What is he hiding under there?!

this story has one of the most bizarre and tragic endings to any story i've ever told but before we get into today's story if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you come to the right channel because that's all we do and we upload three or four times every week so if that's of interest to you please replace the like button's mouthwash with glass cleaner also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads alright let's get into today's story in 2017 daniel beckwith was a 27 year old genius hacker and prolific bitcoin day trader he was living in his modest childhood home in bethesda maryland with a multi-million dollar fortune to his name and he was hiding something major in his basement that when it was discovered by authorities he would be convicted of one of the rarest criminal charges in the american legal justice system but to understand the story we have to go back to the beginning daniel was born in 1991 to his eccentric and brilliant parents linda and david he would be their only child david was a phd and an accomplished opera singer that had trained under a famous french composer and he had also performed at the white house linda was a columbia law school-trained lawyer who at one time had been a government attorney but she gave it up because she described it as a scummy profession and she became a vocalist like her husband when daniel was just a toddler he learned how to read so it was clear he had unusually high intellect which linda guarded fiercely she decided that public schools were not capable of teaching her son and so she decided she would homeschool him by the time daniel was just five years old he was consuming entire novels and shortly after that he was able to break down and reprogram his playstation but despite his incredible intelligence daniel had a really lonely childhood he was rarely allowed to go outside and play with other kids and on the rare chance that he was his parents always hovered around him the entire time and few playmates or adults for that matter ever came inside of daniel's house because daniel's parents were big time hoarders you couldn't take two steps into that house before knocking into a big stack of papers or books or old food containers in 2000 when daniel was nine years old his father was diagnosed with parkinson's disease which left linda his mother to take care of both of them and in that time linda became obsessed with protecting their property and so anytime anyone walked in front of their house just near their property she would run outside and yell at them until they ran away but despite their eccentricities it was clear to anybody that knew the bequit family that linda and david just adored daniel they just could not give him any space one neighbor recalled seeing the three bequets out trick-or-treating one year all wearing these same matching hamster outfits and this was well into daniel's teenage years daniel loved his parents but it was in those later teenage years but he started to realize just how smothering they really were and so he began looking for other places to connect with new people and he found a new community on an online forum called 4chan there daniel got to reinvent himself he adopted this kind of tough guy genius persona where he bragged about finishing most of high school by the time he was 15 and that nowadays he just blows stuff up in his backyard to test his chemistry know-how but over the years of posting on this channel daniel would occasionally let his guard down and he would talk about something that was really close to him that pervaded his thoughts at all times and would ultimately be his downfall and that was his extreme fear of death daniel's isolation looks like it might come to an end in 2010 when he enrolled at the university of illinois to study computer science and electrical engineering his parents dropped him off at the amtrak train station with all of his stuff for college they said their goodbyes daniel hopped on the train and he waved to them as they disappeared and he likened that experience to being set free it was the first time he was going to be without his parents for any amount of time but unfortunately after only being at school for a couple of months he had to go right back home again because his mother was diagnosed with cancer and she had hid it from daniel in fact she'd hit it from everyone and not even seen a doctor and so when daniel got home she was in really bad shape and she passed away two weeks later including daniel only three people showed up for her funeral and so daniel with his mismatched clothes and his pants that were too short he gave his mother's eulogy and in it he just looked dazed and he actually said i feel lost and then shortly after daniel went back to school his father began declining rapidly from parkinson's disease and so daniel had to put him into assisted living and so living by himself at his apartment in college daniel was overcome with grief and now more than ever he was just terrified of death because now he had seen it up close with his mother and he was watching his father wither away and so he went back on 4chan and he began talking about taking a more defensive position against his own death what that translated to is daniel began researching what the most common killers were for people his age and he discovered that car accidents were a big killer and so he reinforced all the doors of his car with kevlar plates and anytime he drove it he wore a kevlar vest which he believed protected him from blunt force trauma in the event of a crash knowing that cancer was a big killer he went out and removed every mole on his body as a preventative measure but what daniel viewed as the biggest threat to his life was not something that statisticians would tell you is something people his age or people in his country should be worried about and that was a nuclear attack on the united states daniel believed it was imminent daniel believed the only way he could protect himself was to build a proper fallout shelter and because his mother had left him a multi-million dollar trust fund he had the means to construct one and so he left college and went back to his home he went down into the basement and he picked a spot right in the middle of the ground and he began digging over the next two years daniel spent part of his time living at college being a really good student and the other half of his time was spent living at his family home hiring different contractors to come in and dig out this massive labyrinth of tunnels underneath his property but in 2012 his schoolwork and his tunnel work had to come to a complete stop because he got in trouble with the law professors at daniel's school began reporting that somebody was sneaking into their office hacking into their computer and then sending these really inappropriate and embarrassing emails to everybody in their contact list which was primarily former and current students and faculty and then whoever it was that was hacking their computer was then super gluing their door shut after several months of investigating the police finally got a suspect when students on campus said yeah daniel beckwit is actually a prolific hacker and he just spoke at a hacker conference so he seems like someone who would be capable of doing this and so a detective went to daniel's apartment to pay him a casual visit but daniel wasn't there or didn't come to the door and the detective looked down and saw a package that was sitting there that was addressed to s loomis detwiler the detective believed this could be an alias for daniel beckwit and so he went back and they ran that name and sure enough it was connected to an online persona that had recently been bragging about breaking into their professors offices and hacking into their emails so the police used this information to attain a search warrant they went back to daniel's apartment he wasn't there they used the key they had been given for the unit they went inside and they're hit with just this ridiculous mess of an apartment it looked exactly like daniel's home growing up with stacks of papers and books and wires and computer equipment and trash and old food containers and there was just this dirty mattress sitting right in the middle of the apartment with no sheets on it and in the back on top of a mini fridge was daniel's laptop it was open and it was unsecured so they logged into it cloned his hard drive and left and using the information that was contained on this hard drive detectives were able to without a doubt connect daniel to the vandalism and hacking that had been taking place at his college daniel was arrested and charged with a number of serious felonies but shortly before his trial daniel struck a plea deal and then immediately took to reddit to tell the world that he fully expected the state governor to pardon him because he had made a number of significant contributions to his campaign but that pardon never came however daniel's sentence was remarkably light he was ordered to pay 23 000 in restitution to the college and then was given two years of probation daniel was expelled from a school and so he moved back into his childhood home where he lived alone full time once home daniel focused his efforts on this bunker he was building in his basement which by now was a fairly large series of tunnels that zigged and sagged in different directions well beyond his property lines once daniel hired a couple good contractors to continue to expand this bunker he turned his attention to a new activity bitcoin trading and in relative short order daniel became extremely good at this and made millions of dollars by 2015 daniel was off probation his bunker was almost completely built out although he did have plans at some point to hire more people and continue to expand it and in terms of bitcoin day trading he wasn't doing it as much because he had made so much money now he just spent his time sitting inside of his bunker live streaming on this new website called blab about his investment prowess and every time daniel live streamed he was cautious to never reveal his identity and so he used the username three alarm lamp scooter and he wore a large fire protection hood over his face and he used a voice changer within his small but avid following on blab there was one 19 year old named oscar kofra who completely idolized daniel even though he only knew him as three alarm oscar was from a middle-class home and he was the son of immigrants from trinidad he also lived only 15 minutes away from daniel but he didn't know that because daniel never gave up where he lived because he was so obsessed with protecting himself against a potential nuclear attack he just told people he lived in some underground bunker in the middle of virginia somewhere oscar longed to be successful and rich which is part of the reason he idolized daniel so much when he was 18 years old he received a 100 000 settlement for a lead poisoning case and he for a second got to live the life of someone rich and famous and he blew it immediately on expensive dinners and rented mercedes and bmw cars and once the money was all gone he was certain he could get it all back and his big plan is he was going to build an app called equity shark which is basically crowdfunding that allowed people to invest small amounts of money into new promising startups and he believed this app was going to be the way he made not millions but billions of dollars but he didn't have any real money to fund this app and so he and his business partner applied for a 100 000 grant for young entrepreneurs that have dropped out of college something asya had just done and they were certain they were gonna get this grant but despite oscar's confidence he was far from a sure bet for this money because oskia still had many of the blind spots of someone still learning how to become an adult and one of his biggest blind spots was how quick he was to trust people and so it was shortly after oscar and his business partner had applied for this 100 000 grant that oscar came across daniel on blab and he was so taken with him then he's got all this money and he's so successful and that's when daniel told his followers that he was open to new investments and so oscar who wanted to get closer to daniel and figured he could use some additional money because even when they got this 100 000 grant they would need more money to build the business he decided he would ask daniel if he and his business partner could pitch him on equity shark and daniel agreed and so in june of 2016 oscar and his business partner went to this hookah bar that was about 20 minutes away from oscar's home and there they sat waiting for a three-alarm lamp scooter to walk through the door and they didn't know what he was going to look like because whenever they saw him on his live streams he had that big fire protection hood on but as soon as daniel walked through the door they immediately knew it was him because he had this comically bulky shirt on where it was obvious he had a bulletproof vest on and so this guy with the bulletproof vest walks over introduces himself as three alarm aka daniel and so by now oscar and his business partner are very accustomed to three alarms eccentricities like his bulletproof vest they just kind of overlook it and begin pitching him on equity shark and they tell him that the success of the company they believe is hinged on this one hundred thousand dollar grant that they explained they are certain to get they meet all the parameters they are exactly what they're looking for and at the end of the conversation daniel was convinced that not only were they gonna get this 100 000 grant but that equity shark seemed like a great investment and so after a number of follow-on meetings daniel ultimately committed five thousand dollars to equity shark and he told oscar that they would have to pay him back with the funds from the one hundred thousand dollar grant or if for some reason that didn't come through oscar and his business partner would have to find another way to pay back daniel oscar and his business partner were totally thrilled they felt like that 100 000 grant is a done deal so there's no risk to this investment by daniel and shortly after they secured the five thousand dollars the manager of the one hundred thousand dollar grant program called oscar and said hey you guys have made it to the second round of applicants we need you to fly out to san francisco and pitch your company to us and so they're totally excited they tell daniel that everything's progressing exactly as they planned then they fly out to the west coast but they book their flight to lax not to the airport in san francisco so they land 400 miles south of where they needed to be and so they're cussing themselves for being so stupid about this and they realize they can't even rent a car they're not old enough to rent a car but they were old enough to rent a u-haul so they rent this huge u-haul and they start bombing up the coast towards san francisco to make this meeting in time but they plugged the wrong address into their gps and did not go to the right building they went in the opposite direction and so by the time they finally got all the way back to the meeting place in san francisco it was too late and the manager that was waiting for them was clearly upset about it and said just go home we'll be in touch by phone back home oscar was totally embarrassed when he told daniel about their botched trip and he was convinced that they were not going to get the grant now because of how badly they had screwed up the meeting and so asuka began asking daniel if he would give them more money because maybe if they use that additional money to bolster the app and make it more appealing they will have a better chance at getting that 100 000 grand daniel eventually said he would commit more money but oscar picked up that he was really hesitant and just seemed not to be very interested in equity shark anymore and so oscar hoping to stay in daniel's good graces and wanting to make sure he was confident in this investment he said hey let me do something for you i heard on one of the channels online that you're looking to expand some of the tunnels inside of your bunker let me do that for you daniel who was looking to expand his bunker was eager to hire asya but he told him that if you're going to work for me there's going to be heavy restrictions on how this goes because it's a very secret location i don't want this to leak out you know where my bunker is because as you know there's going to be a nuclear attack on the united states any day and my bunker is one of the only places that's going to be safe oscar said that was totally fine he would do whatever daniel needed so on january 28th 2017 just after 2 a.m oscar sat outside his house waiting for some car to come pick him up and at some point daniel showed up in a minivan and he walked up to oscar he led him into the van and then he put goggles that were blacked out on his head and then daniel drove around in loops up on the highway and background neighborhoods giving the impression to oscar that they were actually going somewhere far outside of maryland but really they were only going 15 minutes away to daniel's actual house and when they got to daniel's house daniel made oscar keep the goggles on daniel got out and he led oscar by a string into the house and once they got inside daniel had to carefully walk him around all the junk that was piled up all over the house they made their way all the way to the back they went down the stairs into the basement where daniel had intentionally created this unbelievable maze all over the basement floor with chicken wire and stacks of bikes and books and more junk it was designed so anybody who was working inside of the tunnels that even once they came out of the exit wouldn't even know how to get out of the basement and finally after bringing oskia all the way through this maze he stopped him right in front of this hole in the ground that was the entrance into the underground tunnels and at that point he told oscar to remove his goggles daniel told him to hop down and take a look so oscar hopped down he's looking around and he's seeing these massive tunnel systems pushing out in all directions and all of it is extremely well lit and he couldn't believe what he was looking at he's looking at daniel like how far does this go and daniel said it's huge it was at this point that daniel handed down to oscar a pickaxe a shovel and a hard hat then he explained to him that anytime you're in the tunnels i'm gonna have to cover over this hole because i can't even have you in the basement it's too much of a security threat for me and in fact i'd prefer it if you worked multiple days in a row because any time you leave we're gonna have to do the whole blindfold thing and so you should anticipate living in the tunnels for days at a stretch but don't worry there's a mattress down there there's wi-fi everything's well lit up and there's a five-gallon bucket if you need to go to the bathroom and so oscar who trusted daniel didn't love this setup but in a weird way he was just kind of excited to be a part of this guy's life this guy who he believed was just this really amazing person and so over the following winter and spring oscar would make the blindfold commute all the way to daniel's house 15 minutes away and then he would spend multiple days down in the tunnel chiseling away into these different tunnels that daniel wanted expanded but as well as it was going working for daniel oscar was dealt some bad news at the end of the spring when it turned out equity shark was turned down for that 100 thousand dollar grant oscar was surprised he was crushed and he now knew he would have to pay back that five thousand dollars that daniel had invested in equity shark because he wasn't getting it from the hundred thousand dollars anymore and so he asked daniel if he could increase his hours in the tunnel to try to pay back that debt daniel agreed and so on september 10th oscar was back at daniel's house and he was down inside the tunnels in one of the lowest sections that required squeezing through a very narrow section that asya had actually texted his friends about and said that section made him really claustrophobic but he had to do it he needed to pay back the debt and so later that day at 4 pm when askia was down in that lower section the power in the tunnel suddenly went completely out it's pitch black and so daniel who was upstairs recognized it happened and so he navigated through all the junk upstairs came downstairs navigated the maze all the way to the circuit breaker in the basement and he flipped the switch and the power went on but daniel heard a loud buzzing sound coming from upstairs in the kitchen and so worried that could be an electrical fire he turned back off the circuit breaker putting asya back in total darkness down deep inside of this tunnel and daniel went back through this really epic maze in the basement went up the stairs into the kitchen to investigate the buzzing sound and as soon as he left the basement he could smell smoke and he turned around and looked down into the basement and he could clearly see smoke was filling the basement and so daniel ran downstairs and yelled out for oscar and some were way down in the tunnels he heard oscar yell out hey dude what's going on and daniel's like come on you gotta get out of there but he was totally overcome with smoke and daniel had to run back upstairs ran outside he caught his breath and then he charged back into the house down into the basement but as soon as he got to the bottom of the stairs he didn't see oscar but he saw flames leaping out of the entrance into the tunnels and he knew oscar was down there and he's screaming for oscar to get out get out but he didn't hear from him and at some point daniel just had to turn around and leave because he was totally overcome with the heat and the smoke a neighbor saw daniel come running out they saw the smoke coming out of his house and so they called 9-1-1 and so while daniel paced outside screaming for oscar oscar is down in total darkness there's smoke filling up the tunnels and he began making his way across that very tight section but once he got out of there he had no idea where to go because this tunnel system was huge and all the power was out so it's pitch black and there's smoke inside of the tunnel and so he desperately starts crawling all over the tunnel he's hitting dead ends and finally miraculously he makes it to the exit of the tunnels everything around him is on fire he leaps out but now he's in a basement that's covered in smoke and every time he had been led to that point in the basement he had been blindfolded he didn't know how to navigate the maze and so he's looking out and it's all smoky and all he can see is there's one window on the far side that he might be able to get to and so he starts leaping over the chicken wire and the bikes and he sneaks past a furnace and it's just flames and smoke all around him and he gets to this little shimmer of light which is the window except he realizes there have been metal bars placed in front of it there's no way to get through it but in his desperation he grabbed a rollie chair and he put it in front he climbed on top and he managed to break the glass but he couldn't get through the bars and eventually after a number of agonizing minutes he fell backwards and was consumed by the flames after the fire was finally put out and oscar's body was finally found inside of the basement underneath that window investigators didn't understand how oscar couldn't have gotten out of the basement and daniel tried to lie about it and say oh well he might have been asleep you know that's his bachelor pad down there but eventually as investigators were looking for the cause of the fire they uncovered the entrance to this massive tunnel system and that's when they realized daniel had put oscar effectively into a death trap when the fire started osceola was at the bottom of this tunnel system and so we had to navigate all the way back up to the top killing all this precious time as the fire grows and then he finally got into the basement and there's flames everywhere but he has no idea how to navigate the maze daniel had made down there and so he managed to get to the window because it was the only thing he could see but of course daniel had put bars in front of it and so oscar had nowhere else to go and he just died the investigators would point out that where he died he was only two steps away from almost certain safety he just didn't know it after an eight-month investigation prosecutors charged daniel with involuntary manslaughter as well as one of the rarest charges in the american justice system it's called second-degree depraved heart murder where daniel's disregard for human life was so extreme it amounted to willful killing and so he was sentenced to nine years in prison so that's gonna do it guys if you found the secret in today's episode let us know in the comments what it is and where you found it so give us the time stamp and if you're the first to do that we'll pin you at the top of the comments section if you enjoyed today's video and you haven't done this already please switch the like button's mouthwash for glass cleaner also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly 3 or 4 video uploads if you want to get in touch with me you can direct message me on instagram or on twitter my username for both platforms is the same it's johnballen416 i also have a ton of content over on tiktok where my username is mr ballen i also have a second youtube channel called mr ball and shorts where i post short videos if you have a story suggestion please submit it to our subreddit just called mr ballin it's linked in the description below so whether i see you on twitter instagram tick tock reddit youtube or some combination just know that i really appreciate your support and until next time that's going to do it see

Channel: MrBallen

Views: 1,419,245

Rating: 4.9510889 out of 5

Keywords: true, true story, mrballen story, story time, fire hood, 3alarmlampscooter, 3alarm, askia khafra, washington dc, maryland, Bethesda, nuclear, nuclear attack, nuke, fallout, fallout shelter, bunker, underground, underground bunker, fire, basement, basement fire, smoke, hacker, genius, millionaire, bit coin, bit coin day trader, day trader, strange, dark, mysterious, scary, horror, horror story, true crime, depraved heart, crazy, obsessed, smart, too smart, expelled, hacking, tech, tech Ceo, start up, oof

Id: jQ3ZBEBusCg

Length: 22min 43sec (1363 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021