Photo of transgender woman claims to show Robb Elementary shooter – Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

Online rumours claim to show a photo of the Robb Elementary shooter in Uvalde, Texas, posing in front of a transgender Pride flag.

FALSE

We often see much misinformation circulate in the immediate aftermath of high-profile mass shootings in the United States. Such misinformation is often fuelled by conspiracy theorists and other high profile accounts known for not verifying information before proliferating it on social media.

One such rumour is that the Robb Elementary shooter was transgender. Such a claim was echoed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and House Representative Paul Gosar, who also baselessly claimed that the shooter was an illegal immigrant, referring to him as a “transsexual leftist illegal alien” in a since-deleted tweet.

Shortly later a photo of a transgender woman posing in front of a transgender Pride flag circulated online, claiming to show the photo of the shooter. See below –

However the photo does not show the shooter, since identified by law enforcement as Salvador Ramos. The photo actually shows a Reddit user called Sam. The same user has since posted further photos of themselves – under the title “it’s not me, I don’t even live in texas” to their Reddit account. One such photo even includes the date.


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Such photos were posted after Ramos was confirmed to have been killed, effectively proving that they were not the shooter.

Sam subsequently confirmed that the photo of her posing in front of the transgender Pride flag was taken from her Instagram account. Such rumours appear to have started on prank website 4Chan, which is often responsible for proliferating misinformation and hoaxes, including ones about tragic mass shooting events.

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