Newsmax Repeatedly Shows Photo Of Wrong Man Claiming He’s Texas Mall Shooter — After Social Media Ran Wild With It

Multiple Newsmax programs showed a photo they claimed was the now-dead Texas mall shooting suspect — but the photo was of the wrong man. Try telling that to social media conspiracy junkies.

The gunman who killed eight people at a mall in Allen, Texas, Saturday has been identified as Mauricio Garcia, a 33-year-old former security guard from Dallas who is reported to have held white supremacist views.

But while the notion that a person of Hispanic heritage could hold such views has flummoxed many on the political right, Newsmax took their confusion a step further by pairing their commentary about the dead suspect with a picture of the wrong Mauricio Garcia.

The photo showed up on Monday night’s edition of Newsmax TV’s The Balance as host Eric Bolling convened a panel to discuss the shooting and again on Monday night’s  edition of Newsmax TV’s Greg Kelly Reports during host Greg Kelly’s lengthy commentary about how the shooter was being falsely posed as a white supremacist in order to impugn “MAGA.”

Several social media users flagged the fact that the photo was of the wrong man, and as Forbes noted, the photo of the wrong man had already been circulating for days among social media users spouting conspiracy theories:

The photo does show a Mauricio Garcia, but he’s 36 years old, three years older than the actual shooter who opened fire on innocent bystanders on Saturday. That man’s mugshot was taken on August 4, 2022 when he was arrested and he has nothing to do with the shooting at an Allen outlet mall over the weekend.

In reality, the shooter was a Mauricio Garcia who held neo-Nazi and white supremacist beliefs, according to NBC News. And researcher Aric Toler, who works for Bellingcat, was the first to identify the shooter’s social media account with Russian-based platform Odnoklassniki. The account has photos believed to depict the real shooter, which has caused even more confusion online because they don’t match the photos that were first circulated by amateur internet sleuths over the weekend.

In fact, the wrong photo became so common that it’s created conspiracy theories on platforms like Twitter where people believe some kind of government-perpetrated hoax is happening.

Watch above via Newsmax.