A photo shows a homicide victim, Kaitlyn Hall, whose suspected killer, Nicholas Ewald, is on the run in the UK.
False. These photos show children who have been reported missing in the US, and are not related to a homicide case in the UK. There are no reports on any such case in the UK.
Facebook posts shared in multiple UK community groups claim to show a photo of a homicide victim and warn that the suspect in her killing is supposedly on the run. But these posts are a hoax, and the photos actually show missing children in the US.
One post shared in a buy-and-sell group for Oldham, outside Manchester, says: “HOMICIDE SUSPECT ON THE RUN in oldham [sic] The Homicide Bureau has identified 43-year-old NICHOLAS EWALD as a suspect in the death of 6-year-old girl Kaitlyn Hall. Nicholas has been charged with first degree murder and is currently on the run. If you have any information about his whereabouts, please contact the police. LETS BUMP THIS POST TO HELP LOCATE HIM”. It shares a photo of a young man wearing glasses and a girl in a pink hoodie.
The posts, which share the same photos and have almost identical text, appear in community groups for as many as 20 different locations across the UK, including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds and Nottingham. We could find no credible reports of the recent death of a six-year-old girl named Kaitlyn Hall in the UK.
Moreover, photos shared in the posts do not show people with these names, or the suspect and victim of a homicide in the UK. The photos actually show children who have been reported missing in the US—Solenne Grimes, who was last seen in Hawaii, and Kaleb Allen Turkovich from Ohio.
Another sign that these posts are not genuine is that they all have their comment sections disabled, which Derbyshire Police have previously warned is a sign of a potential hoax.
We’ve written before about similar posts falsely raising the alarm for missing children, elderly people, abandoned infants and injured dogs in Facebook community groups. Our investigation into these types of hoax posts found they’re often edited later to include links to surveys, freebies or cheap housing.
In February, we found these hoax posts continue to be an issue, with at least 47 communities across the UK being victim to nine different hoaxes we fact checked that month. We wrote to Meta for a second time asking it to take action.
You can find out more by watching an episode of BBC One’s Rip Off Britain in which our investigation is featured. Our guide also offers some tips on how to identify such hoaxes.
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 these photos show children who have been reported missing in the US.
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