No, this story about a woman being acquitted of homicide in Texas after shooting a thief is not true

  • This article is more than one year old.
  • Published on June 5, 2019 at 23:40
  • Updated on June 5, 2019 at 23:40
  • 2 min read
  • By AFP Canada

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A Facebook post shared more than 11,000 times claims to tell the story of a waitress who killed a man after he tried to steal her purse before being acquitted of all charges in the US state of Texas. The story, which recently resurfaced in Canada, is falsely attributed to The Houston Herald newspaper which published a debunk of the tale in 2009. The current version of the claim also uses an unrelated picture of a woman convicted in the US state of Alabama in 2014.

“A TRUE STORY FROM... ’THE HOUSTON HERALD’ HOUSTON , TEXAS Last Thursday night around midnight, a woman from Houston, Texas was arrested, jailed, and charged with manslaughter for shooting a man 6 times in the back as he was running away with her purse,” starts the fabricated article shared via Facebook. “The woman was acquitted of all charges. She was back at work the next day! That’s Gun Control, Texas Style,” the post concludes.

Screenshot taken on June 5, 2019 of a false Facebook post

This post is false for several reasons.

The Houston Herald newspaper, which is made out to be  from Houston, Texas but is actually published in Houston, Missouri, provided AFP with a copy of a column from the August 6, 2009 edition that explicitly states that the story now resurfacing nearly 10 years later is false.

“Our telephone and e-mail have been active with this story, supposedly attributed to the Houston Herald, that has circled the globe through the Internet… it isn’t true”, the column stated in 2009, while adding a copy of the same story still widely shared on Facebook.

Screenshot taken on June 5, 2019 of a 2009 Houston Herald column

A Google reverse image search for the mugshot used in the post also reveals that the person is actually a woman who was arrested in 2012 and convicted in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for the murder of her ex-husband.  Tracey Grissom has no connection to the story shared.

Screenshot taken on June 5, 2019 of a 2015 WBRC article

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