Posts Misidentify Suspect in Kansas City Parade Shootings

3 months ago 33

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Quick Take

Kansas City authorities charged two juvenile suspects with crimes connected to the Feb. 14 shootings at the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory celebration, in which one person was killed and 22 others were injured. Social media posts falsely identified one of the shooting suspects as “Sahil Omar, a 44 year old illegal.” A police spokesperson said that was a “fake claim.”

Full Story

The Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade and celebration on Feb. 14 ended with a mass shooting outside the city’s Union Station building. One woman, radio DJ Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was killed, and 22 other people — half of them younger than 16 — were injured during the shootings and panic that followed, the Associated Press reported.

Kansas City, Missouri, police detained two juvenile suspects who were charged on Feb. 16 with gun-related offenses and resisting arrest, authorities told the AP. The shootings appeared to have been sparked by a dispute, police said, and several guns were found at the scene. A third person, also a juvenile, had been detained but was released, police told ABC News.

None of those detained has been identified by police. But some social media posts have falsely claimed that one of those held by authorities was a 44-year-old “illegal immigrant.”

“At least one of the Kansas City Chiefs parade shooters identified as Sahil Omar, a 44 year old illegal immigrant. Biden has failed to protect America from invasion and terrorism,” one Instagram post claimed. The post, which shows a photo of a man in a red sweatsuit sitting on a curb between police officers, received more than 1,200 likes.

But the claim is wrong.

A Kansas City Police spokesperson told us in a Feb. 16 email that police have seen the post and image on social media and called it “false information/fake claim.”

“The two people that remain in custody are juveniles, thus not the individual named Omar. There’s no indication that person is involved in the shooting,” the police spokesperson said.

USA Today reported that the name Sahil Omar had previously been falsely linked in social media posts to a hotel explosion in Fort Worth, Texas, on Jan. 8, and to a shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in December.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.