He Murdered His Family Over His Obsession With a Girl He Met Online

Grant Amato was born on May 20th, 1989 in Chuluota, Florida. He was the youngest of three boys and was very close with his brothers. He would eventually go on to attend the University of Florida and then enroll in a medical program before becoming a nurse, just like his older brother Cody.

Cody seemed to flourish as a nurse, while Grant seemed to be struggling with it. In 2018, Grant was fired from his nursing job and arrested for Grand Theft for stealing prescription medicine and giving it to patients.

After he lost his job, he fell into a deep depression where he stayed at home all day playing video games and surfing the internet. And at the time, Grant still lived with his parents and they were strongly encouraging him to get out of the house and find a new job.

However, Grant didn’t listen to them, and he went on to create an online persona to live out his true fantasies. He would tell people online that he was a famous Twitch streamer who had a lot of money, when in reality he didn’t have any money, he still lived at home with his parents, and all he did was play video games all day.

One day, while he was surfing the internet, Grant came across a cam site where can talk to lonely individuals online, for a small fee of course, and that’s when things in this story take a huge turn.

While he was on , Grant found a model named Sylvie from Bulgaria. In order to chat with her, Grant needed to pay at least 90 tokens to chat with her. He was captivated by her looks that he bought an initial pack of $600 worth of tokens (5,000 tokens) so he could do just that.

But without a job, how was Grant able to afford $600 worth of tokens to spend on a webcam model? He had taken the money from his dad and his brother Cody after telling them he needed to use it to promote his Twitch channel. Meanwhile, every time he got money, he spent it on Sylvie.

In a short period of time, Grant’s perception of Sylvie went from desire to full-on delusion, and he started referring to her as his girlfriend. Even though he had to pay money to talk to her and send her lavish gifts. In total, Grant would go on to send her over $200,000.

Eventually, Grant’s dad would catch on to his nonsense when he found out that his son had opened a credit card in his name and was using it on the cam site. That’s when things took a turn for the worst. Grant and his father got into a huge fight over it, but it still wasn’t enough for his father to press charges against him, so the charges were dropped.

Not too long after that, Grant went on a trip to Japan with his brother Cody and one of their friends. When he arrived home, his parents told him that enough was enough and that he needed to get a job because they were tired of supporting his lifestyle. This caused a huge fight between him and his parents, and Grant ended up storming off to his aunt's house nearby.

While he was staying there, Grant stole his aunt's credit card so that he could buy tokens to chat with Sylvie. His father begged his aunt not to go to the police so that Grant wouldn’t get into trouble.

At this point, his aunt and his father arranged for him to go back home. And when he did, they were waiting there for him with an intervention where he could be treated for an internet addiction. They made it clear that while he was living in their house he was living by their rules and that meant no contact with Sylvie. His father even went as far as logging into the cam site to tell her what was going on and asked her not to speak to Grant again.

Grant agreed to go to a rehab that his brother Cody paid $16,000 for, but only ended up staying for two weeks before he left. A few weeks later, on January 24th, 2019, Cody didn’t show up for work and so his boss called in a welfare check.

Once police arrived at the Amato household, they discovered that both of Grant’s parents, Margaret and Chad, along with his brother Cody were all dead. They were all shot to death by Grant.

After he killed his family, Grant took a thumb drive he had with pictures of Sylvie and downloaded all of them to his computer. He then hacked his father’s bank account where he proceeded to log into the cam site, purchase another 5,000 tokens, and unlock his account so that he could chat with Sylvie.

Grant Amato was sentenced to life in prison for all three counts of murder in the first degree.

Source:

Fox/Wikipedia

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