In the wake of Wednesday’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, a number of reports came out regarding the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and whether he held allegiances to certain groups.
In the days that followed a leader of a Florida white supremacist group claimed Cruz, who killed 14 children and three adults at Stoneman Douglas High School with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, was a group member only for that same leader to backtrack on that statement later.
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Other reports include that Cruz was a member of an NRA-supported rifle team at the school and a member of the school’s junior ROTC program. Several photos from Cruz’s social media profiles also began trending, some showing him holding a variety of guns and knives while others had him wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat President Donald Trump’s supporters wore during his 2016 campaign.
Another photo also started trending of Cruz wearing what was labeled as an Antifa shirt, showing a group of former Russian leaders and philosophers including Josef Stalin, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
Snopes investigated the photo as it spread and found a major problem — the person in the photo wearing the shirt isn’t Cruz, and the account that originated the photo originated from an impostor Twitter account (which has been suspended) pretending to be an Antifa group from Laguna Beach, California.
The story of the photo, along with a second claim that Cruz was a registered member of the Democratic Party, ran on Infowars.com.
Twitter account @RespectableLaw noticed the report and broke it down, citing that photo originated from a young communist activist named Marcel Fontaine.
But that’s the not the shooter. That’s a young communist activist named Marcel Fontaine. pic.twitter.com/Yt7jDo7YMH
— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) February 15, 2018
The account also noted that the database the site used to link Cruz to the Democratic Party had both the name (the entry was under Nicolas Cruz instead of Nikolas Cruz) and the date of birth (the entry said September 1998, Cruz was born in May 1998) incorrect.
But not only is the name not spelled right (the shooter is named Nikolas), but the Sheriff said in the initial press conference that the shooter was born in September 1998. The voter registration you circulated is for someone born in May 1998. https://t.co/DBzXVNFvlR
— Respectable Lawyer (@RespectableLaw) February 15, 2018
Snopes also noted that the shirt Fontaine is wearing isn’t associated with Antifa, as upon further inspection all the characters are shown to be drinking and several are wearing ridiculous hats, a style of graphic t-shirt design known as “communist kitsch.”
