A photo shows the attacker involved in a shooting this week at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia in the US.
This isn’t true. The image is old, and was used in a training document for a self-defence course. It is unrelated to this week’s shooting.
A photograph of a hooded person carrying a gun is being shared on social media with false claims it shows the attacker involved in a school shooting in the US state of Georgia this week.
The image, which depicts a person wearing a hoodie and jeans carrying a weapon in front of a set of double doors, has been shared on X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Threads with captions linking it to the attack at Apalachee High School on 4 September.
A suspect, identified as Colt Gray, 14, is accused of opening fire at his high school in the city of Winder, killing two teachers and two pupils and injuring another eight pupils and one teacher.
Police have identified the victims who died as teachers Christina Irimie and Richard Aspinwall and 14-year-old students Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo.
Posts sharing the image of the person carrying a weapon on social media include text saying: “First Photo of Active Shooter at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.”
But the picture is unrelated to the shooting in Georgia, and appeared online long before the incident.
The oldest active version of the image Full Fact could find online is in a 2019 training document about how to respond to an ‘active shooter’ situation, produced by a US-based safety preparedness company.
The origin of the image is unclear, though we were not able to identify a link to any previous school shootings through a reverse image search. The search suggested the image may have been circulating online since at least 2015.
We often see posts circulating on social media during or shortly after major news events that falsely identify individuals, such as posts misidentifying US troops killed in air strikes and the attacker behind the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
It's important to consider whether what you are sharing is accurate, as misinformation like this can spread quickly during significant international news stories.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the image is not of the attacker involved in this week’s school shooting in the US state of Georgia.
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