The Youtuber Who Killed His Family.



In the early hours of March 20th 2012, Trey Sealer, more commonly known on YouTube as Mr. Anime, shot his mother, father and brother in their family home in Waller, Texas but how did he get to this point and could this have been prevented?

Trey Sealer was born in Texas on August 3rd 1989. Growing up, he didn’t get into much trouble and he never complained of any bullying at school. Everything seemed normal until at the age of 13, Trey told his school teacher of a plan he had come up with. He was going to call 911 and complain about a suspicious shadow lingering outside the window of his parents' home. He would then wait in the nearby woods for police to arrive where he would club them with his baseball bat and steal their firearm before heading to his friend's house to shoot him. Understandably, this raised concerns and Trey was made to see a psychiatrist however nothing came of this and the matter was eventually dropped by both the police and the school.

In September 2006, at the age of 17, Trey made his first YouTube channel under the name LensCapProductions where he would upload short films and bloopers of mainly himself but would sometimes include his brother and parents too. Nearly a year after making the channel, he made a new channel called Mr. Anime where he changed his content to reviewing TV series and movies in the anime genre. He garnered success from this channel and had a reputation of being straightforward and honest in his reviews which at the time made him stand out from other’s doing review content because they would always try and shadow the overarching opinion in the Anime community. Over the next five years he had uploaded over 300 videos and in 2011 alone his channel gathered over 1 million views which at the time, was an enormous amount. During this time, he would still upload funny skit videos every now and then to try and break up the content on his channel however these videos ended up being more disturbing than funny.

Trey was a big admirer of firearms and he started to include them in his skit videos but these videos slowly turned into full demonstration videos. In these videos, there were no warning signs as he would often condemn gun violence in his videos and had a strong stance against it.

For most of 2011, he was living alone in his grandmother’s house in Hempstead, Texas as she had recently passed and he was safeguarding the house for the foreseeable future. However, a big reason he decided to move in there was because the relationship with his father had deteriorated due to Trey dropping out of college which his dad had a problem with. Whilst living alone, all of his behaviour was left unchecked and he would often fantasize about doing as much damage to human life as possible. He became obsessed with historical school shooters like The Columbine Shooters, who murdered 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives and notorious serial killer Ted Bundy. Trey had gone as far to download a satellite map of his old school, Waller High School, to plan a massacre of his own. This plan consisted of him ramming his car through the gate and courtyard before getting out and unloading on as many people as possible with his .22 rifle.

During this time, rum ours had started to circulate online that he was using live animals, including his pet rabbit, as target practice. People in his fanbase had also started to notice the content of his video’s declining which coincided alongside his erratic behavior.

Towards the end of 2011 arguments between himself, his brother and his father became much more frequent and were mainly around Trey’s alcohol abuse which had gotten considerably worse. At Christmas time, he had told a friend he was planning to kill his father because Trey believed his dad saw him as a crazy, unstable low-life who would never do anything with his life. This was false and Trey’s father believed he was a little misguided and lost but still had hope for his son.


In February 2012, he uploaded a video called “Mr. Anime is planning something."

March 13th 2012, Trey would upload his last video to the Mr. Anime channel called “Mr. Anime’s new job” where he shared that he’d been headhunted by a film making company and he accepted a job they’d offered to him. He concluded the video by informing his audience he would still upload but it wouldn’t be as frequently. Unbeknownst to his audience, the job offer was a lie.

In the evening of March 19th 2012, Trey had stayed up binge drinking alone in deceased grandmother’s house. This led to him fully arming himself and driving over to his family home in the early hours of the 20th of March. A police call was made by a neighbor citing unexpected noises coming from the property. Once he killed his family, he sent calm voice messages from his parents' phones explaining they wouldn’t be coming into work because they were dead and then he fell asleep next to his mother. Upon awakening, he packed his car with his rifle and over 100 rounds of ammunition and made his way to Weller Highschool where he sat in the car park for a while before deciding against carrying out the massacre he’d planned. The police only arrived at the home after a second call was made by a family member requesting a welfare check because nobody was answering their calls.

When police arrived on the scene, they found Lawton Ray Sessler Jr, 58, Rhonda Wyse Sessler. 57, and Mark Alan Sessler, 26, deceased on the living room floor with multiple gunshot wounds. The house had also been vandalized with nearly every room having broken glass present. Carvings were found on many doors and walls in the house confessing to his crime which read: “I will never forgive myself; I don’t know why I did this.” Later that evening, Trey was found at a friend's house 21 miles away in Magnolia where he was arrested.

In police custody, Trey told law enforcement that he was ready to take out his plans on the school and said the only reason he killed his family was so they didn’t have to endure any pain or shame for what he was about to do. During his interviews with police, his behavior seemed unstable. He would weep at times and admit to his wrongdoing but then zone out and seem like a completely different person than to that of a killer. Trey admitted to being a “loner” and shooting at businesses in the middle of the night and killing livestock and pets. He confessed that this was something he had planned over several years.


Police seized a half a dozen weapons from his grandmother’s property and ammunition of various calibers.

On August 2nd 2012, Trey Eric Sessler pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Since then, he has shown contentment with being in jail and accepted that it is where he belongs.


“Mr. Anime is Planning Something”

Trey Eric Sessler, 22, likes anime, movies, and guns, and he was arrested yesterday for killing his parents and his older brother with a high-powered rifle in their Waller home. Texas Rangers and a SWAT team caught him in the afternoon in Magnolia, north of Houston. He was sitting in his black Mustang.

Sessler was a graduate of Waller High School and had made an amateur career out of doing online video reviews for the past five and a half years, mostly of shows and movies featuring anime, the Japanese art of animation. You can see the videos, which he called “Mr. Anime Reviews,” on YouTube, shot for his LENSAR Productions. There are 323 of them, and they had been viewed more than a million times. What do they tell us about Trey Sessler?

The videos show a young, nerdy guy doing playful reviews that are usually short (two or three minutes) and stylish in a low-fi kind of way, with Sessler talking to the camera from his bedroom, reviewing anime shows or movies. Sometimes he shows stills, sometimes he asks the characters questions, cutting back and forth between himself and the character on the screen. A young man who seems to be his brother makes some appearances. Mostly, it’s pretty whimsical stuff.

Mostly. On December 11, 2011, he put up one called “Very Bad News, Please Watch,” in which he wore sunglasses and announced that he had been diagnosed with pneumothorax, or a collapsed lung. “If you’re religious, I’d appreciate it if you prayed for me.”

And there are guns, lots of them. In a jaunty intro to his reviews he holds a pistol in each hand and shoots himself (via a quick edit) as he comes through the door; then Sessler looks into the camera and gives a wry thumbs-up. In a video from October 2010, Sessler pulls out a rifle with a flashlight attached to its barrel. “Well, get your rifle with flashlight attachment ready,” he says, “because today I’m gonna review the zombie epic High School of the Dead.”

And last September he uploaded a video showing him shooting a High Point 995 9mm rifle at some bottles under a bridge. Sessler gives an ominous intro to the video: “How you doing, everyone? It’s Mr. Anime, or you can call me Trey, or you can call me the guy who does the video reviews, or the guy who does all the gun stuff now.”

Apparently Sessler was going through some big changes. On March 13 he put up a video called “Mr. Anime’s New Job,” in which he says, “I have some pretty good news. I’ve found a full time job in a department I’m interested in—film,” though he also assures his viewers, “I’m still going to be doing videos.” But only a month before that he put up a video with the unnerving title, “Mr. Anime is Planning Something.” “I want to thank you for sticking with me and watching the channel,” he said. “Everything is going really good. ” He said he was going to take a two- or three-week break, and that he might do some blog videos. What else he was planning, he didn’t say.