If anyone wants a deep rabbit hole to climb down, look up the smiley faced killer and specifically Brian Shaffer.
I knew him and his family. It sounds eerily similar to this.
It is weirder than you think. I cover the secret domestic surveillance operation in my tagline url. I have seen that operation all my life, my family was a target for some reason. The adults of that operation run their kids in the schools, and the kids grow up and go off to college, where the organization has satellite offices at every college, and utilizes the kids as informant/spies to continue to build out the files it maintains on every citizen.
They are operational, intervening in kids lives to alter their paths, according to the orders of command.
So I am always following and probing for any insight into that thing. One of the things I ran across was a guy who had a theory on this. He thinks the Smiley Faced Killers are actually domestic intel, culling kids who would be problematic at some point, ie getting into politics, and so on. But he said he didn’t think they killed them all, or even most. Many get lesser control operations.
He had a relative, surrounded by surveillance kids at school. They all decided to go to a concert, once there they kids got his relative drinking, introduced him to other kids he had never seen before, including some cute girls, and then they ghosted him. He needed a ride home, they offered, they gave him a drink along the way, and he woke up in his underwear in a ditch, apparently having been sexually assaulted all night, probably on video. The guy I ran into was sure the Smiley Face group was in fact that op, which would account for it being all over the country.
I am sure from what I have seen, domestic intel does that. It is set up basically exactly like the East German Stasi. And it focuses on controlling the human terrain by intervening early with the kids.