The world Sam Nordquist inhabited through his phone screen was where he felt most at ease. It was where he found acceptance, established some of his deepest connections, met some of his closest friends.

The amount of time he spent socializing with apparent strangers online puzzled his friends and family, who knew him as an extrovert, a jokester, a charmer.

But it was not entirely surprising. He had dreams of fame, which he hoped to realize by uploading videos and livestreaming his everyday life.

And for a young, Black transgender man living in the suburbs of Minneapolis with his mother and older brother, social media represented a landscape of endless possibility in his search for belonging.

Last September, he traveled to upstate New York to meet a woman he had begun talking to online over the summer. He considered her his girlfriend, even though they had yet to be in the same room. The trip was meant to last two weeks.

Five months later he was dead, his body discarded in the brush of a secluded farm roughly 15 miles from the roadside motel where she lived with her two young children. Nordquist was 24 years old.

The woman, Precious Arzuaga, and six other people have been charged with first-degree murder — an extraordinarily severe charge, stemming from allegations that they tortured Nordquist for weeks before he died. Prosecutors say the children, a 12-year-old girl and a 7-year-old boy, were made to participate in the torture.

Arzuaga pleaded not guilty, as did the other six people accused. Arzuaga’s lawyer, William Swift, said he was “pursuing all legal avenues on her behalf.” A trial date has not been set.

Online life

Online, though, Nordquist’s life and the circumstances of his death have united a devoted community. People he never knew congregate on Facebook to organize memorials, lament the dangers facing transgender people and trade notes about the case. Nordquist’s family has joined in to grieve, to vent, to find solace and to seek answers. To those he left behind, there is a brutal irony in Nordquist’s vibrant digital afterlife.

“Sam wanted to be — not in this way, of course — but Sam always wanted to be famous,” his sister said. “And now he is.”

Like many of his generation, Nordquist treated social media like a public diary, sharing musings, insecurities and aspirations without hesitation. In one TikTok video, he rapped about coming to terms with his gender identity.

He began working in a group home, where his co-worker and friend Ashlee Youngs described him as a stubborn advocate for the residents.

Youngs and others also said that he always had his phone out — early in the morning, at work, at night in bed.

If he was not recording videos or livestreaming, he was video chatting with friends, sometimes while scrolling through social media on another device. On apps like LiveMe and TikTok, he met people who became some of his closest friends. Some lived hundreds of miles away.

Inevitably, his social media feeds traced the roller coaster of his romantic life.

In the words of Youngs, “Sam was almost desperate for love.”

He started communicating with Arzuaga. She was a 38-year-old mother living on the edge of Canandaigua, a small city in the Finger Lakes region of New York. She had reached out to him on TikTok, according to his friends.

His family members noticed the brisk turnaround. The couple posted videos lip-syncing to the same songs on TikTok. They had marathon sessions on the phone.

While Nordquist was trying to project his authentic self online, Arzuaga was doing the opposite, according to people close to her and in her sphere for decades.

Her posts on social media portrayed a playful, doting mother who exuded confidence, sex appeal and fortitude.

In reality, she was a drifter with a violent and chaotic past.

In Geneva, N.Y., another city in the area, she is named in nearly 200 police reports for incidents including harassment, domestic disturbances, theft and threats of violence. Public records show she was jailed at least eight times. Her past lovers — men and women — invariably described her as manipulative and abusive.

By the time Nordquist encountered her online, Arzuaga and her children had returned to the Finger Lakes, settling into Patty’s Lodge, an assemblage of timeworn buildings on a highway outside Canandaigua.

Posts suddenly stop

Nordquist arrived Sept. 28 to be with Arzuaga.

In subsequent days, Nordquist posted video after video to TikTok celebrating his relationship. He called his family and friends and told them things were going well. He did not get on his return flight home, scheduled for Oct. 12.

Confused, his mother, Linda, called police the next day to check in on him. When officers arrived at Patty’s Lodge, Nordquist told them he was fine, said Mark Eifert, a senior investigator with the New York State Police.

Over the next three days, Nordquist posted at least 19 TikTok videos, most of them showing him and Arzuaga kissing, cuddling and dancing together. One featured the couple with Arzuaga’s two children under the text “The New Nordquist-Arzuaga Family 2024.”

The TikTok uploads continued apace until Nov. 15. Then the posts from Nordquist abruptly came to an end.

Nordquist’s communication with his family members and friends became curt and infrequent, and they began finding themselves blocked from his accounts on various social media and chat apps.

On Feb. 7, Kayla Nordquist sent him a text message with a picture of her three young children.

“I just thought you’d want to see how big they’re getting,” she wrote.

There was no response.

Kayla Nordquist texted her brother again.

“Well, I hope you’re doing OK and safe,” she wrote. “I love and I miss you.”

There was no reply.

“By the time I sent those text messages,” she said, “he was already gone.”

On Feb. 9, Nordquist’s family asked state police to check in again at Patty’s Lodge.

Troopers eventually opened a missing persons investigation. The family had already begun spreading the word on social media.

Desperate, Nordquist’s mother, sister and older brother, Mason, headed to New York, stopping Feb. 13 at a motel in Ohio.

At 10:38 that night, they received a call that a body had been found in the field of a dairy farmer. Authorities believed it was Sam.

In March, authorities outlined the details of Nordquist’s death in an indictment that read like a horror story.

Beginning on Jan. 1, prosecutors said, Nordquist was physically restrained in Room 22 of Patty’s Lodge. He was hit, kicked and punched; forced to stand or kneel facing a wall; sexually assaulted; deprived of food and water; forced to consume feces, urine and saliva; bound with duct tape and doused with bleach. The torture didn’t cease, they said, until Feb. 2, the date they believe he was killed.

To prove the first-degree murder charges, Kelly Wolford, an assistant district attorney in Ontario County, said her office would need to show “that all seven defendants tortured Sam Nordquist, and that they did so because they enjoyed it.”

To the puzzlement of some, prosecutors did not charge Nordquist’s killing as a hate crime. In response, Wolford said the acts were “bigger than a hate crime.”

Nordquist was buried March 3 near his home in Minnesota.