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The release of the film American Sniper (based on the autobiographical book American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History) on 16 January 2015 brought the late Chris Kyle's story to a wide audience. While the former Navy SEAL achieved a fair degree of fame before his death in February 2013, the release of the movie based on his book prompted renewed interest in both the events it depicted and other claims Kyle made during his lifetime. Three particular incidents Kyle maintained he was involved in have caused the most controversy. They are:Chris Kyle's claim he'd fired upon and killed dozens of looters after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 preceded the other two tales. The story circulated through postings on several web sites and through a number of news articles, as well as being passed from person to person in both the online and offline worlds: Indeed, the account does not hold water simply on the grounds cited in the passage quoted above. Imagining that SEALs were deployed to New Orleans in the chaotic days that followed Katrina is not exceptionally hard, considering the level of disorder that followed the devastation wrought by the hurricane. But the notion that dozens of Americans were shot dead on mere suspicion of (relatively minor) crimes, on American soil and with the full support of a system of law that otherwise does not allow for such summary punitive actions, challenges credulity to a very large degree. Moreover, thirty or so bodies of local residents slain in such a manner never turned up as corroborative evidence of such a claim. The circumstance Kyle claimed would have required the silence and compliance of all witnesses, the families of the dead, all involved law enforcement agencies, and untold others who might have become aware of killings meted out under inarguably public circumstances. Had Kyle and his fellows truly dispatched such a large number of looters or residents who were contributing to the chaos (who had neither been charged with nor convicted of any crime, much less a capital one), some other evidence of this tale would have emerged. One person disappearing under such circumstances is unusual; thirty or so is truly unbelievable. The second claim involved a similar measure of street justice purportedly meted out by Kyle to what many would deem deserving recipients. In that tale, Kyle was nearly the victim of a carjacking at a gas station, but the deadly sniper was quicker than his would-be assailants: he drew and fatally wounded the unnamed men. The story got odder, though, when police responded to the situation (in some accounts, Kyle called for intervention from the Department of Defense; in others, police discovered his special privileges when they checked his identification and received a mysterious message in response). An iteration of the rumor was promulgated by a New Orleans news outlet after the release of American Sniper, in which both the claims made by Kyle and their built-in lack of verifiability were questioned: The most pervasive version of the rumor stemmed from a February 2013 article on a Dallas-based web site that referenced a very loose definition of the word confirmed. According to the site, Kyle and some unnamed officers in the area in which the incident purportedly occurred (never directly specified), stated security camera footage of the incident existed and/or they had spoken to an individual who'd viewed the footage. But no footage matching the description provided by Kyle on the site in question has ever turned up, certainly an unusual circumstance in the wake of the large amount of attention Kyle and the film American Sniper have garnered: The site added some telltale markers of a genuine urban legend: All involved had heard the story, and some of them claimed to know of a person who had seen the purported footage — but all of them heard the story from the same source (Kyle himself), and none of them could personally attest to having viewed the alleged security camera footage. And just as in the Superdome sniping tale, the putative victims remain unidentified even now, so no one can possibly verify whether they're even dead, much less the circumstances under which they died. While those claims were both extraordinary and by their very nature difficult to corroborate, the third was both a bit more high-profile and (eventually) involved a celebrity. In his autobiography, Kyle described a moment of defending the honor of SEALs against someone who'd impugned them at an unimaginably inappropriate time: while they were mourning the loss of a fellow SEAL at a bar: Yet again, the story eventually developed another intriguing twist when Kyle elaborated upon it during a 2012 appearance on Fox News channel's The O'Reilly Factor. During that segment, Kyle claimed the previously unnamed individual he described was none other than Jesse Ventura, the former professional wrestler, governor of Minnesota, and member of the Navy's Underwater Demolition Teams during the Vietnam War era. While the claims about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the carjacking incident were met with some general disbelief, the mention of Ventura's name introduced a separate credibility issue for Kyle in the form of a lawsuit filed by Ventura against Kyle after the latter's appearance on O'Reilly's show. After Kyle died in 2013 the suit continued against his estate, and a jury eventually found Kyle's estate had improperly profited from claims made by the decedent that had no basis in provable fact and awarded Ventura $1.8 million dollars in damages: However, it should be noted the jury in the case did not specifically have to determine whether Kyle had in fact punched out Ventura (for whatever reason) in order to find in favor of the plaintiff, and its verdict may not have been unanimous: So while Chris Kyle's historical legacy as one of America's most lethal snipers in foreign wars may be confirmed and corroborated, his claims about various take charge incidents in the U.S. are lacking in substantiation. No record of any shooting deaths matching the description of Kyle's purported carjacking victims has ever surfaced, nor has anyone produced the supposed security camera video of the incident (or even evidence such a video truly exists). New Orleans authorities did not log some thirty unaccounted-for shooting deaths in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; and even if Kyle's claim proved in any way plausible, the government-sanctioned street execution of American citizens on American soil without due process would have prompted a large-scale civil rights scandal. Moreover, the single claim of this group that stood a legal test of its veracity failed: Kyle's claims about Jesse Ventura were sufficiently non-provable that a jury (deliberating in a country that, by and large, holds a large measure of respect and pursuant leeway for American servicemen) saw fit to award damages to Ventura totaling seven figures, even with the knowledge that Kyle himself hadn't lived to see the sanction and the damages would be levied against his widow and other beneficiaries of his estate.
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