Texas gunman not pictured in mugshots shared online
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on May 10, 2023 at 20:32
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"NBC news is reporting that Allen Texas mall shooter Mauricio Garcia is a neo-nazi and a white supremacist," says a May 7, 2023 tweet sharing both photos. "I'm not buying it are you?"
Similar posts spread elsewhere on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms after a gunman killed eight people at the Allen Premium Outlets in a Dallas suburb on May 6. Conservative influencers such as Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, former Donald Trump aide Sebastian Gorka and "Catturd" -- an account popular with supporters of the former president -- amplified the images.
"This is the Allen Mall killer you’re supposed to believe is a 'white supremacist,'" Gorka said May 7 on Facebook.
Newsmax host Greg Kelly repeatedly broadcast one of the pictures on his primetime TV show May 8.
The posts follow reports from US media and the investigative outlet Bellingcat that the gunman, whom Texas authorities identified (archived here) as 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, supported Nazi ideology. He posted photos of himself and his tattoos, identifying documents, diaries and cryptic warnings about the attack on the Russian social media site Odnoklassniki, Bellingcat found.
Some social media users sharing the mugshots questioned whether the person in the pictures fit the physical profile of a white supremacist, while others pointed to differences between the mugshots and the images Garcia shared of himself online.
But the booking photos -- which are available on third-party websites (archived here, here and here) -- do not show the gunman, whom police shot and killed at the scene.
"The suspected shooter in Allen by name and date of birth has not been in the Dallas County Jail, so there is no mugshot of him," the Dallas County Sheriff's Department told AFP in a May 9 email. "There is a similar name, different date of birth that is not the individual from Allen."
The mugshots show another Mauricio Garcia who has been arrested for crimes such as evading arrest, with details of specific allegations unavailable in county records. One photo was taken in February 2022 and the other in August 2022, according to the third-party websites.
Dallas County records show the pictured man's birthday is October 29, 1986, making him 36 years old -- not 33.
Authorities had not released a photo of the Allen shooter as of 1700 GMT on May 10, but Hank Sibley of the Texas Department of Public Safety said during a May 9 press conference (archived here) that he had no criminal history.
Sibley also confirmed Garcia had "neo-Nazi ideation" and tattoos. Photos of the shooter that Bellingcat verified from his Odnoklassniki page -- some of which show his tattoos -- do not match the mugshots shared online.
AFP has previously debunked posts misidentifying mass shooting suspects in the US states of Tennessee, Michigan, Texas and Colorado.
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