Teenage hackers dismembered and disappearing

In 2010 I became friends with a young man named Adam Beckert in Portland. He was a friendly teenage boy that attended the local high school and we would sometimes talk at the library, where I would often go. He told me a wild story involving a group of teenage boys he went to school with that had recently disappeared. He stated that they all were involved with local hacking and pranking, and they had stolen some software that belonged to one of their fathers. The man’s name reportedly was Richard Krausen, and he apparently had worked for the National Security Agency until somewhat recently. According to Adam the man had resigned after working on a project at the NSA involving some kind of evolutionary encryption algorithms. It was the prototype of this software that the son and his friends had stolen, but Adam had reason to believe that Richard had stolen the program himself before leaving the NSA. This is illegal, but nothing too sinister. It’s what happened next that was concerning.

According to Adam Mr. Krausen  suddenly goes crazy, rambling nothing that seems to make any sense, and then out of the blue he shoots himself. I heard about this myself from a neighbor of mine who said he was at a friend’s house that night in the same apartment building when it occurred. He said it was very gruesome. Law enforcement seal up his house, with the boy and his friends nowhere to be found. Then a couple of weeks later all four of the boys are found alive, each with their tongues and eyes cut out. When Adam took me to see them at the hospital the police and the hospital staff wouldn’t let us in. I never saw anything on the news about this, and I haven’t been able to find anything on Richard Krausen. All information about him online seems to have disappeared. In addition to this, I haven’t been able to contact Adam for some time now as well. I don’t know what all this means. Did the boys find out something that got them into trouble? I don’t know why anyone would do this to themselves? I have heard people talking about it, calling them some kind of cult, but I think it is something different.