Images show far-right influencer, not armed man killed near Trump estate
- Published on February 24, 2026 at 18:59
- 2 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
A widespread X post claims to show photos of Austin Tucker Martin, whom police identified as the North Carolina man shot dead by law enforcement for breaching the security perimeter of US President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate while armed with a shotgun. But the images do not show the 21-year-old, whose physical appearance in pictures published by news media is noticeably different; the photos appear to show Vrillium, a far-right online commentator who previously was falsely tied to a mass shooting in Canada as part of a similar hoax.
"Austin Tucker who was shot and killed trying to breach Mar-a-Lago with a gun this morning has been discovered to be trans after uncovering his social media accounts which have since been deleted," says a February 22, 2026 post on X.
The post includes two images of a man with long hair, one of which shows the individual shirtless.
It spread after shootings in British Columbia, Canada and Rhode Island fueled falsehoods about the proportion of attacks carried out by members of the transgender community.
A Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputy and two US Secret Service agents fatally shot Martin February 22 after they told him to disarm but he raised his firearm instead. They had spotted him by the north gate of the Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida -- where Trump, who was in Washington at the time, frequently spends weekends.
AFP reached out to the US Secret Service and FBI for information on Martin's appearance, but no responses were immediately forthcoming.
However, news media including the Miami Herald published photos from Facebook of Martin, who had been reported missing by his family, that show him with a very different face compared with the person in the X post spreading online (archived here and here).
The images in the X post, meanwhile, do not show Martin. The account that posted them called it a "shitpost" and later shared an X Community Note fact-checking its post, adding: "Oops."
The photos appear instead to show Vrillium, a self-described "dirtbag nationalist" who has expressed support for white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Vrillium, whose real name is William Sexton, responded largely in jest to the widespread X post misrepresenting the photos. In one February 22 reply, he referenced Sam Hyde, an American comedian who is commonly and falsely blamed for shootings as part of a long-running internet hoax.
In another post, he joked that he "just wanted to see Barron," the president's youngest son.
In a third, he wrote: "Bro how do yall keep falling for this."
Vrillium previously had a different photo of himself circulate among users falsely claiming he was the Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia shooter.
That photo -- and the two wrongly associated with Martin -- were originally posted to an X account, "@BillySexton2013," that users unearthed and connected to him in December 2025.
At the time, Vrillium said on X that people had "found an old twitter of mine" and claimed the efforts to expose his "past degeneracy" were in response to his attacks on US Vice President JD Vance.
A review of the "@BillySexton2013" account found the two photos in question posted on February 2, 2020 and May 28, 2020, respectively (archived here and here).
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation from the United States here.
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