Richard Densmore, the '764' Member Who Ran the 'Sewer' and Drew 30 Years in Michigan

TLDR: Richard Anthony Reyna Densmore, 47, of Kaleva, Michigan, pleaded guilty in July 2024 to sexual exploitation of a child and was sentenced on November 7, 2024, to 30 years in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou in the Western District of Michigan. Known online as “Rabid,” Densmore built the 764 “Sewer” communities on Discord, where members recruited children to cut themselves, harm animals, and record sexually explicit acts. The Justice Department called 764 a violent extremist network. At 47, Densmore was among the oldest defendants prosecuted in a network whose founder and most charged members were teenagers, and his 30-year term ranked among the longest federal sentences imposed in a 764 case at the time it was handed down.

Kaleva

Kaleva is a village of a few hundred people in Manistee County, in the northern reach of Michigan’s lower peninsula, the kind of place where a federal child-exploitation prosecution is not part of the local vocabulary. Richard Densmore lived in that part of the state. He was forty-seven years old when the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan sentenced him, a fact that sits oddly against everything else in the 764 record, because the network the Justice Department tied him to is a network of children prosecuting children, of teenagers grooming younger teenagers, of a founder who built the whole apparatus on Discord when he was fifteen. Densmore was three decades older than that founder. He had, by the time federal agents reached him, spent years operating inside communities whose victims and whose other administrators were often the age of his own potential grandchildren.

That age gap is the first thing about the case that does not resolve into the familiar shape of the 764 story. The network’s public image, built across two years of FBI bulletins and national reporting, is adolescent: a Texas fifteen-year-old, a Queens twenty-one-year-old, a San Antonio nineteen-year-old. The founder’s profile is documented in the Bradley Cadenhead founder profile, and the network’s general structure is laid out in what is the group 764. Densmore does not fit the demographic. He fit the function. Inside 764, what mattered was not how old a member was but what that member could build and what that member could extract, and on both measures Densmore had built and extracted at scale.

”Rabid” and the Sewer

The Justice Department identified Densmore’s online identity as “Rabid.” Under that handle, according to the government, he created a set of Discord communities known as the “Sewer,” and those communities operated as one of the recruitment and coercion subgroups inside 764. The mechanics the government described are the mechanics that define the network. Members located children on gaming and social platforms, drew them into chat, and used a sequence of flattery, manufactured intimacy, threat, and blackmail to coerce those children into recording themselves. The recordings the network sought were specific: minors cutting themselves, minors harming or killing animals, minors engaging in sexually explicit acts, minors carving a member’s username into their own skin. The footage then functioned as currency, traded for status inside the community and held over the victim to force a return to the cycle.

Densmore’s role, in the government’s account, was infrastructural. He did not merely participate in the Sewer communities; he created them. That distinction carries weight in how federal sentencing treats organizers and leaders, and it carries weight in how the public record assigns responsibility, because a person who builds the room in which the coercion happens is differently culpable from a person who walks into a room someone else built. The naming of the communities, the recruitment of members into them, the architecture through which children were funneled toward the demand for self-harm content: that was the conduct the government attributed to “Rabid.”

What the recovered evidence contained has been described in reporting on the case rather than itemized in detail in the publicly available summaries. Among the materials referenced was a video in which a nude girl had Densmore’s online moniker written on her body, the signature artifact of the network’s coercion model, in which the demand that a victim mark herself with the abuser’s name converts a child’s body into proof of the abuser’s reach. The fuller documentation of how the network turns recordings into trophies and coercive holds sits in the 764 network child exploitation report.

The Charge

Densmore pleaded guilty in July 2024 to sexual exploitation of a child. The federal offense, codified at 18 U.S.C. § 2251, criminalizes the use, persuasion, inducement, enticement, or coercion of a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing a visual depiction of that conduct. It is the production statute, distinct from the possession and distribution offenses that govern material a defendant merely holds or shares, and it carries a substantially higher penalty range precisely because it reaches the conduct that creates the material in the first place. A first conviction under § 2251 carries a mandatory minimum of fifteen years and a statutory maximum of thirty.

The guilty plea resolved the case without trial. Densmore had been charged federally in 2024, and the plea in July of that year acknowledged the production conduct that anchored the government’s case. The broader investigative file, as the Justice Department framed it, extended beyond the single count of conviction to his role in building and running the Sewer communities, conduct that informed the sentence even where it was not separately charged. Federal sentencing permits a court to consider the full scope of an offender’s relevant conduct, and the government’s sentencing position placed Densmore’s network-building at the center of the case for the statutory maximum.

The Sentence

On November 7, 2024, United States District Judge Hala Jarbou sentenced Densmore to thirty years in federal prison, the statutory ceiling for a single first-offense production count. The sentence reflected the government’s characterization of Densmore not as a peripheral consumer but as an architect of the coercion machinery.

The Justice Department announced the sentence through its most senior officials, an unusual level of public attention for a single-defendant child-exploitation case and a signal of how the department had come to categorize the network. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in the announcement that “Richard Densmore will spend the next 30 years in federal prison for sexually exploiting a child and for his role in creating 764’s online networks that coerced children into recording themselves engaging in self-harm, sexually explicit acts, and violence.” FBI Director Christopher Wray’s statement described the method: “This defendant orchestrated a community to target children through online gaming sites and used extortion and blackmail to force his minor victims to record themselves committing acts of self-harm and violence.” Matthew Olsen, the head of the department’s National Security Division, framed 764 itself, characterizing the network’s conduct as involving the extreme exploitation and coercion of minors and a chilling level of depravity.

The participation of the National Security Division in a child-exploitation sentencing is itself a marker. Child-exploitation prosecutions ordinarily run through the department’s Criminal Division and the United States Attorney’s offices. The presence of the National Security Division reflects the categorization the FBI had by then assigned to 764, which the bureau treats as a nihilistic violent extremism matter rather than as a conventional child-exploitation case, a distinction examined in the comparison of O9A and 764. The terror-network framing in the department’s own announcement, where 764 is named as a violent extremist network rather than as a child-pornography ring, located the Densmore sentence inside the government’s national-security response to the network.

Where the Case Sits in the 764 Ledger

Densmore was sentenced in November 2024, during the first concentrated wave of major 764 prosecutions. The chronology matters, because the network’s legal reckoning has not arrived all at once. It has arrived case by case, in different courts, on different theories, with different outcomes.

The founding figure, Bradley Cadenhead, was prosecuted in Texas state court, pleaded guilty in 2021, and is serving an eighty-year sentence, with his subsequent bids for relief rejected. The Queens defendant, Angel Almeida, whose arrest is widely credited as the thread the FBI pulled to open its network-level investigation, was prosecuted federally in the Eastern District of New York and, after years of competency proceedings, was found not competent and not restorable in February 2026, a posture detailed in the Angel Almeida Queens case profile. Densmore sits between those poles as a case that produced a clean federal conviction and a maximum sentence, without the state-court venue of Cadenhead or the competency collapse of Almeida.

His sentence also sits near the top of the range the network’s prosecutions have generated. Cadenhead’s eighty-year term came from a Texas state court applying state sentencing rules. Among the federal 764 cases, Densmore’s thirty years stood as one of the longest at the time it was imposed, a benchmark against which later federal sentences and charging decisions would be measured. The aggregate scale of the federal effort, including the count of open investigations across the bureau’s field offices, is tracked in how big is the 764 network.

The age outlier is what makes the case useful as a corrective to the network’s adolescent public image. 764 is real, and it is largely young, and the founder built it as a teenager. The presence of a forty-seven-year-old administrator who built one of its coercion subcommunities establishes that the network’s structure was permeable to adults, that the same architecture a fifteen-year-old assembled could be operated by a man three decades older, and that the demand for self-harm content did not depend on the proximity in age between abuser and victim. The Sewer communities were not a teenage subculture that a grown man stumbled into. They were communities a grown man built.

What the Network Is

For readers arriving at the Densmore case without the surrounding context, the short version is this. 764 began on Discord around 2020, founded by a Texas teenager. It is decentralized, pseudonymous, and constantly splintering into renamed subgroups, of which the Sewer was one. Its members target vulnerable minors, often children already struggling with mental health, and coerce them through a pipeline of grooming, manufactured intimacy, and blackmail into producing recordings of self-harm, animal abuse, and sexual conduct. Those recordings circulate as status and as coercive holds over the children who made them. The FBI classifies the network as a nihilistic violent extremism threat, and the Justice Department has charged dozens of people with ties to it across the United States and coordinated with prosecutions abroad.

The network’s relationship to the older occult-fascist tradition that supplies part of its aesthetic and ideology is treated in the Order of Nine Angles primer, and the full documentary record on the parent network and its offshoots is collected in the Order of Nine Angles topic hub. The Densmore case is one node in that record, valuable less for any doctrinal element than for what it shows about the network’s operational reach into adulthood.

The Enforcement Wave Around It

The Densmore sentence did not stand alone. It landed inside an accelerating federal effort that, by late 2025, the FBI described in terms of more than 350 open investigations tied to 764 across the bureau’s field offices, a figure the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee cited in February 2026 correspondence with the FBI director and characterized as likely to have grown since. The Justice Department has publicly charged dozens of people with ties to the network. Densmore’s case, resolved by guilty plea and capped at the statutory maximum, became one of the cleaner data points in a docket otherwise complicated by competency disputes, extradition fights, and the network’s habit of dissolving and renaming its subgroups faster than any single prosecution can reach them.

What the Densmore case offered that prosecution effort was a template. A defendant who built a named coercion community could be charged under the production statute, convicted on the conduct that created the material, and sentenced to decades rather than years. The cases that followed, including the first federal terrorism charge brought against a 764 member, drew on the same evidentiary logic the early sentencings established. The current posture of the network’s prosecutions, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, is tracked in the 764 arrests and prosecutions monthly roundup.

What the Case Established

The Densmore case established three things with the reliability that a guilty plea and a maximum sentence provide.

It established that building a 764 coercion community is prosecutable as production of child sexual abuse material, not merely as possession or distribution, when the architect of the community is shown to have caused the creation of the material. The thirty-year sentence rested on § 2251, the production statute, and the government’s theory tied the production directly to the communities Densmore built.

It established that the Justice Department was willing to deploy its most senior officials and its National Security Division against a single 764 defendant, treating the case as part of a national-security response rather than as a routine child-exploitation matter. The terror-network language in the department’s own announcement was not journalistic shorthand. It was the government’s chosen frame.

And it established the age range of the network’s exposure. A network whose public face is adolescent produced, in Densmore, a forty-seven-year-old organizer who drew one of its longest federal sentences. The case did not soften the network’s youthful profile so much as complicate it, showing that the same coercion architecture operated across a thirty-year age span between its youngest builders and its oldest.

What the public record does not contain, in the summaries available, is the granular procedural detail that a full docket review would supply: the specific count structure beyond the single production charge of conviction, the identities of the individual prosecutors, the precise victim count. What the record does contain is sufficient to fix the case in the network’s history. A man in a Michigan village of a few hundred people built rooms on Discord in which children were taught to cut themselves, and a federal judge sent him away for thirty years.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Richard Densmore being held?

Densmore was sentenced to 30 years in the custody of the federal Bureau of Prisons. The publicly available announcements did not specify a designated facility, which the Bureau of Prisons assigns after sentencing based on security classification and program needs. Federal sentences of this length for production offenses are served in Bureau of Prisons facilities rather than in state custody.

What court handled the Densmore case?

The United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan. U.S. District Judge Hala Jarbou imposed the sentence on November 7, 2024. The case was a federal prosecution, distinct from the Texas state-court venue that handled founder Bradley Cadenhead.

Is the “Sewer” the same as Densmore’s username?

No. Densmore’s online handle was “Rabid.” The “Sewer” was the name of the Discord communities he created inside 764. Some secondary accounts have conflated the two; the Justice Department’s account distinguishes the personal handle from the communities he built.

How does the Densmore sentence compare to other 764 cases?

Founder Bradley Cadenhead received an 80-year sentence in Texas state court, documented in the Bradley Cadenhead founder profile. Among federal 764 cases, Densmore’s 30 years was one of the longest at the time of sentencing. The federal case against Angel Almeida in the Eastern District of New York produced no verdict and is now in civil-commitment posture, as described in the Angel Almeida case profile.

Why was the National Security Division involved in a child-exploitation case?

The FBI classifies 764 as a nihilistic violent extremism threat rather than as a conventional child-exploitation network. That categorization routes 764 cases through national-security channels in addition to the ordinary child-exploitation prosecutors. The head of the National Security Division, Matthew Olsen, spoke in the department’s announcement of the Densmore sentence, reflecting that framing.