Man Sentenced to 45 Years in Prison for Attempted Murder of Gay Teen He Met on Grindr

Chance Seneca, 21
Lafayette Sheriff's Dept.
Amy Furr

A 21-year-old man in Louisiana will spend the next 45 years in federal prison for kidnapping and trying to murder a gay teenager.

Chance Seneca pleaded guilty a few months ago after kidnapping the young man he met on Grindr. He reportedly planned to kill him and dismember his body, NBC News reported Thursday.

Seneca “intentionally targeted the teen and other gay men because of their sexual orientation,” the outlet said.

The Grindr website describes itself as the world’s biggest app for people who consider themselves gay, bi, trans, and queer.

The U.S Department of Justice (DOJ) detailed the case in its press release on Wednesday, noting that Seneca tried to kidnap and murder a gay man identified as H.W.:

Specifically, Seneca used Grindr to propose a meeting with H.W., with the intent of murdering and dismembering him, and then drove H.W. to an isolated house, took out a handgun, instructed him to put on handcuffs, and then used several methods to attempt to murder him. Believing that H.W. was dead, Seneca then attempted to dismember him. After his arrest, Seneca admitted that he had planned to continue murdering gay men until he was caught or killed.

Seneca acknowledged that he kidnapped and attempted to murder H.W. in order to satisfy a compulsive murder-fantasy. Seneca had become fixated with the idea of killing gay men, and this fascination led him to spend months designing a murder-kidnapping scheme that mirrored the murders of gay men committed by the notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Seneca intentionally targeted gay men, as Dahmer had done. Seneca had also intended to eat and preserve the bodies of his victims, as Dahmer had done.

During an interview in 1993, Dahmer told Inside Edition it was a process that did not happen overnight.

“When you depersonalize another person and view them as just an object, an object for pleasure instead of a living, breathing human being, it seems to make it easier to do things you shouldn’t do,” he stated:

In 2021, Seneca reportedly admitted that in the summer of 2020 he intended to kill 18-year-old Holden White to satisfy “homicidal urges,” the NBC article said, adding the victim survived the assault but remained in a coma for a few days.

A few days after the incident, Seneca reportedly tried to kidnap someone else and allegedly kidnapped another man.

“No one should ever be subjected to the type of horrendous actions that this defendant inflicted upon the victim in this case,” U.S. Attorney Brandon B. Brown for the Western District of Louisiana said Wednesday.

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