The owner of a popular surf school and supply shop has been charged in federal court with the murder of his two-year-old son and ten-month-old daughter. Matthew Taylor Coleman, 40, told investigators that his belief in right-wing political conspiracy theories inspired him to kill his children.
“Coleman stated that he believed his children were going to grow into monsters so he killed them,” FBI special agent Jennifer Bannon wrote in an affidavit filed with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
“Coleman explained that he was enlightened by QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories and was receiving visions and signs revealing that his wife, [Abby], possessed serpent DNA and had passed it on to his children," Bannon reported.
Coleman owns Lovewater Surf School on State Street in Santa Barbara. On Saturday, he reportedly left his wife at home and drove their two children, Kaleo and Roxy, down the California coast and over the Mexican border to the seaside Baja California town of Rosarito.
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Mexican authorities said surveillance video showed Coleman checked into a hotel in town later that day. At some point between then and the discovery of his children’s bodies on Monday, Coleman pulled his vehicle over to the side of a road and shot them through their chests with a spear-fishing gun.
A Rosarito ranch worker discovered the bodies of Kaleo and Roxy in a roadside ditch with “large puncture wounds in their chest cavities,” the nine-page affidavit read.
The murder of Kaleo and Roxy Coleman is the latest in a string of QAnon-inspired slayings. The genre of conspiracy theory generally alleges that the “Deep State,” an elite cabal of Satanist, cannibal pedophiles, operates a global child sex-trafficking ring and conspired against former President Donald Trump during his four years in office.
A Pennsylvania woman was convicted in 2017 of killing her boyfriend over the pair’s involvement in an online community of QAnon conspiracy theorists. In 2019, a Staten Island man was charged with murder of an organized crime underboss he believed to be an agent of the Deep State.
Experts on extremism have designated QAnon a cult.
According to ABC7, Mexican and U.S. authorities are coordinating to return the children’s bodies to their mother. Coleman is expected to face charges of aggravated murder in Mexico in addition to the U.S. charges.