1 statement.
Ayala’s family said they had previously never heard of 764.
“It got me so upset, the fact that he fell into that,” Ayala’s brother said. “I just want justice.”
The Colorado mother questioned why it took so long to arrest Ayala, when he’d first been reported in 2022 and raided by HSI and LAPD in 2023.
“He’s been on the radar and they really did nothing,” she said.
A spokesperson for DHS, which oversees HSI, said the agency declined to comment on the prosecution timeline for Ayala’s case, but noted that law enforcement faces many challenges confronting the proliferation of 764 criminal activity.
For example, members use encrypted communications to warn each other of law enforcement activity and destroy electronic evidence before it can be seized. It can also take significant time to build the trust necessary to receive investigative cooperation from deeply traumatized victims, the spokesperson said.
The mother said she plans to be in California for the sentencing so she can detail the toll on her family.
“I was a helicopter mom. I did everything by the book that I was supposed to do, and he still infiltrated our trust and our security. They’re just five steps ahead of us,” she said. “They use our child’s weakness and what they’re afraid of to their advantage. It would either happen to our kid, or somebody else’s kid. Until they are made an example out of, it’s never going to stop.”
Suicide prevention and crisis counseling resources
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional or call 988. The nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.
