Life on TikTok gave him the illusion of love and a sad, brutal end

The world Sam Nordquist inhabited through his phone screen was where he felt most at ease. It was where he found acceptance, established some of his deepest connections, met some of his closest friends.

The amount of time he spent socializing with apparent strangers online puzzled his friends and family, who knew him as an extrovert, a jokester, a charmer.

But it was not entirely surprising. He had dreams of fame, which he hoped to realize by uploading videos and livestreaming his everyday life.

And for a young, Black transgender man living in the suburbs of Minneapolis with his mother and older brother, social media represented a landscape of endless possibility in his search for belonging.

Last September, he traveled to upstate New York to meet a woman he had begun talking to online over the summer. He considered her his girlfriend, even though they had yet to be in the same room. The trip was meant to last two weeks.

Five months later he was dead, his body discarded in the brush of a secluded farm roughly 15 miles from the roadside motel where she lived with her two young children. Nordquist was 24 years old.

The woman, Precious Arzuaga, and six other people have been charged with first-degree murder — an extraordinarily severe charge, stemming from allegations that they tortured Nordquist for weeks before he died. Prosecutors say the children, a 12-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, were made to participate in the torture.

Arzuaga pleaded not guilty, as did the other six people accused. Arzuaga’s lawyer, William Swift, said he was “pursuing all legal avenues on her behalf.” A trial date has not been set.

Without a full suite of facts or anything resembling closure, Nordquist’s family has been plagued by grief, anger, endless conjecture and an agonizing series of questions.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to me,” said his older sister, Kayla. “I don’t understand how they just decided they were going to. …”

She trailed off. The details of the case, however sparse, were too devastating to utter aloud.

Online, though, Nordquist’s life and the circumstances of his death have united a devoted community that wants to talk about almost nothing else. People he never knew congregate on Facebook to organize memorials, lament the dangers facing transgender people and indulge their fascination with true crime by trading notes about the case. Nordquist’s family has joined in to grieve, to vent, to find solace and to seek answers.

To those he left behind, there is a brutal irony in Nordquist’s vibrant digital afterlife.

“Sam wanted to be — not in this way, of course — but Sam always wanted to be famous,” his sister said. “And now he is.”

Like many of his generation, Nordquist treated social media like a public diary, sharing musings, insecurities and aspirations without hesitation. In one TikTok video, he rapped about coming to terms with his gender identity.

Nordquist, who was assigned female at birth, came out as a lesbian around age 13 or 14, according to his sister, and dated girls as an adolescent.

He had been struggling academically and socially, and in ninth grade he transferred to a charter school in St. Paul for students seeking an alternative learning environment.

In high school, he volunteered at soup kitchens and shelters. Darius Husain, the director of the school, Face to Face Academy, described him as a “border dweller,” someone who moved charismatically among social groups.

Nordquist graduated in 2020, the same year he came out as transgender. (In 2023, he started hormone therapy and underwent a mastectomy.)

He began working in a group home, where his co-worker and friend Ashlee Youngs described him as a stubborn advocate for the residents.

Youngs and others also said that he always had his phone out — early in the morning, at work, at night in bed.

If he was not recording videos or livestreaming, he was video chatting with friends, sometimes while scrolling through social media on another device. On apps like LiveMe and TikTok, he met people who became some of his closest friends. Some lived hundreds of miles away. Many of them he had never seen in person.

Inevitably, his social media feeds traced the roller coaster of his romantic life.

Those who knew Nordquist agreed on one thing above all: For all his sociability, he was deeply lonely and seeking something more in life. In the words of Youngs, “Sam was almost desperate for love.”

He started communicating with Arzuaga. She was a 38-year-old mother living on the edge of Canandaigua, a small city in the Finger Lakes region of New York. She had reached out to him on TikTok, according to his friends.

His family members noticed the brisk turnaround. The couple posted videos lip-syncing to the same songs on TikTok. They had marathon sessions on the phone.

“They would even FaceTime and fall asleep on the phone together,” Youngs said.

While Nordquist was trying to project his authentic self online, Arzuaga was doing the opposite, according to people close to her and in her sphere for decades.

Her posts on social media portrayed a playful, doting mother who exuded confidence, sex appeal and fortitude.

In reality, she was a homeless drifter with a violent and chaotic past.

In Geneva, New York, another city in the area, she is named in nearly 200 police reports for incidents including harassment, domestic disturbances, theft and threats of violence. Public records show she was jailed at least eight times. Her past lovers — men and women — invariably described her as manipulative and abusive.

By the time Nordquist encountered her online, Arzuaga and her children had returned to the Finger Lakes, settling into Patty’s Lodge, an assemblage of timeworn buildings on a highway outside Canandaigua.

The lodge is one of eight motels used by Ontario County to shelter people receiving housing assistance. Rooms are rented by the week, and police logs show officers are regularly summoned.

“These are all homeless people,” said Manny Patel, who operates the motel. “This is a shelter.”

Nordquist arrived Sept. 28 to be with Arzuaga.

In subsequent days, Nordquist posted video after video to TikTok celebrating his relationship. He called his family and friends and told them things were going well. He did not get on his return flight home, scheduled for Oct. 12.

Confused, his mother, Linda, called police the next day to check in on him. When officers arrived at Patty’s Lodge, Nordquist told them he was fine, said Mark Eifert, a senior investigator with the New York State Police.

And it seemed so. Over the next three days, Nordquist posted at least 19 TikTok videos, most of them showing him and Arzuaga kissing, cuddling and dancing together. One featured the couple with Arzuaga’s two children under the text “The New Nordquist-Arzuaga Family 2024.”

The TikTok uploads continued apace until Nov. 15. Then the posts from Nordquist abruptly came to an end.

Nordquist’s communication with his family members and friends became curt and infrequent after that. More puzzling, they began finding themselves blocked from his accounts on various social media and chat apps.

Those who knew Nordquist in Minnesota found his behavior increasingly difficult to rationalize. He had effectively abandoned his job at the group home, work he had seemed to relish, with co-workers and clients he had treated as friends. It was not until later that they realized his phone activity was most likely being controlled by Arzuaga.

Throughout this period, Nordquist’s sister and mother struggled with how much to intervene, reasoning that he was an adult making his own choices.

On Feb. 7, Kayla Nordquist sent him a text message with a picture of her three young children.

“I just thought you’d want to see how big they’re getting,” she wrote.

There was no response. The silence — and before that, coldness — felt wrong. The brother she knew liked to gossip and make people laugh.

Kayla Nordquist texted her brother again.

“Well, I hope you’re doing OK and safe,” she wrote. “I love and I miss you.”

There was no reply. Only later would she learn the truth.

“By the time I sent those text messages,” she said, “he was already gone.”

On Feb. 9, Nordquist’s family asked state police to check in again at Patty’s Lodge. Kayla Nordquist said police told her that they had encountered a man at the door of Room 22 who made an alarming claim.

“He said Sam’s never been there,” she recalled. “He said he didn’t even know who the officer was talking about.”

Troopers eventually opened a missing persons investigation. The family had already begun spreading the word on social media.

Desperate, Nordquist’s mother, sister and older brother, Mason, headed to New York, stopping Feb. 13 at a motel in Ohio.

At 10:38 that night, they received a call from a police officer. A body had been found in the field of a dairy farmer. Authorities believed it was Sam.

In March, authorities outlined the details of Nordquist’s death in an indictment that read like a horror story.

Beginning on Jan. 1, prosecutors said, Nordquist was physically restrained in Room 22 of Patty’s Lodge. He was hit, kicked and punched; forced to stand or kneel facing a wall; sexually assaulted; deprived of food and water; forced to consume feces, urine and saliva; bound with duct tape and doused with bleach. The torture didn’t cease, they said, until Feb. 2, the date they believe he was killed.

To prove the first-degree murder charges, which are rare in New York, Kelly Wolford, an assistant district attorney in Ontario County, said her office would need to show “that all seven defendants tortured Sam Nordquist, and that they did so because they enjoyed it.”

Often, when people are accused of unspeakable crimes, their friends or neighbors express shock that they could be capable of such things. But many who knew Arzuaga intimately were not surprised to hear the allegations.

“I know how she is,” said Carlos Ortiz-Rivera, the father of Arzuaga’s 7-year-old son, who was alleged to have been forced to torture Nordquist.

Ortiz-Rivera said he met Arzuaga eight years ago when county social services placed him in a hotel she frequented. A recovering drug addict, he was so taken by her appearance and the affection she showed that he moved into a trailer with her.

But, he said, he soon discovered that she was prone to violent fits brought on by jealousy and paranoia. He pointed to a small scar on the palm of his left hand that he said he got when she stabbed him with a decorative sword.

“She’ll talk good to you until she gets you,” said Ortiz-Rivera, 46. “And then she turns.”

Among the six others accused alongside Arzuaga is her 21-year-old son, Thomas Eaves, who was raised by his mother and grandmother in Geneva. It was by all accounts a tumultuous childhood.

Arzuaga served five stints in jail before Thomas turned 7; when he was 12, she was charged with animal neglect for locking their pit bull, Princess, in a shed without food or water. By the time he was 18, Eaves had been jailed for beating and robbing a 16-year-old autistic boy.

Also arrested was Patrick Goodwin, 30, who had recently moved in at Patty’s Lodge after serving eight years for engaging in criminal sexual acts with two minors. He was registered as a Level 3 sex offender, which the state considers to be “a high risk of repeat offense and a threat to public safety.”

According to police, Goodwin introduced Arzuaga to his girlfriend, Kimberly Sochia, 29, and Kyle R. Sage, 33, who had spent time in prison for grand larceny and disseminating indecent materials to minors. Both have been charged as participating in the torture and killing of Nordquist.

The remaining defendants, Jennifer Quijano, 30, who was identified in the indictment as “Brooklyn,” and Emily J. Motyka, 19, had personal connections to Arzuaga.

Police said Quijano was an on-again, off-again romantic partner of Arzuaga’s.

Motyka was working as a highway maintenance worker and living at Patty’s Lodge with Arzuaga after having been introduced to her by a mutual friend, according to police.

To the puzzlement of some, prosecutors did not charge Nordquist’s killing as a hate crime. In response, Wolford said the acts were “bigger than a hate crime.”

Nordquist was buried March 3 near his home in Minnesota.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.