A member of the Proud Boys street gang was charged Tuesday with second-degree murder in Seattle, accused of killing his brother with a sword.
Buckey Wolfe, 26, was “severely mentally ill” when he attacked his brother, James Wolfe, on Sunday, according to charging documents obtained by The Seattle Times. He was held on a $1 million bond, and prosecutors requested he be held without bail, given the crime’s severity.
“The defendant’s actions — jamming the tang end of a four-foot long sharpened metal-bladed sword-like instrument completely through the victim’s head and killing him — demonstrate the danger he poses,” prosecutor Scott O’Toole wrote in charging documents, according to the Times.
James Wolfe’s age was not disclosed.
Buckey Wolfe called 911 on Sunday evening and admitted killing his brother, saying that “God told me he was a lizard” and telling the dispatcher, “Kill me, kill me, I can’t live in this reality,” according to court documents.
He was arrested a mile north of his family’s home in the Fremont neighborhood. He later told officers he’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia and “that their eyes and mouths were changing,” the prosecutors said.
Posts on Wolfe’s Facebook page are equally dark and rambling, and reveal his affiliation with Proud Boys, an organization known for its violence that is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
His posts also show he subscribes to QAnon conspiracy theory, The Daily Beast reported. Embraced by the far-right, the discredited theory posits that President Donald Trump seeks to salvage control of the U.S. government from “deep state” operatives who want to topple him.
Wolfe in September posted the QAnon motto, “Where We Go One, We Go All,” and early last year he posted the Proud Boys logo along with its motto, “I’m a proud Western chauvinist and I refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”
Though the group has attempted to disavow Wolfe on its website, claiming that he was “never a Proud Boy,” anti-racist activists on Twitter have identified him in photos with a West Coast chapter of the gang, and some of its members have reached out to him publicly on Facebook to check on his health.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, one in five American adults deal with a mental health issue during their lifetime. People with severe mental illnesses are 10 times more likely to be victims — not perpetrators — of violent crime than the rest of the population, according to the agency.