By Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
After closing year’s mass taking pictures at Santa Fe High School in Texas, a man calling himself David Briscoe described how he had heroically barricaded the door of the classroom he becomes coaching in and instructed college students to lie down and cowl their mouths as gunshots rang out close by.
But the college district said Monday that the story changed into false, and nobody with the aid of that name had ever worked for the school.
Multiple information companies included quotations attributed to Briscoe after the May 2018 taking pictures that killed 10 and wounded 13. He said he became a replacement English teacher and that the bloodbath occurred on simplest his 1/3 day coaching at the faculty.
“I barricaded the door with desks and tables and close the lighting,” CNN quoted him as announcing. In an article that has since been updated to do away with Briscoe’s account, CNN additionally said that he said he had “heard what seemed like a scholar getting hit by using a bullet.”
The tale fell aside while The Texas Tribune started out making inquiries following a telephone interview in April and observed that it regarded Briscoe changed into by no means at the site of the taking pictures.
“We can verify that there has never been an employee (component-time or complete-time), alternative, dealer, contractor or intern operating in Santa Fe ISD named David Briscoe,” Lindsey Campbell, a spokeswoman for the Sante Fe Independent School District, said in an email.
The district’s superintendent, Leigh Wall, stated Monday that the plain hoax turned into an instance of the way rapid misinformation can unfold, “mainly while the quantity of special data available is restricted.”
“We are extraordinarily dissatisfied that a character that has never been a part of our school community might constitute themselves as a survivor of the mass violence tragedy that our network persisted on May 18, 2018,” she introduced.
Wall said that the district changed into thankful for the people correcting the record and became persevering with to consciousness at the needs of its college students.
Social media posts indicate that a Twitter account below Briscoe’s call persevered to are looking for out journalists this yr by way of claiming to have survived the taking pictures.
“I’m now not too positive in case you bear in mind me but I changed into virtually became aside of the Santa Fe capturing closing yr,” the account tweeted in April in reaction to a CNN reporter. “You, in short, wrote about me in an article last year and it was splendid. 🙂 However, I turned into questioning in case you have been inquisitive about doing a comply with-up article? In light of the latest suicides.”
The operator of the Twitter account under Briscoe’s name did no longer right away reply to an instantaneous message. Briscoe is indexed because the chief executive of a social media advertising agency, however, an e-mail sent to the listed deal with becoming back with a message announcing it couldn’t be introduced.
The Tribune stated that the Twitter account with Briscoe’s name stopped responding to the information corporation’s messages when it commenced inquiring for an observe-up interview in May. In direct messages posted through the news outlet, the Twitter account informed a reporter that he had by no means lived in Texas, that one in every of his personnel had stolen his identification and that the worker had been the only quoted via different news shops.
Time magazine, which also up to date its article to cast off the man’s quotations, wrote on the time that “Briscoe’s fact — though, he says, it still feels like a dream — is a nightmare for any teacher.”
Alexandra Samuels, the reporter who broke the story for The Texas Tribune, stated she first puzzled Briscoe’s account at the same time as reviewing notes from a smartphone interview she carried out with him. His feedback, she stated, has been strikingly much like the ones she had read in his interview with Time mag.
