A North Carolina couple narrowly escaped death after a stalker appeared outside their home in the middle of the night and attempted to fire a rifle through the back door, believing they were running a sex trafficking ring.
Tyler Austin Messer, 29, was arrested March 24 and charged with assault by pointing a weapon, two counts of criminal trespass and two counts of stalking.
A night earlier, the Marion man was captured on surveillance footage sliding around a property on Deep Woods Drive with an AR-15.
Messer, dressed head to toe in tactical gear, points the rifle at a sliding glass door. He is heard pulling the trigger, but the gun does not fire.
When the dogs inside start barking, he sneaks off into the night.
Tyler Austin Messer, 29, of North Carolina, was arrested and charged with assault by pointing a weapon, two counts of criminal trespass and two counts of stalking.
He was seen pointing an AR-15 assault rifle at the back door of a couple’s home, falsely believing they were running a child sex trafficking ring.
Owners Billy Brooks and Preston McHone say Messer has shown up at their house several times asking about his father.
Homeowners Billy Brooks and Preston McHone received a motion alert from their home cameras at 11:13 p.m. and realized someone was at their back door with a gun.
Documents reviewed by DailyMail.com show police refer to the Marion man as “mentally ill” several times.
A handwritten note scrawled on a bail explanation form from the magistrate says Messer “declared to the family that he was going to rid the world of sin.”
“The defendant entered illegally, pointed an AR-15 at the victims, pulled the trigger but the gun did not fire,” it reads.
‘The accused is mentally ill and has the ability to obtain firearms / is delusional (sic) / believes the victims kidnapped his father + are involved in sex trafficking. The defendant is very dangerous in his current mental state.
Deputies say more charges are expected to be filed against the 29-year-old man, who has trespassed on the property several times.
Brooks and McHone shared the surveillance footage on Facebook on Sunday in a desperate attempt to identify their stalker.
‘He has come here on 3 different occasions asking if his dad was here. Every time we said no,” Brooks wrote.
‘I have since found out from two different sources… that he believes we are running a child sex ring and that his father is involved. Apparently this is a persistent illusion, since the visits asking about his father were a year ago.’
Brooks noted that the man’s delusions seemed to “revolve around his father once living here” before the couple bought the house in 2017.
Authorities refer to Messer as “delusional” and “mentally ill” in the documents, adding that he believed the couple had kidnapped his father and were “engaged in sex trafficking.”
Messer was identified shortly after Brooks and McHone shared the images on Facebook. According to McHone (front), Messer was pointing the gun at both of them.
Marion County Sheriff’s Office deputies say more charges are expected to be filed against the 29-year-old man, who is “dangerous in (his) current mental state.”
In his own post, McHone clarified that the couple did not know Messer or his father.
‘Our last contact with him was more than a year ago when on a third occasion he arrived with a ‘stepfather’ asking about his biofather,” he explained.
‘He had been informed from the two previous interactions that we had lived here for 5 years and he did not know his father or anyone else who previously lived in the house.
“There was no interaction after that until Saturday night at 11:13, when he approached the back entrance of our house to carry out his plan to murder us both.”
McHone claimed that Messer had pulled the trigger “to shoot Billy” before “turning around and then shooting me.”
“At that point he places the rifle, but I noticed the security camera alerting while he was calling Billy and the dogs were barking, so he snuck away in the dark,” he wrote.
Messer’s baseless claims are eerily reminiscent of the QAnon conspiracy, which stemmed from posts on 4chan in October 2017.
The debunked theory alleges that former President Donald Trump is fighting a cabal of satanic pedophiles within Hollywood and the US government’s “deep state.”
This is also similar to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which falsely claimed that the NYPD had uncovered a child sex trafficking ring linked to members of the Democratic Party.
Adherents claimed the ring operated in the basement of Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C., the same place where another North Carolina man, Edgar Maddison Welch, was found with an assault rifle in December 2016.
Welch pleaded guilty in March 2017 to weapons and assault charges as part of a deal with prosecutors.
The conspiracy theory has gradually become less political, with more emphasis on the supposed “global elite” running child sex trafficking rings.
DailyMail.com has contacted Brooks and McHone for comment.