FACT FOCUS: Minneapolis shooting prompts spread of misrepresented and fabricated images online

Misrepresented and fabricated images spread widely on social media in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Wednesday.

Soon after the shooting, photos emerged erroneously identified as showing the victim, a 37-year-old mother of three. Others were fabricated to falsely show the face of the officer involved or were misrepresented to say he had a Nazi tattoo. And an old video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was said to show him speaking about the incident.

Here’s a closer look at the facts.

Images said to show the officer likely AI

CLAIM: Images show the ICE officer who shot Good without a mask at the scene of the shooting.

THE FACTS: This is false. The images were fabricated. They appear to be screenshots from a video of the shooting, as the background matches the location where it took place. But that footage never shows the officer without a mask.

Hany Farid, a digital forensics and misinformation expert at the University of California, Berkeley, said that the images appear to have been generated by AI and that they are unlikely to reflect what the officer looks like.

“We have previously studied the application of AI to ‘enhance’ facial images,” he said. “Under considerably more favorable conditions than in this example of the masked ICE agent, AI enhancement/reconstruction is not consistently reliable.”

He continued: “In this situation where half of the face is obscured, AI (or any other technique) is not, in my opinion, able to accurately reconstruct the facial identity.”

Victim falsely identified in photos

CLAIM: Two photos of a blond woman with a small child show Good.

THE FACTS: False. The photos are of Renee Paquette, a former WWE wrestler, and her daughter.

One photo shows Paquette kneeling on the ground while her daughter hugs her. She posted it to Instagram on International Women’s Day in 2023, writing that “raising a strong, independent, free thinking, confident woman is my main objective.” The other photo shows Paquette kissing her daughter’s cheek as her daughter sticks out her tongue. It was posted in 2024, on her daughter’s third birthday.

Paquette commented on one of the posts misrepresenting her photos: “Wrong Renée. My condolences to her family.”

CLAIM: A photo of a woman with short, pale pink hair wearing a green sweater shows Good.

THE FACTS: False. The woman in the photo is not Good, it is Gabriela Szczepankiewicz. Photos of both women appeared in a 2020 Facebook post from Old Dominion University announcing the winners of a poetry prize.

Szczepankiewicz earned an honorable mention in the undergraduate category for that year’s Academy of American Poets Prize. Her photo, which is captioned with her name, is the first to appear in the Facebook post.

Good — who is identified as Renee Macklin in her photo — won the undergraduate category. Her photo appears third.

Photo of man with tattoo is not the officer involved in the shooting

CLAIM: An image of a man with a Nazi tattoo on his neck shows the ICE officer who shot Good.

THE FACTS: False. The image, which comes from a video posted to Instagram on Jan. 5 — two days before the shooting — is of a different man. Video of the shooting shows that the ICE officer involved does not have a tattoo in the same place as the man in the image spreading online.

In the Instagram video, a man behind the camera confronts the man with the tattoo outside of a restaurant on Lyndale Avenue South in Minneapolis. The tattoo is visible in the first few seconds of the video. It consists of two black lightning bolts that resemble the SS bolts symbol, which was used by the Nazi guard, and appears on the right side of the man’s neck, directly behind his earlobe.

The tattooed man says he “had this done years ago” and that he “ain’t had no time to change it” as he walks away.

In footage from the shooting, the ICE officer who shot Good is seen walking down the street about one minute in with a mask covering the bottom half of his face. He does not have a tattoo behind his right earlobe. In addition, his earlobe is shaped differently than that of the man in the Instagram video.

Video does not show Florida governor discussing the shooting

CLAIM: A video shows Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defending Good.

THE FACTS: False. The video is from an interview DeSantis did in June on “The Rubin Report,” an online political talk show, amid protests that month over President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles.

“And we also have a policy that if you’re driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety,” DeSantis, a Republican, says in the clip spreading online. “And so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you. You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida.”

DeSantis was not referring to Good. He was answering a question about Florida’s policies on protests that block roads.

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.