Claims online have associated an image of several guns spelling out the word “Trump” with the man arrested for the El Paso shopping mall shooting, Patrick Crusius.
On August 3rd, Crusius walked into a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, and fired on shoppers in a Walmart outlet, killing 20 and injuring a further 26.
The specifics of the association of the image above with Crusius varies depending on which particular message you see online.
What’s true? Early media reports suggest that a social media page suspected of belonging to Crusius had “liked” the image after it was posted by someone else back in 2017.
What’s false? Many claims suggest that the image was posted by Crusius himself, or that the image shows his weapons. These claims are false. It is also false that this image appeared on social media only moments before the shooting began. It has been online for a number of years.
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Early reporting by many media outlets looking up Crusius’s social media accounts in the moments after the shooting revealed that accounts suspected of belonging to him had a number of associations with conspiracy pages. It also revealed that the account suspected of belonging to Crusius had “liked” a 2017 tweet made by a user John Doe that featured the image. Such accounts suspected of belonging to Crusius have now been removed by Twitter.
In February 2017, he liked a tweet by a user showing a photo of several guns positioned to spell out “Trump.” The tweet read, “I’m extremely proud to call Trump my President! He’s doing a wonderful job and is truly going to #MAGA! #MondayMotiviation.”
Many other social media users reported on that connection, claiming the image appeared on Crusius’s social media pages. This was consequently misconstrued by other social media users to mean that the image was posted by Crusius, or that the photo and guns belonged to him. They do not.
The “Trump” photo first appeared online in January 2017 on Imgur. There is no known connection with Patrick Crusius and the guns in the photo.