By David Wolman
Photographs and videos by Jake Michaels
When Abigail Danian walked into her kitchen and saw the empty packaging of a burner cellphone on the counter, she knew Isaac had gone. It was Sept. 7, 2020, and she had been out of town for Labor Day. All weekend, her 20-year-old son, Isaac, had been calling her from the family home in Grand Rapids, Mich. He needed money for a “great opportunity” in Hawaii, but that was all he would say.
The next morning, Ms. Danian’s husband, John, headed to the local airport. He drove the rows of the parking lot, pressing the panic button on a spare key until he heard the horn blare from Isaac’s silver Volkswagen Passat.
A few days later, Isaac called his mother. He wanted her to know he was safe and asked to talk with his young siblings, both of whom adored their big brother. He was in Hawaii, he said, but he still wouldn’t elaborate. Ms. Danian’s mind raced. Whom was he with? Had he joined a cult? How could she talk him into coming home?
A few weeks passed before Isaac called back. This time he informed his parents that he would be off the grid for 30 days but would be back in touch when he could.
Ms. Danian never heard from him again.
Four weeks before Isaac left his home in Michigan, Shukree Abdul-Rashed called his wife in Rochester, N.Y. Mr. Abdul-Rashed, 26, tried to explain to her why he had quit his chemistry program and suddenly abandoned the life they had been building together. The military would soon be going door to door, he said. They were coming for him, for her, for everyone. She kept her composure during the call, but inside she was panicking.
It was the end of August 2020, and by that point his wife, who asked not to be identified out of fear of online harassment, had become familiar with her husband’s delusions and eruptions of hopelessness — disturbing changes that had coincided with the pandemic lockdown. But at least he had been at home.
“OK. Well,” she said, pausing. “Do your parents know? Are you safe?”
He said he was, but wouldn’t say more. Not long after, he connected with his wife on a video chat. Again she asked where he was. He would only say that he was with a “like-minded brother.”
The undertow of unreason had pulled Mr. Danian and Mr. Abdul-Rashed away from their loved ones, though it was not yet clear just how far away it would carry them.
To his wife, Mr. Abdul-Rashed’s transformation during that first spring and summer of Covid had been devastating. Mr. Abdul-Rashed was a practicing Muslim and a Ph.D. candidate in organic chemistry at the University of Rochester, researching novel techniques for building complex molecules. By the spring of 2019, he was already winning prizes, about to publish in a peer-reviewed journal and working to promote diversity in STEM. “He was charming and funny,” his wife said, “and super smart, obviously.”
Shukree Abdul-Rashed in 2019. To his wife, Mr. Abdul-Rashed’s transformation during that first spring and summer of Covid had been devastating.
Abdul-Rashed Family
But as the lockdowns of 2020 wore on, Mr. Abdul-Rashed’s wife began to notice that her husband was also spending a lot of time online, and that those sessions were agitating him. When she asked what he was watching, he would say something like, “Just YouTubers or whatever.” Glancing over his shoulder now and then, she saw “plandemic” videos about Covid-19 and bizarre ultraconservative content about Satan’s grip on the government.
Nevertheless, when she confronted him, she was careful not to make him feel cornered or belittled. “If you choose to marry someone, they deserve your patience and kindness,” she told me. Through the summer, she endured as best she could. Mr. Abdul-Rashed phased in and out of his troubling state, continuing his organic chemistry research and being an attentive spouse one day, sinking further into paranoia and despondence the next.
In mid-August, he met with his adviser, Dr. Alison Frontier, a chemistry professor. Seated beneath a giant oak tree on campus, Mr. Abdul-Rashed got straight to it. “I want to resign from the program,” he told Dr. Frontier. He was done with academia and needed to focus on other things, namely spreading the word about Satan’s plan for controlling humanity, bogus vaccines and the imminent apocalypse. Dr. Frontier was at a loss, and she remembered thinking: “This is a scientist who understands how vaccines work. How does this happen? How is science suddenly thrown out the window in favor of the will of evil men to control the world?”
For the Danians in Michigan, their son’s troubled state of mind wasn’t a complete surprise. Years earlier, he had been treated for depression, but his mental health had since improved, and he had recently started working at a restaurant. Then in early 2020, he had “developed paranoid thoughts” — made worse, Ms. Danian said, by the pandemic, widespread social unrest and the presidential election. He started posting videos in which he talked about a totalitarian government, Armageddon and finding Christ.
He proposed that the family study scripture with him. He was desperate for others to see what he saw. In one wandering, almost breathless, message, he wrote, “As the Bible said we fall for lack of knowledge.”
Isaac Danian celebrated his 20th birthday just a month before he abruptly left for Hawaii.
Danian Family
By that point, the Danians feared that Isaac might be suffering from schizophrenia or some other mental illness. But before they could persuade him to get help, he was on a plane to Hawaii.
Back in Rochester, Mr. Abdul-Rashed’s wife kept rethinking the conversation in which her husband had said he was with a “like-minded brother.”
“That triggered me to go and look and see who he was interacting with,” she said. She went to her laptop and began poring over her husband’s social media posts. She also remembered two T-shirts Mr. Abdul-Rashed had bought a few weeks before leaving. They depicted a Black Jesus with glowing white eyes, and the slogan “Vaccines are the Mark of the Beast 666.” In smaller print, there was the URL of a YouTube channel.
She typed the address into a new tab and was led to a collection of posts by a man with dirty-blond dreadlocks and a tattoo across his forehead that spelled out, in archaic Hebrew, “Yahweh.” The caption accompanying the most recent video read, “Last opportunity to join me and friends in our exodus.” He was looking for any men — because women, in his view, were a temptation to sin — of sound mind and studious nature who wanted to “bug out” of this obviously doomed society and start rebuilding civilization as God intended it.
On their next video call, Mr. Abdul-Rashed’s wife asked her husband directly: Are you with this man with the tattoo? He said yes, but again refused to say where he was. While he spoke, his wife noticed tropical vegetation in the background and thought: “definitely not Rochester.” A few weeks later, she found an order receipt for the T-shirts, which included a return address in Hawaii.
“Oh my God — this is it!” she shouted.
The tattooed man’s name was Matthew Mellow, though he had been born Matthew Logue. On his YouTube channel, Facebook and other social media, he went by the alias Mortekai Eleazar.
Mr. Mellow grew up in Orange County, Calif., where he became an avid body boarder. When he was 20, he moved to Hawaii, where he made ends meet refurbishing scooters. In the early 2010s, Mr. Mellow set out for still more distant shores, traveling to many famous surf breaks in the South Pacific. But by 2020, he was back on Oahu, living with his mother.
Mr. Abdul-Rashed and Mr. Danian had found Mr. Mellow and
