If you’re reading this, we sincerely hope you know by now that joining a cult is a bad idea. If Charles Manson and NXIVM didn’t bode enough of a warning, perhaps this online alien cult-related murder will.
Barbara Rogers, a Pennsylvania woman who was involved in an online alien cult, Sherry Shriner, along with her now deceased boyfriend, Steven Mineo, was sentenced to 15 to 40 years in prison for the 2017 murder of Mineo, according to news station WNEP.
Rogers, who was found guilty in March of third-degree murder, has always maintained that Mineo’s death was accidental. As Rogers tells it, in July 2017, after a night of drinking, the two went back to their Tobyhanna apartment where Mineo allegedly put the gun to his head, placed her hands on the gun, and told her to pull the trigger. Rogers said she didn’t realize the weapon was loaded.
“We are most likely going to be appealing it. It was very unfair,” Roger said, according to WNEP.
Now to hold up, rewind, and go over how a friggin’ alien cult fits into all of this.
Well, as previously stated, Rogers and Mineo were part of Sherry Shriner, named for the leader of the group, Sherry Shriner. The crew believes in the impending doom of a Revelations-style end of days as well as extraterrestrials. While neither of those beliefs is inherently bad or even uncommon, things get a little intense when you find out the group theorized “that a group of alien reptiles is subverting the human race through mind control,” according to the Associated Press.
According to the Herald Sun, Shriner said the group told Mineo that his girlfriend “was dangerous and he was just blinded by her. … Cult members were convinced Rogers was a witch or a reptile who wanted to kill Mineo.”
In a counterpoint, Rogers claims that the cult’s efforts to turn Mineo against her was getting to him, leading him to ask her to kill him.
Amanda Push
