In private messages reviewed by the Flatwater Free Press dating back to last year, Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez, 31, of Omaha – who faces federal charges in connection with his alleged role in a plot to kill the president – hinted that he was preparing for violence, worrying his online friends who found his tone increasingly troubling. Illustration by Hanscom Park Studio for the Flatwater Free Press
Not long ago, he was in a college honor society and gave campus tours to prospective UNK students. But hidden from public view, he was growing unhinged in private chats, friends say. Recent messages viewed by Flatwater show Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez calling himself a soldier and suggesting secret “big projects in the works.”
Written by Andrew Wegley and Henry J. Cordes
In his public musings and activities online, the change Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez hoped to sow seemed nonviolent.
The 31-year-old Omahan made connections on TikTok, the video-sharing app, where he posted and chatted with other users about holding local governments accountable for ICE operations, filing public records requests and, most recently, “building a people-owned supply chain” to eliminate economic dependence on big corporations.
But in private messages reviewed by the Flatwater Free Press dating back to last year, Alvarez — now facing federal charges in connection with his alleged role in a plot to kill the president — hinted that he was preparing for violence, worrying his online friends who found his tone increasingly troubling and Alvarez himself increasingly untethered from reality.
On Jan. 24, Alvarez sent one such message to a woman who he had chatted with for nearly a year.
“We are survivalists. And soldiers 2nd if this wish to be,” he wrote in the message viewed by the Flatwater Free Press. “For that we don’t talk. We act. … But we must have contingency and cunning. We must be resilient. When the fight comes we will know what to do.”
Four days later, he sent another: “And lastly if I have been unclear before it has been intentional. There’s a lot of big projects in the works. Some aren’t ready to be disclosed.”
Now the Nebraska man stands accused of being the “mastermind” behind an alleged plot to attack the June 14 UFC event at the White House and assassinate President Donald Trump.
Prosecutors allege in messages shared on the encrypted messaging app Signal, Alvarez identified posts near the White House for snipers and explosive-laden drone launches, intent on targeting Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. At a Monday court hearing in Lincoln, FBI Special Agent Seena Ali Soheilian said the alleged plot had been in the works “for about a week.”
At Monday’s hearing, Alvarez’s attorney, Stu Dornan, argued that Alvarez tried to call off the attack two days before it was scheduled to occur and had never bought a plane, train or bus ticket to travel there. Soheilian said Alvarez sought to reschedule the attack only after the arrest of a co-defendant in Ohio and two other alleged co-conspirators encountered car trouble.
Charging documents indicate the group was motivated by antigovernment sentiments, including grievances about government corruption, the handling of the Epstein files and data centers guzzling water in communities.
The FBI used Alvarez’s TikTok username to trace his location back to the Omaha apartment he shares with his wife, according to the federal indictment. He was arrested there June 14 after returning from the pool with his wife, Soheilian said. Federal agents who searched his home found a drone, a shotgun, 50 shells and a flamethrower, Soheilian said.
U.S. District Judge Jacqueline DeLuca on Monday granted the government’s motion to hold Alvarez in detention as the case against him proceeds after prosecutors argued he was an “extreme flight risk” and a danger to the community. “The reason the disaster didn’t happen is because the FBI was able to stop it,” said Don Kleine of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Those who knew Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez are left to wonder how a man who graduated from the University of Nebraska at Kearney six years ago and who had no prior criminal record could now find himself facing a long federal prison sentence.
“Very surprised,” said Ron Bubak, who coached Alvarez in junior high basketball in Cozad, where Alvarez grew up. “That’s not the kid I knew.”
A Nebraska-based terrorism expert who has studied how extremist groups radicalize and organize online said there is no one formula that predicts what would drive anyone to tip from activism into alleged violence.
But Ares Boira Lopez, a researcher at the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center, said this type of radicalization often includes shared grievances, unmet social or emotional needs and lack of identity or purpose in daily life.
“We don’t have enough information (in this case), but it is … actually not uncommon for people to say, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have expected it — they seemed like a normal person,’” she said. “That can happen.”
A Flatwater Free Press dive into Alvarez’s past did unearth hints of some of those elements, offering evidence of how a man who until several years ago seemed to be living a routine life could find himself in shackles Monday, seated before a federal judge.
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While Abraham Hermosillo Alvarez was living in Omaha at the time of his arrest, his Nebraska roots reach into the central part of the state.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the native of Mexico first came to the United States in 2001 as a 6-year-old on a visitor visa and then illegally remained in the country after it expired.
He ultimately settled with his family in Cozad. Dawson County has been a magnet for immigrant families since the former Tyson meatpacking plant opened in nearby Lexington in 1990.
Alvarez later gained legal status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which granted temporary work permits and lawful immigration standing to undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Known during his school years as Abraham Hermosillo, he graduated in 2014 from Cozad High School, where he ran on the cross country and track teams.
Bubak and classmates who knew Alvarez said he did not particularly stand out, either as a student or socially.
“He was always a quiet kid,” said Bubak, who taught and coached in Cozad for 26 years. “In all the interactions I had with him, he was a good kid.”
One longtime Cozad classmate, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Alvarez appeared to blossom after he enrolled in the fall of 2014 at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
At UNK, Alvarez was among 110 students on campus inducted into a national honor society for college freshmen. He was active in a fraternity and selected as a student government representative. He also served as a student diplomat on behalf of the school’s admissions department, giving campus tours to prospective students.
Alvarez majored in industrial distribution, which studies logistics, supply chains and industrial sales. The program is known for its rigorous requirements, including classes in electricity and electronics, as well as finance and accounting, paired with a business internship.
In 2016, Alvarez was featured in a campus Facebook post where he spoke of struggling with epilepsy as a child, which he said made it difficult to learn and play sports.
“A lot of people assumed that I would never go to college or amount to anything, but after all the hard work and dedication, it paid off,” the then-UNK junior was quoted. “My advice to kids is to live life to the fullest, chase your dreams and never give up.”
But there are also indications Alvarez’s path at Kearney was not completely smooth.
He did not graduate in 2018 with his entering class, instead earning his degree in July 2020. The degree he was awarded was also in industrial technology, more general than the industrial distribution program he was majoring in.
Four professors from his department either declined to talk to Flatwater or did not respond to messages. A UNK spokesman confirmed Alvarez’s years of enrollment and graduation but declined to comment further, citing student privacy.
Alvarez’s online LinkedIn profile suggests that, after graduation, he worked briefly as a supply chain specialist for a Kearney hospital before leaving the job in March 2022. The hospital did not return phone calls seeking confirmation.
It then appears he went into business for himself. In 2020, he co-founded a production company in Grand Island that advertised providing photography and videography services for events.
By 2024, Alvarez was living in an apartment in Omaha near 120th and West Dodge. In that same year, Douglas County records show he also married. In a phone call with Flatwater, his wife declined to talk about Alvarez, asking that her family’s privacy be respected.
State and county property records indicate Alvarez for a time owned a commercial property in downtown Grand Island that housed a dress shop. He also owned a fixer-upper home in east Omaha. The records also show that three years ago, he made an unusual property purchase.
In July 2023, Alvarez bought a former United Methodist church building in Western, a town of 200 in Saline County in southeast Nebraska.
The previous owner said the century-old brick structure had been used as storage for decades when a real estate agent representing Alvarez inquired about buying it, saying the buyer wanted to convert it into a home. Records show Alvarez purchased the old church for $5,000.
There is no indication Alvarez ever rehabilitated the church property or lived there. But it would come into play in the alleged plot.
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To his online friends, depending on the platform, Alvarez was known as “unitedworldwide444,” “Fortress” or “resilience-spirit-of-the-west.”
Members of an online group on the app Discord, a communications platform popular among gamers, didn’t know his real name until it made headlines when he was arrested earlier this month, according to logs viewed by Flatwater.
But some members of the group also indicated they weren’t surprised.
“(He) wanted to use your network to dismantle and overthrow the epstein class and murder multiple high influence targets. He got mad when I expressed caution and told (moderators),” one woman who had chatted with him wrote on Discord.
That woman, a 27-year-old named Margaret, spoke with Flatwater on condition her full name not be used.
Margaret said she had chatted with Alvarez sporadically on TikTok and Discord for nearly a year before cutting off contact in January when his rhetoric intensified.
She first met Alvarez through TikTok, where they monitored ICE activity and gravitated toward survivalist content — videos that taught viewers things like how to build an emergency generator from a box fan, Margaret said.
Alvarez had a series of since-deleted TikTok accounts, she said. Many of the posts on his latest TikTok — the one the feds used to trace him back to Omaha — revolved around a plan to form a new supply chain outside of traditional channels, an idea that seemed to harken back to his college days.
He kept in touch with at least some TikTok companions on Discord. It was on that platform where he began to trouble some of them, Margaret said.
In one November message, Alvarez told her the sun “is looking funny” and predicted “major blackouts” would hit Puerto Rico and Cuba. In another, he said “things are getting bad” in the United States, without elaborating, predicting that the “cracks will begin around” January.
Then two months later came the messages about the upcoming “fight” and the “big projects” that were in the works.
In the indictment, federal law enforcement officials laid out what one such project may have been: the planned June 14 White House attack.
Federal prosecutors allege Alvarez was the man under the username “Shepherd” who served as chief architect of the attack plan. They allege Alvarez in recent months conspired with 18 others, seven of whom are currently also facing charges.
“This is the best action I see. Position your teams in the purple dots (counter sniper and drones) Long range (circled area) (great shot) Easy out into the river,” Shepherd wrote June 10 on Signal, according to an FBI affidavit supporting Alvarez’s indictment.
The next day, Shepherd also allegedly shared with the group a screenshot that listed potential people for the group to target. They included “1,” who the FBI said it believes was likely Trump; “VP,” allegedly Vice President JD Vance; “N,” allegedly Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and “Musk,” referring to Elon Musk.
Shepherd allegedly told another member of the group during a discussion on drones that he wanted “as many and as deadly as we can get.” He said he had one drone and was working on more. Shepherd also instructed the other members who were part of the planned attack to take back roads or the Potomac River down to the “pick up location.”
The complaint says Shepherd also provided a photograph of the church that Alvarez owned in Western as a “safe zone” where the conspirators would meet up afterward.
At Monday’s hearing, Soheilian, the FBI agent, said Alvarez had cast the Signal group as one focused on building off-the-grid homesteads. Alvarez nodded as the agent testified.
But the agent also testified about the sniper perches, escape routes and church in Western.
Alvarez even met with a co-defendant, a Missouri man, in Omaha on June 12, Soheilian said. Alvarez gave him a 3D printer, $1,200 cash and other supplies in exchange for the shotgun that agents found at Alvarez’s home, the agent said. Soheilian accused the Omaha man of mailing ballistic plates and two-way talk radios to others.
On Signal, Alvarez said the drones should be outfitted with explosives strong enough to pierce police body armor, Soheilian testified, while Alvarez shook his head “no.”
As agents confronted Alvarez with his own chat logs, Soheilian testified, Alvarez had acknowledged: “It doesn’t look good.”
After Monday’s hearing, Dornan, his attorney, told reporters Alvarez is a young man who has “never been convicted of anything.”
“He’s got a good job,” he said. “He’s married. His wife and family members are supportive of him. So that shows a lot about his character, in my opinion.””
The parents of one of the defendants, a 19-year-old from Ohio, alerted authorities to the alleged plot days before it was to occur.
Interviewed by the FBI, the Ohio man said the roots of the planning was a TikTok group called “Vanguard of the Old,” whose members believed the United States was headed in the wrong direction and believed the attack would “jumpstart” a revolution.
According to a federal affidavit, the FBI found a TikTok account they believed belonged to Shepherd, the conspiracy’s alleged ringleader.
Using a computer IP address provided by TikTok, federal authorities said they traced it to the west Omaha apartment where Alvarez lived. He faces two federal felony counts, conspiracy to commit murder and conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States. The murder conspiracy charge carries a possible sentence of life in prison.
Alvarez also faces deportation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials last week put an immigration hold on him.
For those who knew Alvarez, perhaps as jarring as the charges against him was the mug shot taken after his arrest: The bearded man with thick, dark hair is smiling broadly in his orange jail garb.
He wore the same beard, similar garb and metal shackles when he walked into a federal courtroom Monday morning in downtown Lincoln and sat next to his attorney. He was no longer smiling.
Hermosillo Alvarez after his arrest.
