Tallahassee protester misidentified as Florida State University shooter

"Of course the FSU sho0ter is a liberal freak.. Never fails," says an April 17, 2025 post on X.

The post shows a protester affiliated with Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society, a progressive student organization, carrying a large white banner that says: "Fight Trump and the GOP agenda!" Other messages on the sign include "Stand with Palestine," "Stop attacks on immigrants," and "Defend women's & LGBTQ rights."

Image

Screenshot from X taken April 22, 2025

The post -- and similar claims shared across X and other platforms -- spread after two people were killed and five others wounded in an April 17 mass shooting at Florida State University, a public institution in the city of Tallahassee. The gunfire sent the campus into lockdown before law enforcement shot the gunman.

Police named the suspect as 20-year-old Florida State student Phoenix Ikner, the stepson of a local deputy sheriff, and said the attack was carried out with his parent's old service weapon. Ikner was hospitalized with "serious but non-life-threatening injuries," police said (archived here).

However, Ikner is not the person seen demonstrating against Trump in the picture spread online.

A reverse image search surfaced the image on Instagram, where Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society and other organizing groups posted it January 15 (archived here). The post's caption says the photo was captured a day earlier at a march to protest Trump and the Republican Party.

An article about the January 14 rally on FSUNews.com, a website affiliated with the USA Today network, also included the image (archived here).

Further investigation revealed the person depicted in the photo is fellow Florida State student Oliver Cheese, who was quoted in the FSUNews.com article and who confirmed in an April 21 direct message to AFP that they were the one holding the sign.

Cheese, an organizer with Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society, said it was "unbelievable" that they had been misidentified online as the shooter.

"My family were calling me nonstop the whole day trying to convince me to leave Tallahassee, because they were scared that somebody might try to kill me thinking I was the shooter," Cheese said, blaming "right-wing influencers who are shamefully trying to exploit a mass shooting to grow their online following."

One possible reason for the confusion: the FSUNews.com story also quoted Ikner, an onlooker to the January 14 march, who said: "These people are usually pretty entertaining, usually not for good reasons."

Extremist views

Photos of Ikner published in news reports show a different man (archived here and here).

Ikner is registered to vote as a Republican, according to Florida voting registration records.

Classmates who knew Ikner said in interviews with local and national news outlets that he espoused white supremacist viewpoints and that he had made racist and hateful comments about minorities, denied the results of the 2020 presidential election and joked about mass violence (archived here, here and here).

A review of his digital footprint by researchers with the Anti-Defamation League found Ikner used a drawing of Adolf Hitler as a profile photo for an online gaming account, and the name of a Nazi paramilitary group on another account, according to USA Today (archived here).

Mass shootings are common in the United States, where a constitutional right to bear arms has long trumped widespread public support for stricter gun controls.

Misinformation frequently circulates in the wake of these attacks, as information gaps leave room for false claims.

AFP has previously debunked posts misidentifying other shooters, including here, here, here, here, here, here and here.