A Satanic cultist who killed his parents in a plot to assassinate President Donald Trump was sentenced Thursday to two life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Nikita Casap, 18, confessed to the murders in January after authorities found him living with his parents’ corpses in their Wisconsin home, court records show. Law enforcement also found materials detailing his descent into nihilistic ideology, terrorist plots and discussions with unidentified individuals who egged him on — a spiral that ultimately led a Waukesha County court to lock him up permanently.
“To everyone who loved them, to everyone who feels pain and grief because of my actions, I am sorry,” Casap said during Thursday’s televised sentencing hearing during a tearful speech. He claimed to have accepted Christianity and asked God for forgiveness since the crime.
“What I did was vile. What I did was thoughtless. What I did was wrong,” Casap said.
The teen pleaded guilty to murder charges after fatally shooting his mother and stepfather in February 2025. He initially faced additional charges over the killings, such as using a false identity to obtain money. Casap took their lives “to obtain the financial means and autonomy necessary” for his plot to murder Trump, an FBI affidavit said. The Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed not to use evidence in a federal case against Casap in exchange for truthful statements during an FBI interview, Republican Waukesha County District Attorney Lesli Boese said in Thursday’s proceeding.
The FBI tied Casap’s case to an emerging trend of “Nihilistic Violent Extremists (NVEs),” criminals who hate society and want to cause its collapse, as opposed to those waging violence for typical political goals. Some materials on Casap’s phone referenced the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a cult that embraces “anti-Judaic, anti-Christian, and anti-Western ideologies.” O9A also advocates for terrorism and child sexual abuse, according to the FBI.
Other similar groups have been charged in child exploitation cases. NVEs also helped radicalize a teen who killed a student and himself in January 2025 at Antioch High School in Tennessee, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. Before his capture, Casap made an internet search for the phrase “Antioch High School shooter,” among other murderers he was interested in, a Boese said Thursday.
The FBI found Casap immersed in online chats with Russian extremist group National Socialism/White Power. Casap was also shown to text Russian and Ukraine-based contacts who encouraged his violent ideas. The 18-year-old went so far as to purchase a drone and explosives “to be used as a weapon of mass destruction” before being caught, the FBI wrote.
“As to why, specifically Trump, I think it’s obvious,” a written manifesto from Casap said, according to the FBI. “By getting rid of the president and perhaps the vice president, that is guaranteed to bring in some chaos. And not only that, but it will bring further into the public the idea that assassinations and accelerating the collapse are possible things to do.”
The strangers online targeted Casap for “manipulation” as a “vulnerable, immature, non-skeptical individual,” and he should not be punished as if he were an adult at the time, Casap’s attorney, Paul Rifelj, told the court.
Casap said Thursday that he “became obsessed with hateful thoughts” out of a belief that society was “rotten,” but should not have listened to those indoctrinating him. “To the other young people they are targeting right now, that would be my message: you have the ability to choose between right and wrong,” he said.
Nevertheless, the prosecution and the stepfather’s brother, Robert Kitchell, asked the court for life in prison without parole eligibility in Thursday’s hearing.
“For more than a year, we have struggled to make sense of it,” Kitchell told the court. Casap’s parents took him from war-torn Moldova, where he was born, and provided a loving home, he added.
“There is no reason that can justify such an ultimate betrayal,” Kitchell said. “My family is forever broken. There will never be another holiday, celebration or gathering where we are whole again.”
Boese also disputed any notion that the unnamed individuals were responsible for driving Casap toward evil, particularly the assassination plan. “This defendant brought that plan to them,” she said.
The district attorney noted that Casap brought a household Bible with him right after the murders, which she called a manipulative tactic to make others think he had “found God.”
“He always had God,” she said. “He just ignored God.”
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