“I just slaughtered my entire family, and will most likely spend the rest of my life in jail if I manage to survive,” the Menhaz account wrote. “I hope I made you laugh at one point or another, I hope you remember the good times. I will miss you all.”

Through bleary eyes, he read the private message on Discord, a chat app aimed at gamers, and it shook him to his core.

Maroon Ayoub was still in bed when he received a message from an online friend who went by the username "Menhaz."

It was an utterly shocking moment for a group of friends built around one of the most niche things imaginable: a private server for Perfect World, a Chinese massively multiplayer game launched in 2005. The acquaintances had congregated in the game server, called Perfect World Void, and its discussion forums for years.

The Menhaz account then sent Ayoub a collection of photos which allegedly depicted his family members lying dead on the ground, covered in blood, with their throats cut. Online acquaintances of both Ayoub and the Menhaz account received similar messages.

Several hours later, in the afternoon on July 28, police attended a home in Markham, Ontario for a wellness check. Once there, they found a disturbing scene. Inside the house were the bodies of 21-year-old Malesa Zaman, 59-year-old Moniruz Zaman, 50-year-old Momotaz Begum, and 70-year-old Firoza Begum. Police arrested a 23-year-old man named Menhaz Zaman at the scene and charged him with four counts of first-degree murder.

This unlikely group of gamers were, for the moment, the only people in the world privy to a quadruple homicide in progress. It's an impossible situation: What can a group of friends who have never met, and who don't know each other's real names, do when faced with a possible murder spree?

Police say they received information that spurred them to conduct the check-in, but wouldn't clarify what that information was nor would they confirm any of VICE’s information. A police spokesperson told VICE that since Zaman is already in custody, there is no public safety risk. The police are being careful with what they publicly confirm so as not to taint a future case against him. (The courts have not tested the charges against Zaman, nor established that he operated the Menhaz accounts on Discord and the PWV server and forums, so VICE will be referring to Menhaz Zaman as "Zaman" and the account which contacted the gamers as "Menhaz.")

While we can't know what really happened inside that bloody Markham home, the gamers who say they were unwittingly thrust into the middle of the grisly crime have come forward to share their version of events.

The following account is built from interviews with several gamers involved, who shared screenshots from the night in question with VICE.

The members of the Perfect World Void (PWV) community had engaged with the Menhaz account for a long time, some for over half a decade. Several players who spoke to VICE considered him a good friend, and they played and conversed online almost every day.

They knew a bit about him: he was a Canadian who said he was attending university, he loved gaming, and often he would be playing when they logged in and still going at it when they logged off. The person they only knew as "Menhaz" played as an elf priest in the game, a class known to be good at both supporting and offensive capabilities. Players who spent time with him said he enjoyed taking on other players in one-on-one battles.

"When he started saying he would kill his family, I think most people like me just thought of it as another weird dark joke."

Friends of the Menhaz account described him as a troll. For the most part, the trolling was light-hearted, they said, but that changed over the last year. He told them that he was a former Muslim, and he began to deride his former religion and use racial slurs. He began talking about killing himself and his family as early as March, according to chat logs that VICE has seen, a disturbing development that PWV players considered a bad joke.