QAnon surfer accused of killing two kids with spearfishing gun told FBI he thought he was Neo from The Matrix
FBI affidavit states Matthew Coleman started seeing ‘evil’ hand gestures everywhere and became convinced his wife and church leaders were in on conspiracy against him
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A QAnon supporter accused of murdering his two young children with a spearfishing gun in Mexico told the FBI he thought he was Neo from The Matrix in an interview days after his arrest, a newly released federal search warrant has revealed.
Matthew Taylor Coleman, a surf instructor from Santa Barbara, California, told agents he thought ‘Q’ – the supposed leader of the infamous cult – was “actually talking to him”.
He also discussed time travel, and teleportation, and claimed his children had told him about babies “being placed in fireworks, food and walls”.
Mr Coleman, 40, was arrested on 9 August at San Diego as he re-entered the United States, the day after the bodies of his two children Kaleo, 2, and 10-month-old Roxy were found near Rosarito, Baja California.
According to authorities, Mr Coleman had been a devout Christian 12 months prior to the killings, but became obsessed with the QAnon conspiracy theory which asserts the world is being run by an elite cabal of cannabalistic paedophiles in Hollywood and the Democrat Party.
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His mental state is said to have declined rapidly after he started noticing “strange coincidences” in photographs on Instagram in the five or six days before his children were killed.
Prior to leaving his home in Santa Barbara with his children, he told the officers he started seeing “hand signals or signs” everywhere, including on postings on Instagram and from from friends and teachers.
He demonstrated the gestures to agents during the interviews, which included a two-fingered peace sign.
He started believing his children had “serpent DNA” passed down from his wife Abby Coleman, and is alleged to have kidnapped his two children and taken them to Mexico after claiming to be taking them camping.
Mr Coleman told the agents as he lay in bed in Mexico prior to his children’s murder, he saw “all the pieces being decoded like The Matrix, and he was Neo.”
“Coleman said he knew what he did was wrong, but it was the only course of action that would save the world,” Special Agent Hamer wrote.
His wife Abby Coleman told FBI agents that the couple had begun researching QAnon, and that her husband became “significantly more paranoid” and started believing the leaders of “the church” may have been part of the conspiracy.
A friend referred to as A.M. gave an interview to the FBI in which he had also seen Mr Coleman become obsessed with hand signals in photographs on social media.
The people making the hand signs were “evil disguised as good”, the friend said.
Mr Coleman found an Instagram photograph of A.M. in which his friends were making peace signs, and said it was evidence that A.M. was a “loyalist” who “could not see that he was being controlled”.
A few hours after Mr Coleman left for Mexico with his children, A.M. said he received a call from Abby Coleman asking him to come to her home.
When he got there, he said Abby Coleman confronted him with a picture taken 10 years earlier when he was about 13 of him “making hand gestures”.
“Based, at least in part, on these hand gestures, A.M. said that [Abby] accused him of ‘being in on it’ and eventually [Abby] chased A.M. out of the Coleman Residence,” Special Agent Hamer wrote.
Just over a year earlier in June 2020, A.M. had sent Mr Coleman a Facebook message with a video screenshot saying: “Team Trump Online”, “Aliens?”, and “Triggered Presidential Edition Text Trump to 88022.”
The newly released FBI search warrant was first obtained by Seamus Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
The warrant filed in mid-February was seeking permission for FBI agents to access Mr Coleman’s private Facebook messages to determine whether he has a “legitimate mental illness”.
Mr Coleman, who used to run the Lovewater Surf Company in Santa Barbara, is due back in court on 19 May.