Who Is Bradley Cadenhead, Also Known as Felix

TLDR: Bradley Cadenhead, who used the online handle Felix, is the Texas teenager who founded the 764 child-exploitation network in 2020 at age 15 from his home in Stephenville, Texas. He pleaded guilty in 2021 in Texas state court to multiple counts of producing, distributing, and possessing child sexual abuse material, and was sentenced to 80 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He has been incarcerated since 2021. The network he founded has continued under successor leadership.

The Direct Answer

Bradley Cadenhead is the Texas teenager who founded the 764 online network. He was 15 years old when he started the Discord server in late 2020 from his bedroom in Stephenville, Texas. He named the network for the local area code, 764. He used the online handle Felix, along with several variant spellings of that handle.

He was arrested in 2021 by the Erath County Sheriff’s Office on Texas state child-pornography charges, pleaded guilty in Texas state court, and was sentenced to 80 years in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He was 16 at the time of the sentence. He has been in TDCJ custody since.

The full case file and the biographical record are documented in the Bradley Cadenhead founder profile.

The Felix Handle

The Felix handle is the identifier most consistently attested in the publicly available record. It appears in charging documents in the Erath County case, in archived 764 server logs preserved by researchers and by law enforcement, and in subsequent FBI public statements that reference the network’s founding period. Variant spellings of the handle appear across different platforms and time periods, and ancillary handles used by Cadenhead in the same period appear in adjacent cases that draw on the 764 evidentiary base.

The convention in the broader 764 community and in successor-group references is to refer to the founder by the Felix handle rather than by legal name. The convention is a feature of how online networks of this type document themselves: the handle is the identity, the legal name is the document trail. The same convention extends to the network itself, where 764 functions as a brand rather than as an acronym for anything specific. The number is the Stephenville area code.

Stephenville and the Founding Period

Stephenville is a small city in Erath County, central Texas, two hours southwest of Fort Worth, with a population of roughly 21,000 anchored by Tarleton State University and the surrounding dairy economy. The 764 area code is a recent overlay, added to the older 254 in the early 2010s. Cadenhead grew up in Stephenville. The pre-network biographical record that has been pieced together from local reporting and from court filings is not extensive, in part because of his age at the time of the conduct and in part because of the procedural opacity that attached to the case as the federal interest expanded.

What is documented is that he was a high-school-age user with extended unsupervised online time and an early presence in the corners of Discord and adjacent platforms where the broader com-network subculture was already operating. The com-network terminology and the network’s relationship to adjacent groups, including 576 and the Comelicon splinter, is mapped in the com networks glossary.

The Charges

The Texas state case in Erath County covered the production, distribution, and possession of child sexual abuse material under Texas state statutes. The guilty plea converted what could have been a multi-year contested prosecution into a sentencing hearing, at which Cadenhead received an 80-year term. The sentence is structured to permit parole consideration after a substantial portion served, with the exact eligibility date redacted in public-facing records consistent with Texas juvenile-adjacent prosecution practice.

The state prosecution preempted any federal charging decision in the originating jurisdiction. Federal child-pornography statutes carry mandatory minimums and would have produced a federal sentence subject to U.S. Sentencing Guidelines calculation. The Erath County resolution produced an outcome roughly comparable in severity through a single-jurisdiction guilty plea. The federal interest in 764, when it emerged, attached not to Cadenhead but to the network he had spawned, in cases such as the Eastern District of New York prosecution documented at the Angel Almeida 764 case.

What Cadenhead Built

The 764 server, when it launched in late 2020, used a tiered membership system in which contributions, meaning verifiable production of content the leadership could use as proof of commitment, determined internal status. The currency was material that, in any other context, would result in the immediate deletion of the server and the criminal referral of the operator. In 764, the same material was the basis of internal status. The mechanics of how the network recruited and coerced its targets are documented in how 764 recruits children.

What distinguished 764 from the surrounding com-network ecosystem was the explicit pairing of the exploitation logic with an extremism aesthetic drawn from the Order of Nine Angles. The aesthetic transfer matters less for the criminal record than for the FBI’s eventual classification of 764 as a nihilistic violent extremism case rather than a child-exploitation case alone. The Order of Nine Angles background sits at the Order of Nine Angles hub.

What Happened After

The network did not collapse with Cadenhead’s arrest. The Discord servers persisted, migrated, fragmented, and were reconstituted under successor leadership in the months following the 2021 case. Each disruption produced a brief pause in operations followed by re-emergence on a new platform or under a new structure. The arrest cadence that followed across multiple federal districts is documented in the 764 arrests timeline 2022 to 2026. The aggregate analysis of whether the network meets the threshold for terrorism designation appears in is 764 a terrorist organization.

Cadenhead has had no documented operational role in the network since his 2021 incarceration. The continuity of 764 has run through successor figures, several of whom have themselves been the targets of federal arrests. The name Felix, however, remains in circulation within the community and in the case files that prosecutors continue to build on the foundation the Cadenhead case established.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Cadenhead still active in 764?

No. He has been incarcerated since 2021 in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and has no documented operational role in the network. The 764 community has been led since his arrest by a succession of figures, several of whom have themselves been the targets of federal arrests.

Did Cadenhead invent the network’s coercion structure?

Whether he originated the tiered status structure or whether he adopted patterns already present in adjacent com networks is a question the public record does not fully answer. What is documented is that he scaled it. The coercion structure as it operated under his leadership is the structure that has continued, with modifications, under successor leadership.

Was Cadenhead prosecuted as a juvenile?

No. Despite his age at the time of the offense and at the time of sentencing, the case proceeded as an adult prosecution in Texas state court. Texas law permits the certification of juveniles as adults in serious cases, and the Erath County case proceeded under adult court procedure.

What is the relationship between Felix and the 764 number?

Felix is the founder’s online handle. 764 is the Stephenville area code, used as the network name. The two function together as the founder’s signature in the network’s internal documents and in the case files. Neither is an acronym for anything specific.