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On August 3, 2019, twenty people were reportedly killed and over two dozen more injured in a mass shooting at an El Paso shopping center. Early news reports indicated that a 21-year-old man named Patrick Crusius had been taken into custody in connection with the shooting. Soon afterwards, social media users circulated a photograph showing the word Trump spelled out by a variety of firearms along with a claim that the picture had appeared in the Twitter account of the suspect (as something he had posted or shared): Uncertainty about the identity of the suspect, which social media accounts (if any) may genuinely have been tied to him, and the possible quick deletion of those accounts made this claim difficult to immediately verify. The image was not actually created by the perpetrator of that shooting just beforehand, as it had been online for well over two years before the incident. Early reporting suggested that the suspect's Twitter account had been deleted after the shooting, but that prior to deletion that account had included no posts, and just one photo which was a profile picture and not an image of firearms arranged to spell Trump: A screenshot we grabbed of the Twitter account in question before its deletion showed a tweet of the image (posted by someone else) was among the items liked by that account back in early 2017: President Trump himself condemned the shooting as an act of cowardice and a hateful act:
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