An enticing world concocted for TikTok hid something sinister.
www.syracuse.com
The trap of lies, sex and cruelty that killed Sam Nordquist: ‘We went too far this time’
Sam Nordquist wanted love. He wanted a family. He thought he found it on TikTok.
He announced in a video last fall that he’d finally met his other half. The video, captioned Mrs. and Mr. Nordquist, was posted Sept. 1. Photos of Nordquist scroll on the right. Pictures of Precious Arzuaga, his Mrs., scrolled on the left.
Arzuaga, 14 years his senior and 1,000 miles away in a tiny Finger Lakes town, did the same with Nordquist on her Facebook page, adding his last name to hers.
The two had not met in person. They knew each other online for about a month.
That was all it took.
Nordquist, a 24-year-old trans man from the outskirts of Minneapolis, flew to New York state to meet Arzuaga for the first time Sept. 28.
He thought he was leaving on a vacation to meet the love he’d been aching for. A woman who accepted him as he was. Kids he could spoil.
And Arzuaga seemed to offer the best kind of love: an unconditional shower of praise.
But it was all a lie. She was a predator. Her bait: the promise of love.
Arzuaga used it to reel Nordquist, freshly heartbroken, into a warped world of manipulation and abuse that she had been building for decades.
This is a love story of the worst kind. Here, Arzuaga weaponized the prospect of love.
She had practice. She used her version of affection to connect and control a legion of castoffs: a convicted sex offender, a mentally challenged woman who had been kept locked in a basement as a child, and her own adult son.
Together, they abused Nordquist in unspeakable ways, police say. Arzuaga also has been charged with forcing her young children to help.
A room in a rural motel that Nordquist thought would be filled with love became the place where he was tortured to death by the very woman who promised him her heart.
Arzuaga and six others have been charged with first-degree murder in the torture and killing of Nordquist at Patty’s Lodge in Canandaigua.
Lifelong prosecutors and police investigators said it was the most horrific crime they had ever seen.
Exactly what channeled all of this rage and violence against Nordquist is not yet clear.
But Arzuaga’s former friends and lovers offer parallel tales with a singular takeaway: You cannot leave her. And if you do, there is hell to pay.
She has stabbed and choked lovers who tried to leave, they say. She has destroyed their lives after they left, threatening their new lovers.
She preys on people who seem weak, cast off or broken by something, former friends and lovers said. Then she makes them hers – to use. They become her child care, her piggy bank, her housing, her Uber, her sex slave.
Syracuse.com interviewed more than a dozen people who knew Arzuaga and Nordquist. We reviewed court records, criminal histories and social media accounts to unravel the mystery of why something
so horrific happened in the picturesque peace of the Finger Lakes.
Not everything was pretty here. There are pockets of deep, generational poverty and drug abuse in communities where services can be hard to come by.
That was Arzuaga’s world. She went from a trailer with no running water in the kitchen and holes in the floor to a series of hotel rooms paid for by social services, former friends and exes said.
She went from being abused as a child to an abuser as an adult, and easily found new people to manipulate in the chaos of cheap hotel life. She learned to overwhelm people with affection, then pull it away just as dramatically. Then the abuse started. A series of her ex-lovers described the pattern to Syracuse.com.
In recent years, with TikTok as her engine, Arzuaga’s reach and speed expanded exponentially.
Powered by algorithms and hashtags, Arzuaga found Nordquist, a young man who had been let down by love.
His last girlfriend convinced him to come to Florida for her and then shattered his heart.
He had no idea how much worse things would get.
MUCH MORE AT LINK
Madison Scott
