Lilyana Wagner, now 16, was sentenced to life in prison for murdering her mother.
The Georgia teen shot Rachel Wagner, 51, in the back of the head as she lay in bed in November 2024, then crashed her mother’s car in Tinton and was found with the center of her hair shaved off, District Attorney Patrick Warren said. The discovery of the crash led police to try calling Rachel Wagner, who did not answer and had not shown up for work; officers then found her dead in her bed.
Wagner later wrote a handwritten confession detailing her original plan and the killers who shaped her thinking. “This whole thing was a last-minute choice,” she wrote. “I was going to commit a school shooting at my old middle school but chose this instead. Although I didn’t commit a school shooting, the whole event was inspired by these people.”
The report did not reveal which six school shooters she name-checked in the confession.
Investigators determined that Wagner had cultivated what Warren described as an “extensive online and social media reputation as being someone who was interested in planning and executing a mass casualty event.” She communicated with “anonymous people who encouraged her to plan and commit murder,” Warren added, using apps “not set up with key word and content analysis software, so the conversations were not identified and forwarded for investigation before she committed the crime.”
It remains unclear how long Wagner had been in contact with those online figures before the murder.
The teen purchased the firearm from a pawn shop one month before killing her mother. Rachel Wagner, originally from New Zealand, had bought the gun and ammunition and given them to her daughter, Warren noted in his statement on the case.
Wagner pleaded guilty to the murder and will be eligible for parole only after serving 30 years.
Warren delivered a stark assessment of the case’s outcome. “In this case there were no winners,” he said. “Rachel is dead and Lilyana will spend the rest of her natural life in prison.”
He continued with a series of questions about what might have prevented the tragedy. “I can’t help but think of all the decisions that were made that led to this tragic outcome; what if Lilyana had not connected with people online who encouraged her to commit this act; what if Rachel had not purchased the gun and ammunition and given them to Lilyana; and what if they both had received the help and support they needed to live normal, healthy lives?”
In the viral moment that first drew national attention, the case stood out for its chilling combination of a school shooting plot redirected into matricide, the shaved-head detail after the crash, and the teen’s explicit admiration for mass killers documented in her own handwriting. The sentencing on Monday brought formal closure to a crime that had unfolded across multiple Georgia jurisdictions and exposed gaps in how online threats are monitored when users migrate to platforms without content-flagging systems.
Wagner is expected to begin serving her life sentence immediately.
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