A picture shows a man who is on the run in England following the murder of two female police officers.
False. No such murders have been reported and the man in the photograph has been in custody in the US for more than a year.
A series of Facebook posts which claim a man is on the run after killing two female police officers are hoaxes.
The posts appear in local buy and sell Facebook groups. One such post, published on a group for those living in Middlesbrough, says: “HELP FIND HIM - A Dangerous Hispanic Serial Killer Ronald Edwards (32) is on the run after killing 2 female police officers on Saturday here in #middlesbrough Warn others!! He is going around vandalizing parked vehicles, knocking on peoples' doors claiming to be homeless ,seeking for help & he attacks you after gaining your trust. He's ruthless and very dangerous. If you see him please call the police and be careful.”
Similar posts with the same pictures have also been shared in other local Facebook groups including those for Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, Milton Keynes, Bradford, Huddersfield and Exeter, all claiming the incident occurred at those locations.
However, the details in these posts are false. None of the police forces in the areas referenced by the posts have reported any such incident. The murder of two female police officers would be a major national news story, as was the case in September 2012 when two officers from Greater Manchester Police, Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes, were shot dead by murderer Dale Cregan.
In addition, a reverse image search reveals that the man in the photograph is actually named Chazre Camacho. The image is the police booking photograph released in November 2023 when he was arrested for robbery with a dangerous weapon in the US state of Oklahoma. In February 2024 Mr Camacho was convicted of these charges and is currently serving a sentence of 20 years.
We regularly fact check hoax posts in Facebook groups, which include false reports of abandoned children, lost elderly relatives or pets. We have seen instances in which these sorts of posts are edited later to offer cheap housing, links to surveys or other freebies, with comments often disabled so other social media users are unable to identify the posts as a hoax.
Hoaxes can damage people’s trust in local community news, because groups can become overwhelmed with false information. As a result, genuine posts may be ignored or dismissed as false.
We have written to Meta expressing these concerns and asking the company to take stronger action in response to this problem. We also have a guide with seven ways to spot if a Facebook post you’ve seen may be a hoax.
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 no such incident has been reported and the man in the photograph has been in custody in the US for more than a year.
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